It’s a no brainer, an engaged twitter audience who loves what you do can drive traffic to your site, recommend your content and become a source of customers for your business. Here’s how to build that Twitter audience in a few simple steps.

ONE: Prepare yourself for engagement.

What does this mean? Well, you need to present value to your audience, and in this case it will come in the form of your Twitter description. The reason we mention this here is because so many people flat out get it wrong. Let’s look at a few examples.

“We are expert creatives that make apps for mobile, web, wearable, and second screen devices. Follow us for great content.”

This is our message. It is simple, direct and to the point, it’s a houses a clear value proposition with what we do, and bases on our statement the user can assume the type of content we’ll be pushing on Twitter.Ogivy’s on the other hand is

Official twitter feed of Ogilvy & Mather.

If you don’t know who Ogilvy is, you might assume it’s a band, a duo of Brooklyn makers, or a swanky SoHo clothing shop. This description doesn’t do a good job of comunicating with the audience who they are what they do and what value you’ll get. FYI Ogilvy & Mather is an Advertising, Marketing and PR firm with 450 offices across the globe.Finally let’s look at one from CBSSports.

Connecting you to the sports content you crave.

It’s clear, direct and to the point and tells me exactly what I  want and need to know.

TWO:  Get your influencers to work for you.

You should always follow industry influencers and finding the right people to follow is difficult. You can typically start your follow list by looking through other folks influencer lists, but what after that? Add them one by one manually? This is time consuming and difficult, and in today’s world we should be able to automate these activities, luckily Flounder let’s you do just that.Flounder …

  • … monitors the @replies to and from each of your team-mates’ personal accounts,
  • and once you or your team-mates have had a conversation with someone, say three tweets either way, your company account follows that person.

While founder is built for small teams and startups, you can instead add those same influencers to flounder as your “team-mates”, and voila. Every person that they have a twitter exchange with, your company account will follow.And now you’re not only growing your own list of people who matter, but people who will likely share relevant content to you that you can start engaging with.

THREE: Build and engaged twitter following without being dodgy. Sign up for targetpattern or deploy a follow-bot

Targetgrow is a great little web app that scours the Twitterverse for specific keyword related tweets and keyword arrays, then lets you favorite them.As it turns out, favorite’ing any number of tweets will convert into approximately 10-20% that number of followers. Target pattern also queues up automated tweets over time, which means that twitter wont have an incentive to flag your account for a “brute force” favorite activity.Targetpattern also lets you press the “f” key on your keyboard for quick favorite’ing, though I wouldn’t recommend this as you’re duping real people into thinking you care about their content. In my book this can be considered a dark marketing tactic (more on those in a later blog post).Another way to do what Targetpattern does is to deploy a twitter-bot such as the Twitter Follow Bot, but overall it’s riskier as you’ll be more susceptible to being flagged.

FOUR: Set up an automated DM’er the right way

Unless you enjoy getting 30,000 daily Twitter emails, chances are that if your account has followed someone via flounder.io, and they then follow you back you will likely not get a message. This is a missed opportunity as there is an inherent interest in one another’s accounts. Solution: Set up an AutoDM bot.Now, I know some people are against this, and again it can be considered a dark marketing tactic, but if executed well it will help with inbound. For example the auto DM we send to certain folks is …

“Hey {firstname} thanks for the follow! While this DM was automated, we are not. Ping us if you want to build an app, and seriously thanx. :)”

The DM’s kind-of personal, it’s honest, it’s funny, and reinforces what we do and how we can work with a potential client.

FIVE: Queue up relevant content

Constantly finding content to post to your Twitter account can get very time consuming, luckily Klout and Buffer exist to make this a little bit more manageable.While Buffer was great a few years ago, the recommended content they provide is limited; Klout does a better job of this. Strictly speaking Klout gives you more categories to chose from and doesn’t limit the queue to 10 posts like Buffer.

On the other hand Bugger lets you shorten urls with t.co and j.mp which Klout does not, and which I personally like.At the end of the day, it doesn’t matter which you use, but it matters what content you share. It should speak to your brand message, be relevant to your audience, and be insightful and interesting. Additionally, getting your team to help with your twitter queue is a great way to build additional content that can broaden and add personality to your voice.

Summing up

While these four steps will grow your twitter base and do so quickly, remember, the people you get by these means are real breathing blood and flesh human beings and you should engage with them, talk to them, and if you’re doing it right, genuinely find the content they share interesting. You should also treat them well, and be kind, people generally enjoy kindness and just because you’re automating low level tasks, doesn’t mean the people you talk to, and how you talk to them should be automated.With that, the last bit of information is, when starting out, no one wants to follow a brand with 7 followers, so do yourself a favor and buy a couple of hundred followers to get you going on fiverr.

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