The more people you’re connected with, the more chances you have to catapult your career through social networking. We’ll show you five ways to gain more Twitter followers so that you can be on your way to welcoming new opportunities.
(Photo Credit: Matt from London/Flickr)
Racking up followers on Twitter is part quantity, part quality — meaning, it definitely helps when a recruiter sees that you have 2,394 followers, than just two followers. However, if 2,390 of those followers are spam accounts, then recruiters won’t hesitate to dismiss your candidacy in a heartbeat.
Here are five ways to gain more Twitter followers, but also ensure that they’re quality individuals, too.
1. Complete your profile – Without a complete profile, including an avatar picture, no one will take you seriously. An incomplete profile lends the perception that you’re too lazy to give people what they deserve — a fair chance to judge a book by its cover (on a less superficial level). The Twitterverse wants to see who you are and what you’re all about so that they can decide whether they want to know, like, and trust you.
2. Don’t be narcissistic or negative – No one wants to be friends (on- or offline) with someone who can’t shut up about themself. Provide your audience with useful and interesting information, and steer clear of tweeting about useless things like what you’re eating for breakfast or how angry you are that someone cut you off on the freeway. Your followers are hungry for news that is interesting, uplifting, motivating, and pertinent to their interests, so give them what they’ve signed up for — and that means not deleterious gossip that makes you look petty. Think before you tweet.
3. Follow top influencers in your industry – One of the best ways to find quality articles and information to retweet to your audience is to follow influencers in relevant industries. For instance, if you’re a woman in a tech career, then you’ll want to follow other notable and inspirational women in tech such as Sheryl Sandberg and Marissa Mayer. This particular step won’t necessarily directly up your follower count, but it will allow you to see and retweet the information from these top-influencers, which can, in turn, gain you more followers.
4. RT quality content. Retweeting is one of the easiest ways to share quality content with your audience, and it, literally, only requires a click of a button. Also, don’t be afraid to spend a few minutes a day searching out content to share online. Twitter makes it very easy to locate specific data, thanks to searchable hashtags and keywords. For example, if you’re looking for information specifically about working mothers, then all you have to do is type “#workingmothers” in the Twitter search field and a list of tweets containing that particular hashtag will be produced. You can then pick and choose which tweets you like, and, even, find other users to follow who are interested in that topic.
5. Engage – People want to hear from you, so feel free to ask questions and start a conversation on Twitter to engage further with your followers. A lot of Twitter is automated now, so showing that an actual person is behind your tweets is a great way to tells others that you’re interested in hearing what they have to say, thus opening the floor up for discussion. The more you engage, the more likely you are to gain more quality followers who actually value your opinion (a.k.a. tweets).
Twitter is a great tool and resource for professionals to enhance their careers in so many ways, and without the need of attending endless networking events or spending money on seminar after seminar. If you want to take your career to the next level, Twitter is the way to go.
Tell Us What You Think
Do you have any other tips to gaining more Twitter followers that you’d like to add to the list? Share your input on Twitter or in the comments section below.
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