How did you get a large social media following?

With a lot of hard work and endless hours every day spent on Twitter!  There were days where I would spend 8 hours in networking hours.  I also run regular giveaways on my account, at least one per week.  This has really boosted my followers.  I find relevant accounts to follow such as other small businesses, healthy living and other bloggers.  This ensures my feed is filled with things that interest me and I read somewhere once that approximately 30% of accounts you follow will follow you back.  Don’t go too mad on a following spree though as Twitter could class it as aggressive following and mark your account as spam.

Also use relevant hashtags and retweet accounts to help promote your tweets and get them in front of a wider audience.

Remember I have been on Twitter for 5 years this year, so my following also reflects using it daily for this length of time.  I’ve not had a day off it!  If you’ve just set up an account be patient.  It takes time to build a following.

I wrote an in depth blog post outlining many of my networking tactics in my blog post How I Got So Many Twitter Followers

Did you do anything in particular such as use paid promotion?

I have only tried paid promotion on Twitter a couple of times and for me it wasn’t worth it.  I think I paid around £10 to get 10 clicks on my link, or something like that.  I tried it twice and it’s just too overpriced for a small business and not enough clicks to make it worth it.  I’d love to know of success stories for Twitter advertising for small businesses and bloggers.  I’ve not come across any yet.

How do you gain more views on your blog?  Any tips?

By utilising Twitter!  One of the best things I have recently discovered is a platform called Social Oomph.  I have only been using it for a few weeks but it’s amazing!  It makes scheduling tweets so easy and saves me a ton of time.  I gave their free trial a go and then signed up as it is so good.  It takes the hassle out of promoting your blog posts on Twitter.  Once I’ve published a new blog post I then create a tweet for it on Social Oomph and add a picture (picture tweets always get a higher interaction).

I can publish the tweet right away and can also choose for the tweet to automatically go out at set intervals, say once per day forever more, or I can choose once every 12 hours for a maximum of ten times, and so on.  It’s so good for promoting blog posts on Twitter with ease and I’ve had lots more website traffic since using their service.  I’ve created ‘queue reservoirs’ which I can store a load of tweets in and set them to send them out randomly every 15 minutes or so.

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