Social media has become a lot harder to master especially as nowadays everyone and his mother is on at least 1 social media site. Making sites like Twitter extremely cluttered and not as easy as it once was to gain a large following.

However, you should worry less about the size quantity of your followers and more about the quality. To really reap the benefits of your Twitter audience they need to be the right audience who will spread the word for you, engage with your posts and genuinely be interested in your products or services.

Starting a Twitter account from scratch for a new business can be stressful and it can be disheartening when the followers don’t come flooding in! Trust me I’ve been there, it takes time and a bit of TLC but it will happen. I have put together 5 easy steps you can follow that will help you grow your Twitter fans and attract the right audience online.

Your Profile

Before you go tweeting anything spend a little time on your Twitter profile. Twitter recently had a massive upgrade, so it is important to take note of these changes when selecting a profile and cover picture.

Profile photos are now square and display at 200×200. Formats allowed are JPG, GIF or PNG and the max file size is 100 KB. Keep this in mind when choosing your profile picture and make sure the image is a high-resolution image that represents your brand and matches/lines up with other images of your business online.

The same goes for your cover picture make sure this is in line with your brand guidelines and is consistent with the rest of your online brand images.

Write a clear and enticing bio. Explain in your bio who and what you are about as people who click on your site for the first time will no doubt read or glance at this. So, make it compelling and remember again to stick to your brand guidelines.

Follow/Unfollow

Once you have your profile set up you can start following other Twitter accounts. Search for accounts with similar interests as yourself i.e if you are fancy restaurant follow foodies or food bloggers in your area. When you start acquiring followers always follow them back and if after some time has passed unfollow those who don’t follow you back.

Try to keep the amount you are following a close enough number to those who are following you as it can look off-putting if an account is following 20,000 people but only has 200 followers.

Relevant Content

Post regular content updates, at the beginning I would recommend posting daily. Keep an eye on trends daily and jump on any bandwagons that are relevant to your business. For example, if its national #fishandchipday and you sell/serve fish and chips then this is a hashtag you need to get tweeting about immediately.

Try to mix your content up and have a variety of posts including funny, promotional, educational and informative tweets.

Watch out for daily news regarding your area of expertise and share this information with your followers be a source for them.

Engage

Don’t just expect followers to engage with you, you need to be active on Twitter to build relationships. If you see relevant tweets from fans or non-fans like it or retweet it. If you like or retweet or twitter users tweets the likelihood they will follow you is strong or at the very least they will recognise your brand when they come across it again.

Also, answer any tweets to you from potential customers and especially any complaints. This ca be a downside to Twitter as you cannot control what people tweet about you but you can actively respond and nip things in the bud quickly.

Analytics

Use Twitter analytics as a good guideline and indicator of what you are doing right. Twitter analytics s free to use and it gives you a massive amount of useful information.

It gives you a breakdown of what tweet and media tweet (tweets with an image, video, GIF etc) has the most impressions and engagement, use this as a good indicator of what your fans want to see the most and what content is found the most interesting.

Twitter analytics also give you a good breakdown of where your Twitter followers are from, their interests, sex and ages. You can use this profiling to your advantage when composing tweets.

Final bonus tip: Keep a close eye on your competitors, what they are tweeting and what’s working from them.

Most importantly have fun with it!