If you’re running a blog on a tight schedule as I am, you may be swamped with the thought of building a large following on twitter on your limited time. After all, you work full time, come home to your family, and in your spare time you spend time writing your posts. How can you gain twitter followers and make a connection with them?
I was faced with this problem when I started this blog. I knew that I needed to create a social media brand for this blog and have a system set up so that I can pass information on to my followers. So I went ahead and set up my twitter account. Frankly, I was a complete novice about twitter. I really didn’t know how to gain twitter followers and on my busy schedule had never gotten caught up into giving out my personal updates on any of the social media platforms. I was able to quickly learn how to set up the basics and with some plugins, I was able to set up automatic tweeting of new blog posts and postings from my job board. That was the basic first step, to make sure that information was passed on regularly and automatically. You can find the plugins that I use for this purpose on my post about my theme and wordpress plugins.
That’s a very basic first step that really only takes a couple of minutes, but even then your tweets are going out into empty space. The question of the day is how do you gain twitter followers? I’ll tell you that when I first set up my twitter account in September, I was completely clueless about how to go about gaining twitter followers. You can see my profile now and see that I have
and it’s growing daily. How was I able to do this in such a short amount of time? I’m going to share my secrets with you. Together, we’ll help you save time and get your twitter following growing.
Setting Up to Receive Your New Twitter Followers
The first step is to set up your system for receiving your new twitter followers. You’ll need to have your twitter profile set up with the information about your blog and the web address. But that’s just the first step. It’s a wasted opportunity to simply have your followers search your profile and find their way to your blog just from that link. You need to prepare for the gain in twitter followers.
You really want to be able to greet and thank all of your followers as they follow you and introduce them to your blog. You can do this manually by direct messaging your new followers when they join. you’ll see that as you gain twitter followers you will receive these types of DMs regularly. However, the methods that I’m going to talk about in this post will increase your twitter following so rapidly that you’ll find it difficult to manually greet each follower as they come in. I found this out the hard way in the beginning when I woke up to hundreds of new followers over night. Trying to greet each of them was impossible and I was unable to give a proper introduction to most at that time. I’ve since solved that problem with a free service that I use through Socialoomph.
This is a social management service that can assist you in building a following across all networks. While their paid services includes valuable features to manage all your social networking services such as Facebook and Twitter, I strongly recommend starting out and signing up for their free account. Using the Socialoomph free account, you can simply link it to your twitter account and set it up to automatically send out a greeting DM to your new followers as they follow you. In addition, you can set it up to randomly select from a number of greeting messages so that your DM has some variety. This is an invaluable service, particularly if you are gaining followers rapidly. At this point, you have your twitter profile set up with a description of your blog and a link back to your website. You also have your blog set up to tweet out your posts. Now, you have set up a way to automatically send out a greeting to your new followers. Now you are ready to increase your twitter followers!
Get Twitter Followers!
As it turns out, the best way of gaining twitter followers is to follow other people. This really demonstrates the spirit of exchange that exists in a social networking site. Of course, you could simply go to twitter and run a search for the keywords in your niche. It will come back with a list of people who tweet those keywords and you can go down the page and start following them. I’m going to show you some methods that will make the process more efficient. Each system has their merits and I use both.
Method #1
The first method that I use involves using the firefox web browser and getting a couple of plugins. Also, this only works with the old version of twitter, however it’s a simple matter of switching your version back and forth. First download and install the greasemonkey add-on. This is an add-on that allows you to run various scripts. It’s very useful in a variety of contexts. After you install the greasemonkey add-on, head over to the greasemonkey user script site and get the twitter friend adder script and install that script. Once you complete those steps, go over to twitter and search for an influential person in your niche. Pick someone that has a lot of twitter followers. and click on their follower link. 
You’ll now see that at the bottom of your screen there is a small bar that tells you how many unfollowed friends you have on that page with a link to follow all. Hit that follow all link and it will automatically follow everyone on the page. Just go through the pages and follow everyone. The limitation of this method is that the page only shows 20 people at a time, so you do have to go to the next page and repeat the process each time. However, it’s very quick and you’ll find that you are following a thousand people in a few minutes time. You’ll quickly see an incredible gain in twitter followers overnight.
Method #2
This second method involves using a service through twiends. This is a free social exchange network. Twiends basically allows you to link your social networking sites and your blog as well and assign points to give out to people who follow you or visit your blog. 
You’ll see on their front page that they have a list of twitterers who are offering points for you to follow them. You can very quickly follow these users and accrue a lot of points very quickly. The default setting is set for you to also give out points for people to follow you on twitter. I actually turn this setting off on the theory that the people who I follow will likely follow me back on their own. Instead, I use the points I gain from following people on twitter and assign them to getting visitors to my blog. This way I can kill two birds with one stone and gain twitter followers while leveraging the points I accrue into blog visitors. So far this has worked out acceptably for me.
