Let’s be honest: the amount of followers on Twitter is still one of the most important metrics for measuring success on that platform. While we have always insisted on the importance of boosting engagement on Twitter - and we will always do - if you are not in touch with enough people most of your efforts will fall short and fail to produce meaningful results.

For this reason, in this post we will present you 3 simple hacks you can use to get more people to follow you on Twitter: nothing illegal or against the Terms of Service (that stuff never works!), but rather some actionable and proven suggestions that will help you reach more users and boost your presence - if you have the patience and time to implement them with dedication and perseverance.

1. Follow the right people

As we all know from the works of the great Robert Cialdini, flattery goes a long way and really helps us get people to like us and treat us as we would like. Keeping in mind this principle - we will get back to it also later on - the simplest yet most effective way of showing appreciation on Twitter is by following somebody (after all, isn’t that why you are here reading this? ;). The first thing to do to increase the number of followers is therefore carefully yet constantly choosing the people you follow: the result will be an almost automatic “follow-back” and this, coupled with the next two tactics, will help you increase the chance of having your contents and account retweeted, further increasing your footprint on the platform.

As you can notice we suggest to carefully choose the people to follow: we strongly advise against mass-following a ton of users just hoping to get something out of it - one of the most important numbers to keep an eye on is the ratio between your followers and the people you follow as it’s a pretty telling indicator of spammy behavior, and that’s the reason why we think it’s better to pick with extreme attention the most interesting people to follow, focusing on quality over quantity.

2. Post interesting stuff

If there’s one thing we learned from all the SEO work we have done in all our career is that content is always king. And that is true also on social platforms, not only for Google and search engines - so posting interesting stuff on Twitter is a must if you want to boost your number of followers. Why? For 3 main reasons:

1. When people follow you back they find cool things to read and valuable links to explore and so they are more inclined to keep following you
2. You end up in more searches (especially if you use skilfully use hashtags) and so get a chance of being discovered by more people
3. You are viewed by Twitter as an active and engaged member of the community and so you increase your chances of being featured in the “top” results or, in general, to see your contents more prominently shown in other people’s timelines

3. Engage engage engage!

Finally, Twitter is a social network, which means that it is built to increase engagement and interactions between people. On this specific platform, interactions are mainly retweets, likes and comments - and that is exactly what you need to do to boost your number of followers and your overall footprint in the ecosystem: pick the best tweets (in terms of interest for your target audience and impact) and retweet/like them at the right moment.

We understand that this is a quite time-consuming and energy-draining efforts but if you recall, we started by saying these techniques work if they are carried out relentlessly and with dedication. At the same time, some of these activities could be automated - and that’s why we created Tweet Ninja: it’s a tool with a brain and a bit of soul that searches the list of people you want to target for interesting tweets and then asks for your approval before retweeting or liking them. The results are quite interesting, getting new followers constantly without the need to dedicate more than 10/15 minutes per day so, well, it’s definitely something worth trying!

If you found this post interesting and valuable and you liked our suggestions on how to get more people to follow you on Twitter we would really appreciate a share on Facebook, Twitter or any other social network you regularly use. Also, if you need a tool that can automate most of the tedious tasks on Twitter with quite some intelligence, try out Tweet Ninja - feel free to click on the button below and start your free trial, we are sure you’ll love it!