Saturday, May 31, 2014

3 Best Tools to Gain More Twitter Followers


Gaining Twitter followers is no easy task. Well, for some anyways. There are many articles on the subject of gaining Twitter followers, but in this article I've boiled down the 3 best tools and services to jumpstart your Twitter marketing efforts and gain a following fast.
It is important to note that follower count is only a number. What really matters is engagement. I'll talk about  that in a future blog post. So for now, here are the 3 best tools to gain more Twitter followers.

1) Fiverr

FiverrThere are many people on this site that are offering 10,000 followers to your Twitter account for a mere $5. Awesome! Keep in mind that most if not all of these users WILL BE FAKE. This is a very controversial subject regarding buying followers. To me, it really depends on what you plan on doing with your account. Take for instance two different scenarios.
The first scenario is if you later plan on running Twitter ads for promoting a product or service later down the road. If you were to buy followers and you run an ad to serve to your audience, it would then be highly ineffective knowing that a considerable portion of ad will be "seen" by fake accounts that won't do anything. If this is the case, buying followers does not make sense.
The second scenario is if you run advertising on your site. If you plan on selling tweets to potential advertisers, they generally care about reach. True, if they get no engagement, they will most likely not send another tweet ad on your account.
Ok, so is buying followers all that bad?I believe it can work for some. It helps build social credibility. If you just started an account that only has 5 followers, it's obvious that the account is new and most likely I won't follow you. Now imagine you have 10,000 followers. Well, that might be someone worth following. So, how do you make this worth your while? Well, that's where the second tool comes in.

2) Manage Flitter

ManageFlitterI discovered this tool awhile back and noticed it greatly supercharged my Twitter growth efforts. This toolallows you to discover users you should be following and find the users that you should probably unfollow. The reason why you'd want to do this is based on the golden ratio as covered in TechCrunch.
If a person has more followers than they are following, they’re probably a good person to at least consider following. If they are following more than they have more followers, the opposite may be true. The greater the discrepancy between the two numbers, the more likely each of those is true — to a certain point, since celebrities like Oprah throw this system out of whack. But for regular, non-Hollywood celebrities, the system works remarkably well as a filter.
I use this tool to then start adding real and engaged followersto my account. Usually fake followers will start to unfollow, which is perfect. This allows you to then capture a better audience who is more likely to follow you because right now, your ratio is well, pretty awesome!

3) Twibble 

Twibble
Of course this is plugging our tool, but I do so with great reason. The whole reason it was created was tohelp grow engagement and following, and it's quite effective in doing so.
In a recent social media study via Social Media Today, it was discovered that tweeting twice as often produced about 38% more retweets, about 14% less mentions and about 70% more favorites. It also led to 124.60% increase in referral traffic.
Twibble is basically an RSS to Twitter service much like Twitterfeed, Dlvr.it or IFTTT. Those are all very good services; however, I wanted to create something where simplicity, design and usability was the core focus. So how do you use Twibble?

Imagine you're a social media consultant. You can now regularly feed relevant content to your Twitter account such as Mashable, Tech Crunch, Jay Baer, Mari Smith, etc. This allows you to keep your account active and relevant to your users. By no means am I saying you should only do this. Using a RSS to Twitter service is only meant to supplement your current social media efforts. You can also add relevant hashtags so that your content is seen by a much larger audience. This way when people discover your content, you'll already have a great following and you're regularly providing relevant and engaging content.