There are two downsides to twiends that I’ve noticed. The first is that I find that the people I follow on twiends are not as quick to follow me back as the ones I find using the twitter friend adder script. So I am not gaining twitter followers as quickly. The second downside is that the visitors coming to my blog tend to have a higher bounce rate than targeted visitors. This is really a minor issue as in the case of twiends I’m really dealing in volume as opposed to targeting my audience. I already know that my targeted audience has a bounce rate under 10% as I found using the methods described in my post about lowering bounce rate. Using twiends I get several hundred additional visitors a day and maybe about 30% of those stay around and read my posts. In any event, this method helps me kill two birds with one stone, so I am getting acceptable results.
Method #3
Finally, I’m going to touch briefly on a third method that you can use to build a social network following quickly and efficiently. That is using a paid service. As an example a service such as Socialoomph provides a variety of benefits with their free account, however you need to gain twitter followers using the other methods I’ve described if you stay with their free account.
If you want to shortcut that and simply use one service to manage building your follower count, schedule your blog posts, as well as schedule your Facebook profile updates in one place, you can explore upgrading to the professional version. 
You can see a few of their professional features on their site and research the benefits.
Final Thoughts
These are a few time saving methods of gaining twitter followers. When you are caught up juggling a variety of responsibilities, you want to do things more efficiently. These methods will help you achieve your goal of increasing your twitter followers in record time. If you have any additional suggestions to help in gaining twitter followers efficiently, please leave a comment.
I liked your article. I did a similar article about the importance of growing a Twitter following a while back.
But may take on methods to do it was completely different. Some of your ways look very interesting, particularly twiends.
One of my methods was very similar to your #1 idea. Using a program called tweepi. Basically it worked the same (input name, get a list of their followers, follow those that look promising). Twiends though looks like a very new…and possibly even fun method of gaining some followers.
Hi Steve,
Thanks for the input. I've been using twiends for a bout a week now and it is quite fun. It's a bonus that I can leverage following twitterers directly into blog visitors. The difference with my first method is that you can do it directly from the twitter interface without having to enroll in any services. It's a couple of alternatives that works pretty well. I'm glad you enjoyed the article. I'll take a look at tweepi as well when I get a chance.
Social Oomph rocks! I've used it to set up niche twitter IDs and autotweet specific content; I've gathered over 1,000 followers in one of my accounts that was set-it-and-forget-it. Very cool indeed.
Hi Richard,
Very good article on increasing the twitter I am already using all the above methods.
Thanks for Sharing
-Imran
Howdy Richard,
I might be too old of a dog to learn all this stuff about twitter and for the life of me, I can't figure out how people find the time to do all this following, leading and twitting.
How much time would you say you invest in social bookmarking?
If everybody eventually does it, will the playing field not be leveled out and we'll wind up at square one again?
Just trying to justify my confusion is all…
Thanks for this post mister.
Barry
Hi Barry,
I have to admit that I was new about twitter as well when I started. To be honest, I work full time and have a family, so I have to blog and do all that social media marketing in my spare time. That's why I try to focus on finding very time efficient ways of doing it. Using the techniques that I was describing in this post, I probably spend 30 minutes to an hour about every other day increasing my twitter followers. I use a couple of plugins to auto-tweet my posts and my job listings. Time hasn't permitted me to do a lot of personal tweeting, but I think I am giving value to my followers with the information that gets sent out automatically.
I think if you set things up in the beginning to automate managing a large following, it can be maintained without spending too much time. Try out these ideas and let me know how it works out for you. You may find that it takes less time than you might think.
Some very great techniques, it would be great to wake up over night with Twitter followers. I tried a few things in the past and I failed miserably and deleted my account. I may set up a new account and use the techniques that I have learnt in this post, thanks.
Hi Craig,
I also took a few tries at twitter before I figured out these techniques. Come back and let us know how they work out for you.
I had used Methods 1 and 2 before but never tried Social Oomph, I'm signing up right now, thanks for informing us about it, looks cool.
Thanks,
Jamie
Hi Jamie,
Glad you enjoyed the tips. Come back and let everyone know how Socialoomph worked out for you. I'm sure you'll like it.
Thanks for the tips. Never heard of the greasemonkey script. Will have to give that a try.
The free account at SocialOomph is great. When I first set it up to automatically follow-back and send out direct messages, I was thrilled with my cleverness. But after a few months of seeing the quality of followers I was getting, I realized my mistakes. Turned off the auto-follow and auto DMs until I could clean out my account. Now I use it in a manner that helps me manage a more targeted set of followers.
yes, greasemonkey is awesome. You can finds different scripts to do a lot of things with greasemonkey. This is just one of them.
Overall a great post which will help many get started with Twitter.
However I do believe we need to keep in mind that Twitter is a form of Social Media.
Social!!!
I don't follow Twitter accounts that appear to be fully automated – what's the point? There is no one there – I'm talking to myself!
And I honestly think that DM's have outlived their purpose. Most people never go near their DM box. Full of total strangers assuring me that me following them is the most awesome thing that has happened to them that week!
Yes, automation is good to get the basics happening but I do think you have to keep it real otherwise it will just be apps talking to apps!
Good recommendations. i will surely look into it to increase my twitter followers. i have 2000 followers now hope it will increase when i use your suggested methods.
Cheers bro.
