The success of social media marketing is dependent on the level of engagement and measured by the numbers of followers, Likes, shares you can acquire in a given period. Social media professionals aver that quality of participation is equally important if you want to generate leads.
On Twitter, most people judge a person’s influence by his/her number of followers. It is an important metric, but having 100 active advocates of your brand is far more preferable than acquiring 1 million non-engaged followers.
Your endeavor should be to gain quality and engaged followers on Twitter. Follow the people you find interesting and will eventually turn into your buyers.
Never follow profiles that mention they “follow back”
Make it a point to tweet articles that you or others wrote and that will be of interest for potential followers: use relevant hashtags, so your tweets are found. Retweet tweets posted by people you want as followers.
Try to tweet at them directly when they write something that you found useful, give a genuine compliment, but don’t ask for a follow or retweet
– instead, ask them questions in their field of expertise. Participate in Twitter chats with the regulars and engage with them continually. Once people follow you, keep engaging with them.
Tweet at your followers an article you wrote if relevant to their field or interests. Never fail to thank if they retweet an important tweet of yours
Your unwavering aim should be to obtain engaged, and faithful followers interested in what you have to say. Whether you are a company or an individual, they will be your real fans.
If you spend too much time on Twitter, you will certainly run across a number of bots, serial followers, and otherwise spammy accounts. These accounts are only interested in growing a following on Twitter to an unethical extreme. It is not your business to be on Twitter to gather a horde of useless fans.
To ethically build a worthwhile cadre of followers on Twitter, you’ll have to do more than create a few lines of code or click the ‘Follow’ button a couple thousand times. To create a healthy audience and a presence, your Twitter strategy should focus on the following:
• Create Valuable Content
• Comment on relevant news/tweets
• Retweet relevant content
• Engage – Ask. Listen. Respond.