Blog: Mike Brown

What's the use of using Twitter if no one is listening to you?

Attracting, keeping, and growing your follower base is the most important aspect of your Twitter campaign, and one which takes time and strategy.

Once you've started tweeting what should be interesting and relevant content, you'll slowly begin to accumulate followers. But make no mistake, your following will not grow without some work outside of just simply tweeting.

One of the first steps after you've launched your campaign and started tweeting is to do some research and see who else is on Twitter. Who out there in the "Twitterverse" shares your interests? Who is promoting solid content that is of interest to you? Follow these people. Many of these people will then in turn follow you.

Once you've got a good list of users you are following, you might send a few a DMs (direct messages) thanking them for an article that you really liked or a post that helped you in some way. This is a great way to begin engaging with the influencers in your industry.

This leads right into another strategy - retweeting. If you see a tweet that is of particular interest or brings to the table good advice or information, you may want to retweet that to your followers. The flip side to this is that if you post a similarly interesting tweet, one of those users you now follow (who may have thousands of followers themselves) will retweet you.

Remember to keep your posts interesting, timely and relevant. If you are a bicycle manufacturer for example, post about your latest model's release date, not about what movie you watched last night. People are following you for a reason and if you begin to stray off relevant topics, these followers will drop like flies.

Also along these lines, keep your posting volume reasonable. In other words, don't post 30 times a day, as this is might be seen as spamming.

And of course, don't be a salesman. As with Facebook, Twitter is a social media tool for engagement so use it as such. If you do, and follow these easy strategies, you will hopefully see your website (or brick and mortar) traffic pick up and sales will soon follow.