Your Ultimate Twitter How To Guide For 2014



Need More Followers? No, This is not a Buy Fake Followers Scam! Here's How to Get 10,000 Real Targeted Twitter Followers in 6 months or Less! 


Ok so you've been on Twitter now for some time, but your account is far from snowballing into that high engagement community of niche-targeted, raving follower-fans that you've seen so many other high quality Twitter accounts enjoying. 

You're not getting many RT's and very few people are spontaneously following you let alone following you back. You haven't yet discovered some of the most powerful strategies for getting hundreds of new followers per day to your account

As tens of millions of people hop on the social media bandwagon, it's becoming more and more of challenge to get your business or personal brand noticed. 

It seems to to have become impossible to quickly build a solid Twitter account with thousand's of deeply engaged, precision targeted followers. 

There's just too much competition. And the most effective Twitter experts don't want to give away their most valuable account-building secrets

Yet, when built and managed effectively, a large Twitter account is a powerful tool that can drastically increase the number of visits to your website or blog each day.

In fact just yesterday, the P2P Engagement blog (the one you're reading now) exceeded 500 page views in 1 day just from our Twitter account alone! 

You can also use a great Twitter account to quickly energize other social media accounts by plugging in follower engagement. 

For example, the synergy and SEO value of linking a high engagement Twitter account with a YouTube vlog can create extraordinary social media and search engine reach.  



So how can you build a Twitter stream with that kind of traffic generating power?


Sadly, gone are the days of following thousands of new high quality accounts on auto pilot. 

Several lawsuits latter, Twitter has completely banned all of those once amazing Twitter building tools that automated the Follow and unfollow process. So what's the alternative? 




Fake followers have zero engagement value. Why? Well, because they're fake!



You need to avoid falling into the fake follower trap. 

You don't want to buy fake followers because one of the most critical success factors for building a giant community of passionate retweeters (or followers on any social media platform for that matter) is getting a consistently high score of the the social engagement metrics that are built into the weighting algorithms, used both by the top social media platforms and the major search engines like Google.

Have you noticed how Twitter is increasingly becoming like and being used as a kind of mini search engine? 


In my view, social media accounts whose owners intentionally buy fake followers, likes and views etc, will actually be banned some time in the near future from all social media sites, much the same way poorly spun and spam content was eradicated from Google by the panda and penguin algorithm changes starting back in 2011.



So what's the bottom Line if you want 10,000 highly active and deeply engaged followers in less than 6 months from now?



Well, unless you have a very powerful and obvious value proposition for your business or personal brand (and in many cases, even if you do) on Twitter, there is simply no way around it: 

You have to manually follow new accounts and remove those accounts that are inactive or not following you back. From an engagement perspective, these are deadweight accounts. 

Accounts who don't follow you back can't retweet your content and inactive accounts can't RT or favorite your tweets either. 

You need to systematically remove and replace dead weight accounts with highly active, niche-targeted accounts who will actively share the interests and passions through your brand as expressed in their frequent RT's and Favoriting of your content.

It doesen't matter if you're on Twitter to socialize or actively implementing a B2B content marketing strategy you want to be sure to target the right kinds of followers or customers: folks who are looking for your ideas, products or services right now, but have not been able to find you yet via social media.


The Critical Importance of Getting Past 2000 Followers 

I have seen so many accounts in my Twitter stream follow the same basic failure pattern: They start out with great enthusiasm and gusto, only to get a few hundred followers and give up in the first couple of weeks. 

These become the kind of inactive accounts that need to be removed from your own, in order to keep your own account's engagement and activity levels high. 

What these inactive account owners failed to realize is that for people to really start taking them seriously, they really needed to pass that all too critical 2000 follower mark. 

I've seen it in my own accounts and the accounts I've built for my social media management clients. 

The follow, followback, favoriting and RTing rates drastically increased at or around the 2K mark.

2000 followers just seems to be a strong social signal on Twitter.



Here's The Secret To Getting To The 2K Follower Mark and Then SnowBalling Beyond it: 


Although prior to getting to 2k followers, Twitter allows you to follow several hundred accounts at a time. 

After the 2k mark, you never want to follow more than 5-7% of the total number of followers you have every couple of days. But more on this later. 

