Recently we posted a few tips that covered the basics of growing your Twitter presence. This blog offers a few more ideas that will boost growth and build your influence.
Use Nuvi, TrendKite, Zignal or Another Metric Tracking Application to Guide Your Strategy
Metric applications are a 
convenient way to track how your audience is responding to your content, so that you can focus and prioritize your efforts. These tools most importantly allow you to analyze success or failures of your posts by measuring the impact your content had with your audience from an engagement (e.g. shares, likes, retweets) perspective. Most find that visuals, recognition of a person or a team, and the occasional personal picture or thought all enhance engagement. But, every audience is different and the only way to find out what works for your “peeps” is to measure their responses.
Evaluate Your Follower Base
The point is that bigger isn’t always better. It’s exciting to see growth in followers, but have you taken the time to see what type of people or companies are following you? If you gather followers that look like bots or the followers link to inactive or spam accounts, remove them from your list. While reducing the number of followers you have may sound counter-intuitive, Twitter’s news feed algorithm explains that these non-user accounts can become a significant percentage of those that see your posts – meaning your posts were not seen by nearly as many people as you had planned. This is because Twitter allows only a select few of those who follow you to see your tweets without being directly on your page, and the greater amount of inactive followers you have the greater the chance that your tweets won’t reach the engaged portion of your follower base.
Keeping it Simple
Luckily, this can be remedied quite easily. Some applications such as ‘Unfollowers for Twitter’ have specific filters that allow you to find ‘Inactive Users’, which also typically capture the vast majority of fake or spam accounts. The filter allows for varying lengths of time to find and unfollow relevant followers. There is another way to remove these accounts as well. Simply find the follower you believe is inactive and click on the gear icon by the follow button and click the block button. This will remove the follower from your followers list, and can always be undone if you feel as though you have made a mistake.
Set Up an Auto-Messaging System
Short messages to followers engage users personally in your content. This step is a basic, yet important step in making new followers feel welcomed. Constructing a personalized message sent when you receive a follower gives each new user a sense of your sincere gratitude and encourages them to return to your content because of a perceived personal connection to the content creator. There are many applications you can use with your Twitter account that will automatically send a message you draft yourself if you experience large quantities of new followers, but isolated drafts to individual followers of such messages work just as well!
There is no question that Twitter has become a very important publishing mechanism for many. Everyone from Hollywood stars to corporate giants are using the social media platform to build influence and status. There’s so much noise, it’s hard to know how to get ahead and build your own following. Using these three simple tips: measure, evaluate and respond – you too can become influential on Twitter.
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