Tricks of the Trade for Building a Twitter Following

In the past couple of months, building Twitter followings for my marketing clients has become a part of my everyday workload in the way that can only be compared to myspace 'friend adding'. If done improperly it can be enormously time consuming and extremely frustrating. Here are a few tricks that I've picked up in my own work that I am confident will make the process easier for you.

First and foremost you must understand your options for identifying people with common interests within the Twitter network.

Tweepsearch allows you to search Twitter profiles-- specifically what people have written in their name, location and 1-line bio. It does not search actual tweets but can be extremely useful, especially if you are hoping to target people in a specific city or state, or people whose primary reason for being on Twitter revolves around a specific purpose (as described in their 1-line bio).

Search.twitter.com allows you to search tweets but not profiles. Be sure to use the 'advanced' option in order to limit your search to specific phrases and keywords. The advantage here is that when you search, those who have written updates containing your search term recently show up in the results. It lists them in order, in fact. This helps because you will waste less time searching through profiles of people who have abandoned Twitter months ago.

Now that you know where to search, here are a few tips on HOW to search and who to follow.

1) Only follow people whose most recent update was posted within the last 2 weeks. If somebody has not logged into their profile since early 2008, they are probably not going to log in the next day to follow you back.

2) Only follow people who appear to be real people; avoid following accounts that appear to be business, informational or promotional. These profiles certainly have a legitimate place within the Twitterverse, but the truth is that most are exclusively interested in their own product or service and have no interest in learning about yours. This includes other artists. Instead, follow those who have a profile picture or name that identifies them as a real person.

3) Do not follow profiles that appear to be sex-oriented. This can be signified by the letters 'XXX' within the person's username, by an erotic profile photo or through updates. These folks are only interested in one thing and it isn't you.

4) DO follow people who are already following somebody with an interest very similar to your own. Underneath the 1-line bio on every profile you can click on the 'followers' number and link. If you find somebody whose followers you feel would be interested in learning about you, this link will bring up a list of that person's followers. Using the rules above, simply click the 'follow' button to the right of each person's username. I find that this strategy is the most time-efficient because unlike searching on Tweepsearch or Search.twitter.com, you do not need to open a new window to follow somebody.

5) DO follow people who appear to be posting in your own language. The return-follow rate for users in other countries is simply too low to be worthwhile, even if you are promoting a product or service with international appeal. This is the only difficulty with finding people via #4 above.

6) Do not follow people whose 'followers' list drastically outnumbers their own 'following'. This is the case with many promotional and business related profiles. Tweepsearch allows you to see these numbers before clicking through to a profile; definitely worth a glance.