How to get targeted Twitter followers

Rather than just waiting for followers on Twitter, there are ways you can be pro-active in gaining a following over time. There are methods involving “buying followers”. We advise against this as this type of follower will never result in buying a purchase of your products or services – or gaining new followers as they won’t retweet or like your material.

So where to begin…

There is a “50% rule” that around half of the people/organisations you follow will follow you back. Based on this, it is ideal to follow the type of person/business you would like to sell to. Even those that you follow that don’t return it are exposed to your brand, so it isn’t wasted. Those that follow you are now reached as part of your target audience.

If you like, after a couple of weeks, you can then unfollow anyone that hasn’t followed you. Although these methods take a little time, eventually the following will continue to rise naturally – as long as you have great social media content on your feeds.

Use your competitors

You will already know who most of your competitors are and if not, a simple Google search will provide details of dozens of them. Just go to their websites and see if they have a link to their Twitter account (look for the Twitter logo). Once you have clicked on their Twitter page, you will see at the top, the word ‘Followers’. Click on that and you should see a list of the exact group of people you are trying to reach.

By using the 50% rule, around half of those that you follow will follow you back – but each of them will be exposed to your brand and see you in their list. The more targeted the follows you make, the higher percentage will follow you back.

We have found this technique to be extremely valuable for our business to business clients.

Using the Advanced Search

The Twitter advanced search enables you to look for targeted Twitter users. This technique works for all types of businesses. Within the advanced search you will see a variety of different options on what you can look for within their database of over 100 million accounts around the world.

If you sell holiday clothing, then people tweeting about going on holiday soon would be perfect. You are able to search for keywords, specific phrases, hashtags (#iloveholidays) and even locations/near to which is great if you operate in a certain geographical area.

Gaining a following on Twitter takes a little time to do at the beginning but is worth gaining relevant and useful followers that will then snowball as time passes. Why not let us take one thing off of your hands and get SiteWizard to do your content? We write fantastic content for Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn, just check out our social media marketing page.