1. Get Followers:

   Yes, obvious enough but many people are of the mindset that they would rather have a small following and tighter group of friends on twitter than a larger group. This is all a matter of personal taste and a function of what you intend to accomplish using the service. If one of your goals is to drive traffic to your blog or application, more followers is better. This gives you a few things:

   • A larger number of people looking directly at your tweets, this will familiarize them with you and gradually build trust as they see the value of your information.
   • Those followers may re-tweet you. This means that, for example, if one of your followers has 1000 of his own, you’ll get exposure to another 1000 people. This is great if you have only 500 people watching you directly.
   • Brand awareness, even if people don’t retweet or read you, they will know your name and get a sense of what you do. When these people develop an interest in your area, they’ll know who to turn to.

   It is very important to keep in mind that you must do something for those followers. Just having a large number of people watching your tweets will accomplish very little if those messages are of no interest or don’t offer any insight. People will eventually either unfollow you or just tune you out when your tweets come up on their Twitter client.

2. Put out some informative and useful links

   Your Twitter stream cannot be just about your blog or application. Show that your interest in the topic you specilize in is real by Tweeting or retweeting related articles from other people. This proves that you are out there looking for valuable information and reprocessing it with additional value at your own site. Comment on those articles you post or retweet.

3. Post Your own blog:

   Again, quite obvious but this is not necessarily about tweeting your own blog posts but about how to do it. Don’t go overboard. Posting the same post over and over again can start to annoy others, particularly if they are following only a few people. Before long their timeline can become overwhelmed with tweets on your 1 or 2 recent blog articles. Use TweetLater.com to manage when your blog posts will be retweeted. Make sure to schedule a time when lots of tweeters are online.

4. Clean out those who don’t follow you back and follow more

   This is one way to quickly add followers. If, for example your are already following 2000 people but are followed by only 1000, you can use twitterkarma.com to do so. Login with your twitter id and password, they will return a list of people you follow who don’t follow back. You then have the option to unfollow all those who haven’t reciprocated. This will take the number for those you are following down quite a bit and allow you to follow more who may reciprocate. Remember not to follow someone who just unfollowed, that is a spammy or robotic behavior and can create resentment. On the other hand, once you’ve got a bit of an identity and feel you’ve improved on your content and outreach, there is nothing wrong with trying again.

5. Follow more people via expanding and increasing

   Now that you have some empty space on your Twitter account for more people to follow, be a bit more careful about who you will follow. Choose people in a niche similar to yours, use Twellow.com or justtweetit.com directories to find people of a like mind and follow them.
   In addition, keep a blogging strategy in mind, expand and increase:

   • Increase – increase the people you are in contact with within a certain scope, or type of person on the service. For example, if your are in life coaching, stick to expanding to number of people with this shared interest. This build authority in your niche. Since these people are coming from within your area of expertise, keeping and engaging with them develops authority of content.
   • Expand – This means to move outside of your niche into related areas. Life coaching, for example can tap into other niches, like business, health exercise and even holiday travel (Travel is a life goal for many people) for more followers. This will bring in people from outside that area and can give you authority in numbers.

   Both methods are complimentary and should be used together to build both quantity and quality of traffic and followers. They both help to sustain each other. New people to a topic are looking for experts. Experts are more inclined to comment where there are other experts and where their voice can reach a larger audience.

6. Have conversations:

   Twitter is best used interactively. Make yourself an interactive presence. This doesn’t mean spending hour after hour shooting messages back and forth to everyone who will respond. The strategy is more a matter of trying to have an informative and productive exchange with someone. This will get you a few things:

   • A new friend and enthusiastic source of information and dissemination of your content. This doen’t work unless you help to get their stuff out there too
   • These conversations put you inside what is happening. People often find themselves observing rather than participating in the conversation. You are part of the events and changes that are happening, this is crucial authority juice.
   • You will learn something new and be pointed into new directions. Both are great for getting ideas for that next blog post

7. Start conversations:

   Start by posing a question, and look at the answers you get. If your focus is on being an authority, asking a beginner question makes little sense. What you would like to do in that case is ask more insightful or technical questions that begginers would not ask. Ask the question in a survey style. Comeback later with a blog listing the poll results. This equals direct involvement with the community and a return for their investment in responding to your question.

8. Stay Relevant:

   Make sure that you know where things are going and where things are coming from. New authorities emerge everyday and new trends are developed or drop out of favor. You need to be not only aware of whats blipping hard on the radar but also able to predict what is coming up based on the way that you value things. Having the ability to see what’s coming is held in extremely high regard and is an important skill to cultivate. This is best done by looking to sites that are already recognized authorities in the field. By authority, see , . There are different types of authority and you need to define your mix and deliver in the areas that you are targeting. Once you know what it is you want, looks for developmental patterns to emerge and factor in human behavior, this will help to provide some unique insight and commentary into what is happening in your field. Look to small blogs that are way ahead in their field and reference them, they are not, necessarily a competitive threat and can provide some symbiotic value. It is important to encourage bloggers and thinkers that are a bit more out on the edge, the are the ones generating the new content that so often ends up recycled on all the other cookie cutter blogs.

9. Stay Innovative:

   While staying relevant is essential, you should eventually strive for innovation. Mass audiences are not necessarily drawn to innovation, but this trait lends a huge amount of authority to your site and separates you out from the other blogs that are busy recycling or 1,2,3 riffing on someone else’s original ideas. Innovation takes a fair amount or additional work and something that many times it is something that has to ripen, it can’t be churned out so let it sit when it must. The most important payoff in attempting to innovate is that it extends your range of vision. All of that hard thinking may only give you one small blog post, but it will have radically changed your thinking and sent you into very new areas online for inspiration and ideas. You will have expanded your sources of information and scope of your commentary. In the long term, this widens what you are able to Tweet and blog about and because of this makes writers block much less of a problem.

10. Use a Variety of Tweet Text to Promote the Same Post:

    Again, don’t overdo it, but take sentences from a given post that are < 140 characters and tweet them along with the link to the post. What this does is deliver some more of that article to to people who follow you. It provides a preview of what you are talking about in the post and thereby promotes it. Immediately, without having to go to your blog, people can see what you are about. This message is expanded and reinforced everytime a part of your post is tweeted. It's a win-win people on Twitter get some more useful content and you get some promotion.

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