Add 1000 Followers on Twitter Weekly- 10 Simple Rules

When I started twittering 8 weeks ago I had no idea what to do. I knew little about Twitter. I knew that I wanted to make a difference in people’s lives and I also wanted to leverage Twitter from an SEO standpoint, to bring additional traffic to my blog and my custome SEO website.

I sat down and established the following rules which have helped me to gather more than 8000 followers in about 7 weeks, without using any viral software or automated mass following tools.

1. I treat Twitter as a business not as a hobby.
2. I follow everyone who follows me. That is my way of saying thank you for following me. People appreciate it and expect to be followed and it is very polite to do so. I also unfollow those who do not follow me. Usually they end up inviting me back to follow them.
3. I do not follow more than 10% of my total followers. For example, a following/follower ratio of 1100 following/1000 followers would be the maximum I would follow until more people followed me. An unbalanced ratio, such as 1800/1000 will turn people off since they may think that you are a spammer.
4. I tweet every day. I have noticed that if I am away for a day or two, people will stop following.
5. I add successful twitterers to my list of followers, i.e., people who have thousands of followers.
6. I always tweet about successful people, businesses, good news and free stuff. I provide interesting links for people to follow. My tweets have to add value to the life of my followers.
7. I look for valuable tweets and RT them (filters are available via TweetDeck to monitor good tweets).
8. I do not tweet exclusively about my business. I wear different hats, e.g., on weekends, I will tweet more about music, art and fun. Weekdays, I tweet more about SEO Toronto, PPC , web, computers, some arts and daily issues. I find a good ration is to tweet 20/80, i.e., 20% my business, 80% other businesses and valuable daily information.
9. If I decide to use a Twitter tool, I move with caution. I check what friends say about them before I use them. Many of the tools are useless and can get your account suspended.
10. I started writing valuable blogs where I can educate my followers about my SEO Toronto business as well as my Flash Website Toronto expertise. I tweet about my SEO / SEM Blogs.

Finally, remember to promote everything together with no exceptions. In your e-mail signature, put a link to your Twitter account, your Facebook, your Linked-in accounts, your blog and your website and vice-versa on your blog, your website and every social networking account that you have.

By following these simple Twitter rules, you too can quickly develop a large Twitter following.