May 11, 2009

How to Get Targeted Quality Followers on Twitter Using Hash Tags and Alltop

Filed under: social — admin @ 1:06 pm

In case you have just awaken from your Rip Van Winkle 20 year nap and have not heard of Twitter, you are missing out on one of the best social linking tools and traffic builders out there.

I have had a Twitter account for almost two years but until about two weeks ago I never tried to use it to its full advantage. When you sign up there are about 20 followers that you can get immediately just by clicking the accept button, and you can also let Twitter into your email address book to find others that are on Twitter, which I refuse to do, and then you start adding followers to your account by writing lots of good posts.

Hold on, you say. “Who will see my posts if I don’t have any followers?” Well you must eat your meat or you can’t have any pudding! Its the old chicken or the egg problem isn’t it?

Here is one way that I started to use recently to find birds of a feather.  At the bottom of the Twitter page is a “search” tab.  Use that to search for keywords that you want to use to find like minded Twitterers, Tweets, Tweeties, Twotes, Twats..  If you really want to zero in on some users that are “In the know,” use the hash tag symbol (otherwise known as the pound sign or “#”).  So lets say you want to find articles about “Make Money Online” or “MMO”.  The hash tag search would be #makemoneyonline or #mmo.  This will return all articles that use those specific hash tags.  These tweets will also be more apt to be from tweeters that are advanced and may have many followers themselves.

Then here is what I did to get followers.  When I find a tweet that I like, first I “follow” the writer, then I select, copy and paste the article into the “What are you doing” box and use the “retweet” feature with a reply notice to the writer.  To make a reply notification you include the @ sign in front of their name like @linkmoneydotorg.  Then you put the retweet symbol which is the two letters RT and then the copied message.  Now you have accomplished two things.  You have notified the writer that you are following him or her, and you also thought enough of one of their posts to retweet it.  Nothing gets attention better than retweets because that is what everyone is hoping for all the time and what helps to make certain messages go viral.  This person will no doubt follow you and they might even return the favor some time and retweet some of your posts.

Now here is an even better way to find high quality tweeters that are in your niche.  go to Alltop.com and select a category of interest.  Alltop calls themselves a magazine of the Internet but I look at them as one of the very best sources of Blogs that are in high standing.  Not everyone’s Blog is accepted into Alltop and if they are there then you have no fear of ever being scammed or spammed by any of them because Alltop actually vets every single applicant before they are approved.

Now for instance if you select Green, or mmo, or cars, or whatever, as your category of interest you will find dozens or hundreds or thousands of Blogs listed that are in your niche.  Click on some of them that interest you and read their Blog posts and if they are in your groove, then look for their Twitter name and go to Twitter and subscribe to their Twitter posts, then follow, then retweet, then rinse and repeat.

You will start building a very high quality list of followers that are in your niche.  By the way, take a look at the followers of your new found friends because they are probably interested in what you have to say also.

Don’t forget to add links to your own Blog posts or your website of interest or affiliate product landing page, or whatever you want to promote.  In the last two weeks I have added about 700 new followers using these methods and you can too.

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5 Comments »

  1. I am a newbie, I like your post, I copied it to my documents. Thank you. Mo

    Comment by Maureen Cartwright — May 13, 2009 @ 2:22 am

  2. Hi Mo,

    Thanks for the comment. I hope you can find many more posts here that will help you. All free Too!

    Rich

    Comment by rich — May 15, 2009 @ 11:21 am

  3. I’m a twitter newbie 2, and in charge of the corporate twitter feed. Thanks for the advice – it’s really helpful.
    I was so excited to reach 50 followers, now i’m going to go search for more!

    Comment by Sidra Muoio — June 8, 2009 @ 7:58 am

  4. Sidra Muoio,
    You will find that it actually becomes quite fun to keep adding more followers. Using this method I have grown my followers to over 3,000 since I wrote this article. Now they just keep coming in on their own without much work on my part. I am also starting to see the benefit of this work. Yesterday was the highest amount of traffic I have ever had on this website. At one point during the morning the visitors were coming in at the rate of six per minute. Now what I have to do is move this same procedure over to some of my commercial websites so the traffic will actually equal income! Thanks so much for the comment.
    Rich

    Comment by rich — June 8, 2009 @ 9:40 am

  5. [...] I wrote a post last month about how I had started to build my Twitter followers list from a paltry 200 to 300 followers using @ALLTOP for locating quality tweeple to follow.  You can read the previous post here: How to Get Targeted Quality Followers on Twitter [...]

    Pingback by How I Added 5,000 plus Followers on Twitter in Two Months — June 25, 2009 @ 3:19 pm

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