_Robin
Thanks for some great info! I can't get the GreaseMonkey script to work for me, though. I'll have to get my husband to take a look at it once he gets home from his business trip…
Richard, thanks for the post. I am one of those who haven't been able to use social networking sites like Twitter to pull in traffic and leads. I always though its time consuming. But, I see from your post that it could be done faster. I think I am gonna give Socialoomph a try and see how it will work. Thanks for such a detailed article.
Richard,
I love this article! I have written a post about my plan to surpass 1000 followers this year and it seems your post have outrun mine in the number of followers. Having high number of followers are just great because you can easily make several, not significant, income from advertising network like SponsoredTweets. The greasemonkey script above is just great. I mean, literally, you can use this script and run a small service on Fiverr to make several more income.
Awesome, I already tweet it to my followers. And where's the vote button on BlogEngage?
Hi Mike,
Glad I could help. Using these tools will get you over 1000 followers easily. I hadn't thought about taking my twitter following tools freelance to fiverr, but I'm satisfied with giving the information free here.
Glad you reminded me about BlogEngage. I'd heard about it, but hadn't joined yet till I read your comment. I'm all joined up now and added their vote button to the blog! Thanks for the reminder.
Excellent post Richard. I haven't tap into twitter market yet but do moving in small scale
.This post will be value resources for me and to those still not tap into twitter market yet. Thank you Richard.
Hi Richard,
I use some other methods to increase twitter followers overnight, but none of them guarantees targeted followers. What about these three methods you have mentioned here? Can we get targeted followers.
Sathish
Hi sathish,
I would say that the first method gives you the best free way to get targeted followers since you are specifically following people in your niche. It is still a mass follow technique so it's not 100%, but I get targeted followers that way.
If you're willing to go with a paid method, then socialoomph specifically has feature to get you targeted followers as well and may do a better job than using the greasemonkey script.
Twiends will get you followers, but not targeted. The other two methods will.
excellent ways listed out here
i know twiends
There's nothing more likely to get me to unfollow someone is an automated DM saying "Thanks for the follow – visit my link/buy my product"
And I'm not alone in thinking that.
I can certainly empathize with your position, Andy. I just suggest setting up an automated thank you note because it can become very difficult when you are getting hundreds of new followers at a time, it's very tasking to do it manually. For those that like to send out a short acknowledgement, this is one way to do it. I tried to answer DM's manually initially, but really got way behind as my follower count kept growing. I suppose the other route to go may be to send out a group thank you in a tweet. Or one can forego sending the DM altogether.
How do you like to thank your followers?
I really appreciate your effort if posting these tips in gaining more followers on twitter. Actually, in my first time of running a blog, I am so exhausted for I didn't able to gain followers for a week until it improved after two months. I bet that your tips will be a great help in having more twitter's followers in just a single night.
Richard, Social Oomph rocks! I will used their service. I think method 1 won't be much useful for those who want targeted used but its very useful for those who just need followers to promote websites or affiliate products.
I use a combination of all 3 methods. Although I think the first method may work better than most people think as far as targeted users. Think of it this way, if you can follow 1000 people and only 10% are targeted, that's still a good amount of targeted people. Then you figure in the other people, who may just become readers of your blog and retweeting or sharing your posts. There's a lot of potential in getting a large following. Also, if you are selective with the people you select to gain followers, you increase your chances of getting your target audience.
Richard your blog have some error. When I tried to post reply, A javascript alert box show "commentformid".
I agree with you reply. If you get 10% targeted followers.
Cheers!!!
Kai
PS: Read 9 ways to build free one way links at http://www.lazy-blogger.com/9-ways-to-build-free-…
Hi Kai,
Thanks for the heads up on the error. I found the problem and corrected it. That was very helpful.
Btw, do you know about the comment luv network? It pulls your rss feed and automatically posts a link to your latest post so you don't have to do it manually like you did in this comment. You might want to take a look at it as it will really help you create some deep backlinks to your posts. It's a free community and mostly dofollow blogs as well. If you want to look into it, you can find them here.
I still face same error my friend.
Regarding links: It show me "No last blog posts to return." Any suggestion why?
Thanks for all of the pointers. I've started using them and I went from 94 followers to 152 followers within 10 minutes. Great Post!!!!
It's a pitty that SocialOomph doesn't allow the full features in the trial to see how good it is… but I might signup anyway
hey awesome post man. Amazing tips to increase twitter followers. But I hope they don't get us banned from twitter !
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Skip a few days between your rotations of adding and unfollowing twitter followers. It should be ok, they keep an eye out for heavy churning and spammers.
It was a very nice thought! Just wanna say thank you for the selective information you have distributed. Just continue composing this kind of post. I will be your patriotic reader. Gives Thanks over again.
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Hi Richard,Just a short note to say that I like your site.Some good information on it.
Michael baker.detkhobut@gmail.com
This is an awesome post. I specifically like Socialoomph because of the fact that I use it extensively to send direct messages to my new followers inviting them to connect with me on Facebook. I've found out that if you ask your new followers to add you as a friend on Facebook, they're more likely to do that than to click through to get to your blog.
Thanks for sharing.
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Well explained wonderful tip. A must see video for all webmaster especially for the newbies . Thanx Daniel to bring Erica here.