With over a billion registered users and over 100 million daily active users Twitter is social network of choice in for growing organisations interested in driving new traffic to their website.
Essential to any healthy Twitter presence is having an audience that will listen to you and interested in your words, i.e. a large engaged Twitter following. It’s definitely an aspect of your inbound marketing strategy where more is better, much better.
To help you get some traction, here are 7 free tools to help you grow your Twitter following that inBASE has used recently to double ours in a matter of days.
- Canva
First things first - get your profile in tip top shape.
Use Canva.com to do it. Canva gives you the ability to create awesome graphics, Twitter profile images, headers and shareable graphics to take your profile to the next level.
Best of all its largely free with some paid themes and images, highly recommended as its made for marketers versus graphic designers and so is extremely simple to use.
- SumoMe Smart Bar
A great free plug-in to your website that allows for one click following of your twitter account by every visitor to your website. It sits at the top of your web page(s) and encourages your visitors to follow you on twitter, one click done. Simple as that.
- FollowerWonk
A Moz tool with a free component this is a cool application to both search for potential account to follow by region and details in their Bio but also to analyse your own Twitter following to some great detail.
Including things like location, gender, interests, when they are most active (allowing you to time your tweets effectively so they'll see them in their time-lines) and a host of other functionality that make it a must have for marketers.
- Tweepi
This application connects to your Twitter account and lets you manage the accounts you are following en-mass as well as understand who is not following you back, therefore allowing you to even up the follower/following ratio.
Where it is hugely useful however is to identify groups of twitter accounts who may be interested in your company/services. For example, as an Inbound Marketing Agency its valuable to me to know which accounts follow HubSpot for example as they have essentially qualified themselves already as being interested in inbound marketing.
The same can be applied for individuals, Dharmesh Shah for example or even competitors. Use it daily to stay on top of your account and you'll have a ton more followers in no time.
- Crowdfire
Similar to Tweepi in its functionality to allow you to mass manage who you follow and who reciprocates however where we use it is in its automation functionality. The ability to send an automatic DM to those accounts that follow me with a link to a recent blog post is an invaluable targeted traffic generator for any blog.
It may end up being ignored by the recipient however it allows for someone to one dialogue with the minority of users that respond.
Great for developing connections and extending your network.
- Alltop
Alltop is a great source of curated shareable content. It’s a one stop shop of great blogs and articles segmented by niche.
We use it daily at inBASE to identify awesome blogs that we think our followers would find both interesting and useful. 90% of our updates are articles that we have found interesting and want to share and Alltop is a super source of daily updates.
- Feedly
Similar to Alltop, Feedly is essentially the modern equivalent of your RSS reader. It’s a news aggregation service where you add collections of topics you are interested in, add the blogs to the reader and check it daily for new fresh valuable insight that your followers will find useful.
From there, like Alltop, it’s a matter of identifying great content to share with your audience.
There are dozens more tools out there that can help you accelerate your Twitter following, the key here is organic growth, made up of the right kind of audience, people who may potentially buy from you or who have followers who may buy from you.
Don't take any short cuts or be tempted to buy followers, those tactics will get you a worthless audience and ultimately a slap on the wrist from Twitter for breaking their rules.
If you have any favourite tools I’d love to hear about them.