Several people have asked me lately how they can get more followers on Twitter.  They realize that Twitter is a great source for getting traffic back to their blog but they haven't had much success in growing their number of followers.  And like anything else related to blogging and traffic generation, when they ask me how to get more followers on Twitter, I have some questions for THEM.

How Many Followers Do You Want?

Yes, we all know Ashton Kutcher was the first person to have over 1 million Twitter Followers and we all know someone who has 20,000 followers or 150,000 followers.  So you think the measly little 1 or 2 thousand followers who are listening to your Tweets aren't nearly enough to do you or your website any good. 

Sending traffic to your blog is just like sending traffic from anywhere else on the web.  It doesn't really matter how many people you send, it's the quality of the traffic and the quality of the content on your blog.  For example, if your blog is about Gardening but your Twitter followers are coming to your website because they like what you had to say about March Madness then of course none of them are going to buy your gardening book.  They're all there because they thought you were talking about basketball.

On Twitter your first concern should be that the right people are following you, not how many of them there are.  You want targeted followers.  And to do that you have to be very careful about who YOU follow.  Twitter is a social site and when someone starts following you it's considered polite to follow them back.  So if you just go in and start following random people, then random people will be following you. 

You want to use the search feature and look for people who are interested in the same niche that you're trying to promote.  Then, when you follow them they'll follow you back.  And the people who are following them will also start following you and you can follow them back.  But it all starts with YOU and you have to follow carefully.  For this reason you should also set up a separate Twitter account for each of your blogs so you can keep your followers separate. 

Are Your Followers Listening To Your Tweets?

Are the Followers that you do have listening to your Tweets?  Are you generating any traffic from your current followers?  Just because you have 1000 Followers doesn't mean that every time you send out a Tweet 1000 people are going to rush to your blog.  A lot of those Followers may live in a different time zone than you and when they are online they may not spend every minute watching their Tweets.  So before you start worrying, look at your tracking statistics and see where your traffic is coming from.

If they are following your Tweets, maybe it's your content.  If you're sending them to a sales page maybe it needs to be rewritten for better conversions.  Or maybe it's just not something your Followers are interested in.  But the first thing you need to do is find out if they're following your Tweets at all.

What Are You Tweeting About?

My next question is probably the most important.  What are you Tweeting about?  This is the biggest mistake I see.  I have several Twitter accounts of my own so I know what types of Tweets internet marketers send out.

You first start off with some ridiculous motivational quote for the day.  Something about sunshine and lollipops.  And then you follow it up with a link to your sales page.  Then you Tweet some inane joke or another ridiculous motivational quote.  And follow it up with another link.  Then you send out 7 or 8 ridiculous motivational quotes in a row, all spaced 3 minutes apart...and follow it up with a link.  And then I don't hear from you for the rest of the day.

Twitter is a social site.  Which means people go there to socialize.  Not to trade inane, worn out motivational quotes.   They want to chat and gossip and trade basketball scores and talk about the latest movie or current celebrity gossip.

In fact, you  can tell exactly what everybody on Twitter wants to talk about by looking over on the right where it says “Trending”.  Those are the current hot topics on Twitter.  I look at those topics all the time and have been for months now.  And not once have I ever seen the topic “Motivational Quotes”.  Why would you think that a tired, worn out motivational quote would give me reason to pause and go check out your blog?  If I sent you a motivational quote every fifteen minutes for a week would you be tempted to go buy something from MY blog?

How Often Are You Tweeting?

Are you Tweeting regularly or do you get to it when you think of it – say every four or five days or so?  Either way, it's fine but it will have an affect on your traffic.  Your Followers won't mind if you only Tweet every 5 days.  Everybody has a job and a life to tend to and people don't expect you to hang out on Twitter 24 hours a day.  But just be aware that the more often and regularly you Tweet the more Followers you'll get and the more traffic you'll see at your blog.

Schedule Your Tweets

To be more consistent in your Tweeting, and to provide better quality Tweets, try scheduling your Tweets just like you schedule your blog posts.  When you schedule your Tweets, obviously you can Tweet all day long whether you're on Twitter or not. 

But you'll also have more time to put together quality Tweets that will engage your Followers and show that you're actually listening to them.  After a while, I unfollow people who send me nothing but motivational Tweets because I assume they don't really care if my day is full of sunshine and lollipops or not.  They just want to make sure I hang around and click on their links.

I believe there are a few Wordpress plugins that can handle this but the ones that I've tried have been mediocre at best. I've finally settled on SocialOomph to handle all my Tweets and keep them organized and on schedule.   They have a free account option that will let you schedule Tweets for the day but if you go with the paid version you can schedule all of your Tweets to all of your Twitter accounts out into eternity if you want to. 

Now that doesn't mean that I do.  I generally schedule my Tweets for the week and I leave breaks in the schedule so I can go in and manually Tweet about the day's relevant topics and participate in the conversations.  This lets my followers know that I really am there, I really am listening and I'm not just using an autoposter.

SocialOomph has several other features like allowing you to post to your Facebook account and tracking of your statistics.  It also has a feature that will automatically follow and unfollow people and you can set keywords to target those people.  Twitter is a brilliant marketing tool and if you're really interested in using it then you should do it right, using SocialOomph to schedule and organize your Tweets. 

I think you'll find that once you're sending out quality Tweets, on a regular schedule, you'll see a huge increase in your followers and the traffic on your blog.