I would also recommend from experience that you not follow too many accounts at once at first, but rather use the 2 powerful free tools I suggest a bit later in this post to follow 1 or 2 hundred highly active accounts - i.e. accounts that are active (i.e. tweeting and RTing) on the same day you start following them.

Following currently active accounts drastically increases the likelihood of a fast follow-back by virtue of the simple fact that someone is actually on Twitter right now to follow you back.  

This harnessing of an accounts currently high or live activity levels is the same principle that I use and recommend as a core strategy for engaging famous people, - industry leaders, best selling authors etc on Twitter: A practice that will really help to build your account in a hurry! Check out: 



The Secret to Socially Engaging Famous People On Twitter

  

The real secret to getting to and moving well beyond the 2k mark fast, involves a 2 part strategy: 

1) hard work and, 

2) "preemptive social engagement". 

There's no way around it. You have to spend at least an hour a day building your account, ideally at strategic times throughout the day when your followers are most active. 

And what kind of hard work you ask? 

The smartest Twitter building strategy around is a process that I've developed called preemptive social engagement. I strongly recommend that you read our incredibly popular post on that subject too.  

In it, I outline a collection of the most powerful Twitter engagement strategies currently available (including my own) that I use to explode objective engagement metrics like Kred.com for my Twitter accounts and my clients' accouts with just a few days of strategic engagement. 

Kred uses the kind of engagement metrics that I mentioned earlier in this post, that major search engines and social media platforms use in part to weigh and rank online content. 

I strongly recommend that right after you read the  preemptive engagement article (via the link below), that you link your Twitter account to Kred (It's free) and conduct a short before and after experiment: to see how you score before and after applying these preemptive social engagement  and targeted Twitter following strategies.

Not only will these Twitter strategies help you get past the 2k Twitter follower mark, but they will also provide you with that critical social momentum to snowball to the 10k mark and beyond very, very quickly. Here's the link to my Preemptive engagement post: 


 How To Quickly Grow A Vast Community of Passionate ReTweeters: Twitter 2014





Your Core Twitter Follow/Unfollow Strategy: 6 Powerful Tips And Strategies: 


Again, in order to maximize and compound the rate by which folks are following you, you need to be regularly following targeted accounts and unfollowing accounts that are not following you back or that are inactive.

 Lets start with how to be an effective Twitter follower. 

The actual following process is now very much a manual process. You have to go through and follow new accounts on an account by account basis -1 at a time. 

Here are 6 very powerful and time saving  "How to Follow Effectively Tips" used by the world's leading Twitter community managers:

1. Follow accounts that are directly relevant to your personal or business brand. If you're a business think about who your ideal customer types are and follow those accounts. 

For example, if you're a social media manager with content expertise in human resources, follow highly active and visible #HR accounts and HR sub-niche accounts (i.e. #recruiting). 


If you're account is a personal rather than a business account, you need to be targeting active accounts owned by people who will share your interests and passions. 

For example, if you're interested in #hiking or #photography then you want to be following accounts that are likely to be built around the same interests and passions. 

Keyword-based strategic following in this way, will boost you active engagement process by increasing the likelihood of RT's, Favorites and follower-participation in your own Twitter stream.
2. Use #tags followed by the keywords most related to your business or personal brand in the Twitter search box at the top right hand side of the page to find accounts. 

I like to follow accounts with real human faces in their well optimized Twitter bios, even for business accounts. I then look for accounts with really strong logos and strong on page optimization.

High value account by definition follow high value accounts themselves. In essence they've done the work of finding those accounts for you. All you have to do is follow from them. 


4. Only follow the first 20-50 followers in each targeted quality account. As you find each new quality account you can minimize the likelihood of not following inactive accounts by only following quality accounts that have recently started following the account you are currently following from. 

The further down the list of followers you go the more time has past since that follower first started following your target account. 

You can also search Google for recent top Twitter influencer lists in your niche and regularly harvest fresh followers from their accounts to insure a high level of activity and engagement. 

5. Never Follow more than about 5% of your current number of total followers.  Twitter does not like aggressive following behavior and actually has a policy against it

As long as you keep it reasonable, Twitter will gently shape your following/unfollowing rate by occasionally setting a limit. When they do, you'll see just how much is too much following and unfollowing for your account. 

