How To Get Over 5000 Twitter Followers On Your New Blog

When I first started blogging just over a year ago I had not had any experience with using social media for business and therefore I did not pay any attention to it for the first month. However I soon realized my mistake when my traffic was not increasing and I had nowhere to market my blog. This is when I learnt that there is no point in setting up a blog and writing great content if you are not going to market it online. The thing is, no one is going to do this promotion for you and self promotion is crucial online if you want to get your blog noticed.

I have been Twitter and Facebook to market my blog for just over a year now and I have nearly six thousand followers. I personally am pleased with this, thinking that I did not have a clue how to use social networks for marketing just over a year ago. I have discovered the power of social networks that new bloggers may not have discovered yet and I am encouraging you to take advantage of it. With well over 500 million users, Twitter is the perfect place to market your blog online and take advantage of the benefits that social networks can bring such as:

• Large amounts of traffic. Twitter is the best place to share your  articles and drive traffic to your latest posts right after you have published them. Furthermore regular visitors can keep up to date with your posts and are more likely to come back and read more posts.
• Networking. I find Twitter to be a useful place to network with other bloggers in the same niche and read their blogs. You can find a load of new blogs and bloggers on Twitter that you may not have discovered.
• Business leads. I have personally come in contact with advertisers and writers looking to guest post on my blog by them searching for people in my niche on Twitter.

Follow back others

When I first started on Twitter I did not used to follow people and eventually I noticed that even though I was getting new followers everyday, for some reason the amount of followers I had was not increasing and then I noticed that people were unfollowing me when I did not follow them back. This is why you should follow everyone back that has followed you and then they are less likely to unfollow you. I have found this to be my most successful way of increasing my Twitter followers and Twitter users are far more likely to follow you if they know what you will follow them back and if you put in your bio that you follow people back then they will follow you just because of this. However this does sometimes mean that people will follow just because you will follow them back and not because they are interested in you but this can be your chance to  impress them with your posts and drive them towards your blog.

Another thing that i like to do is to find other high profile people in my niche and follow some of their latest followers. Most of the time they will follow me back and i then have more followers that are interested in my blog. If they do not follow me back after a week then i will unfollow them.

Brand Your Profile properly

Imagine your blog if you did not have a logo or information about you and your blog. Well this is what your Twitter account is like when you first set it up. There is no point in keeping the egg as your profile picture or using a picture that people are not going to instantly recognize as your brand. Instead you want an icon that represents your blog and also stands out against other Twitter profiles.

As well as your profile picture, your profile description is equally important. This is your chance to promote your blog and Twitter account in just a few hundred words. In this you want to make it clear that you are promoting a blog and all of the topics you cover to get as much interest as possible.Furthermore you may also put that you follow people back in your bio so that people can this when they are scrolling through accounts. You may want to take note that if you put a hash-tag in your bio then it is highlighted and therefore stands out between other text.

Another way to make your Twitter account stand-out and brand it is to use a custom background on your Twitter account. I personally take an existing template and then use Photoshop to customize it to by blogs design. You can also use your background to promote your blogs other accounts and tell people more about your blog.

Interact with others

Twitter is designed for communicating so there is no point in using Twitter if you are not going to communicate with other users, whether this is by direct messages (which I tend to use) or through mention. You will find that you often have a lot of people replying to your tweets,especially when you share content from your blog and you want to make sure that you always reply to them and you need to be prepared to do this at any time. People are more interested in people that they talk to and therefore by talking to other users on Twitter they are naturally going to become more interested in you and what you are doing online and may help promote your Twitter account.

Integrate Twitter with your blog

As well as following people back, integrating Twitter with my blog is also one of the most effective ways to get readers of my blog to follow me on Twitter and continue coming back to read my blog posts. Every time i set up a new blog or change the theme on my blog I always make sure that I integrate Twitter straight into my blog. The first way to integrate Twitter into blog is to add a widget into the sidebar of your blog where your readers can clearly see it and follow you straight from your blog. One of my favorite WordPress widgets WP Max Social Widget.

The second way to integrate Twitter into your blog is to add social sharing buttons onto the bottom of posts. This greatly increases the chance that readers will share your posts on Twitter and provide you with some free advertising to their own followers.

schedule your tweets

With Twitter you will soon discover that most users update their Twitter profile at least a few times a day. For a lot of bloggers your readers are going to be in different time zones than you. For example i live in the UK but a lot of my readers are from the US and therefore there is a time difference between us which means that when it is convenient for me to post on Twitter I am not reaching most of my audience because they are not on Twitter at this time and probably asleep. For this reason I use Hootsuite to schedule my tweets throughout the day so that I can reach all of my audience and gain the most traffic to my blog from Twitter. Hootsuite is free and easy to use and this is why I like it.

Final notes

Here I have shared some of the lessons that I have learned using Twitter over the last year with my blog. By following these tips you will hopefully be able to do the same as me and gain over 5000 followers to your blog on Twitter. Just remember that this is not going to happen over time and just like your blog it will take some time to work on.