5 Top Tips For Finding Your Twitter Audience

As hard as it is to believe, there was once a time when I wouldn't touch Twitter with a barge-pole. I never really understood the benefit of posting short sentences about my mundane life, why would anyone be remotely interested? However, since starting my blog, I've found that Twitter is the most useful and engaging social media platform for bringing in you lovely readers.

Twitter now has over 250 million users worldwide, all posting an average of 230 million tweets every day. If you have a small business or blog, that is 250 million people who could potentially find your services of use. Obviously not all of them are going to be interested in what you have to say, so it's about becoming a master fisherman in a very large pond.

There's a lot of 'black hat' ways to get more Twitter followers and even though they gain you hundreds of followers, they'll usually ruin your reputation in the long run. Here's a few ways you can gain twitter followers and build your audience, all whilst keeping a healthy online reputation.

• Invite your existing connections. If you have a few different social media accounts, ask your followers to head over to Twitter and follow. It's important you include a link to your Twitter account or a 'follow' button on your blog, YouTube and website so that it's easy for people to find you. You can even create Twitter specific content like infographics and behind the scenes pictures and videos to encourage people to follow.

• Replying to tweets and taking part in Twitter chats. I always notice a huge difference in my follower count when I've taken part in a Twitter chat. Starting conversations with your followers and people you follow is essential, Twitter is after all a social media, so why not be as social as possible?

• Retweeting & Sharing niche tweets. Retweeting is a great way to get noticed, when you retweet someones content it appears in their notifications, allowing them to see who you are. More often than not, that person will check out your profile as a consequence. It will also allow people searching for the topic you retweeted about, to find you in the Twitter search. For example, I once RT'd a tweet about Gyms, I then had about 3-4 people who had Gym related accounts follow me within the space of 10 minutes. 

• Do your hashtag research. When you write a piece of content, figure out your keywords and then search for related hashtags you could use to promote your tweet. There's no point using a hashtag that relates to your content but no one else is using. Head over to my post 'Finding keywords and how to use them' if you need a hand finding your own keywords.

• Time your tweets carefully. Using tools like Google Analytics should give you some insight into what times your viewers are most active. Use this information to schedule your tweets around those 'peak' times to catch your audience whilst they're online. 

How do you interact with your Twitter audience? Are there any tricks you have up your sleeves to bring in those followers?