I currently have around 18,000 followers on the @P2PEngagement Account. and I can comfortably follow and unfollow around 1000 followers every couple of days without hitting a limit. 

When I really work at it I can add over 1000 new followers in a week applying the basic strategies I'm recommending here. 

From experience, I recommend that you follow and unfollow every 2 days on average. This allows you to maximize your account's activity level which, in turn will maximize your account's engagement measures. 


6. Bonus Twitter Tip: Plan to Tweet about fresh blog content on the same day as you select, follow and and engage new active followers. 

I dramatically increase traffic to our blog on days when I'm preemptively engaging 200 or 300 new followers by simultaneously tweeting about our fresh blog posts, leading to thousands of purely Twitter generated page reads on this blog each week, through clicks and RTs. 




What's The Most Effective Way to Unfollow Inactive Accounts and Accounts that Are Not Following You Back You Ask?


Luckily the unfollow process  can still be very much automated. And there are some incredible and totally free tools that can make your unfollowing process happen in just minutes instead of in several hours. 

If you want to get 10,000 precision targeted, highly active and deeply engaged Twitter followers in 6 months or less, there are 2 free tools that it's very important that you use to manage and expedite your ongoing unfollowing process. 

The first and best Twitter Tool on my list for simply, quickly and efficiently unfollowing those non-reciprocating accounts (those who don't follow you back) is ManageFlitter 's free unfollow tool. 

All you do is sign in via your Twitter account with a single click and let Manageflitter find and arange all of the accounts that are not following you back. 

A list is quickly populated and you simple click on each account you want to unfollow. I can unfollow hundreds of unwanted accounts in just a couple of minutes!

It's best to unfollow the oldest accounts first. This give the more recent accounts you've followed a chance to follow you back before you unfollow them too. 

ManageFlitter's unfollow tool is free and It's completely Twitter Friendly!

The Second Twitter Tool I recommend is also the best, but for it's very own reasons. 

This second tool is called Your Tweeter Karma and It's 100% free to use. Although you should make a donation to the company's owner if you can afford it. 

The real power and value of Your TweetKarma is that it allows you to see and remove the inactive accounts that are currently following you and/or that you are following:  

TweeterKarma actually arranges all the inactive accounts from greatest to least level of inactivity - something incredibly valuable for a Twitter manager targeting high engagement levels and which i have never seen on any other free tool, let alone fee for service Twitter tools! 

You'll be able to see which accounts tweeted with in the last few minutes all the way down to accounts that have had no activity for days, weeks and even years! 

Removing these inactive accounts (again in order from least to most active) and replacing them with highly active strategically niche-targeted Twitter followers will help drastically increase your engagement metrics and your social reach. This is when you start to get hundreds of spontaneous followers without having to follow them first!   



10k Followers and Beyond! - A Quick Recap: 


To summarize: you will easily be able to gain and even exceed 10,000 followers in 6 months or even less by:

1) regularly applying my preemptive social engagement strategies,
2) Actively following the right kind of niche-to-your-brand-targeted accounts, and by
3) Actively unfollowing inactive and no reciprocal accounts using the free tools I recommend and use myself.

And remember, because you can follow around 5% of your total number of current followers, your account will eventually start to snowball in growth this way. 

You're high engagement Twitter account will always be growing, and therefore so will the numbers of new followers you'll be getting each day! 

Now you can plug the high octane engagement juice from your Twitter account to grow each new type of social media account you open such Facebook (vs) Google Plus.

I strongly recommend the: "build 1 social media platform presence at a time through preemptive social engagement" rather trying to do "too much at once and really failing approach" to social media strategy. 

Looking forward to hearing about your results  building a high engagement Twitter account applying these strategies and tools! 


Don't Have The Time To Do-It-Yourself? 


 If you want thousands of precision targeted raging Twitter follower-fans to radically expand the social reach of your business or personal brand, but you don't have the time to do-it-yourself, let us do the work for you! 

We'd love to help you develop and implement a state of the art social media marketing strategy!

For More Info Contact Us @:  

P2P Advanced Social Media Consulting and Content Creation   




 photo credit: <a href="https://www.flickr.com/photos/ilse/3389565299/">~Ilse</a> via <a href="http://photopin.com">photopin</a> <a href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/2.0/">cc</a>       

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