Actionable ways to build a real twitter following

Three Ways to Build Real and Authentic Twitter Followers for Your Business

Nowadays, having a large number of followers or fans on social media accounts has become a matter of pride for many brands. After all, many content creators and marketers equal high social media following with influence and reach. For many brands, this could mean higher awareness and sales.

For some companies, getting as many followers as much as possible has become such a necessity that they end up resorting to getting fake accounts.

How do you identify if your business or a certain product or service employs fake Twitter followers? Here are some indications.

Small Following-Follower Ratio. Unless you are a huge celebrity, political figure, or social media star, it is unlikely you have massive following and you only follow just a few accounts. Chances are, the account may have bought fake fans to boost his or her numbers. Another possible indicator is the Twitter account posts almost negligible or very too few Tweets.

Blank Twitter bios. One good indicator is when the account has a blank or suspicious Twitter bio. Blank or suspicious Twitter bios are a red flag. Also the account has very too few followers. Some profiles also do not have a profile photo. You want to make sure you have a clean and professional Twitter bio, not to mention a few keywords for organic searches.

Instant rise in followers. Many tools online can be used to analyze Twitter accounts and show the growth of their followers over time. A sharp spike of Twitter followers in a week, much less in a day, should indicate a red flag for you. An organic rise of followers on Twitter takes time and entails hard work.

There are online tools such as FollowerWonk and Twitter Audit that can also help you check the credibility of Twitter accounts. For instance, they can help you analyze whether a Twitter account may have more fake followers than actual ones.

Low quality score. You can also check out if the Twitter account user has been buying followers. Again, a lot of online tools such as Twitter Audit can show if a certain Twitter account has a lot of followers with zero quality score.

Why should products and services care about fake Twitter followers?

Given the huge amounts of workload and busy schedules we all have, it would not be surprising to be enticed to spike your social media accounts with a large number of followers to boost your social media standing.

But such tactics are done at the expense of many honest people working very hard to create and maintain a strong online presence. It is heartening to see when a lot of bloggers and some small entrepreneurs who began with zero followers on Twitter have reached modest Twitter following (hundreds of users) with the help of hard work for several months.

Content creators and marketers must remember: their social media marketing campaigns are created in the hopes of resulting in sales conversion of products and services. If the return on investment cannot be accomplished or there is no solid way of measuring it, critics will be quick to criticize digital marketing.

The lack or absence of return on investment due to fake followers on Twitter can motivate products and services to veer away from social media and its potential to reach target customers and potential markets, hurting brands, marketers, and those that have legitimate Twitter followers.

How to build an authentic social media following on Twitter

The main concern is how businesses can build an authentic and organic social media following for free, at least regarding ad spend. Here are some steps how products and business can gain more valuable followers on Twitter.

Identify the target market for your business. Identifying the right target market or customers for your company’s product or service is essential to the business, offline or online. That principle works well in social media. Know more about the demographic or market your product or service is trying to reach. Learn how your target users where they are on social media, or how they are behaving and operating. Not all social network have the same target market. Twitter has its own target audience while Facebook has another set of your target market. Make sure you are focusing and tweaking social media efforts according to the platform where they are, online. Learn what they need from your product or service or their wants. All these insights would prove valuable to you when you craft your social media marketing campaigns.

Produce content that works well with your target audience. Any efficient social media marketer would know that engaging and relevant content is the most effective way of capturing the attention of Twitter users. Tweets from marketers and content creators that only have calls-to-action asking people to buy their products and services without offering additional information for customers have more chances of being ignored online. This is where learning about your target audience is important. If you know your target market, you would also know their needs and preferences. Having such insights is valuable to your business since you can refocus or retweak your digital marketing strategies to suit to their needs and wants.

Engage and interact with your Twitter followers. Creating and establishing engagement on Twitter is like networking but mainly online. Maintaining good relationships with Twitter users would not happen if you merely post Tweets and do not respond to their comments or criticisms. Remember that social media was created to establish relationships with people on an online setting.

Do not be afraid to respond to customers, follow industry influencers, respond to brand mentions, and even repost content of Twitter followers if their messages closely align with your brand’s values or recommend your product or service. In that way, you can establish meaningful conversations with your Twitter followers. Twitter users would then begin to think that your company highly values its relationship with them, promoting brand engagement and loyalty.

What do you think about these tips? How should brands and marketers handle the proliferation of fake followers on Twitter? What are your thoughts about the need for quality and authentic followers instead of fake ones? Join the conversation.