Twitter follower increase mini-guide

Everyone and their grandmother seems to be on Twitter these days. It's fun and easy to use, and it can be even useful at time. If you use it also for marketing purposes, it makes sense to aim for a big following.

During the past year, I increased my Twitter follower number from 5,000 to +20,000, all real followers interested in my line of work. I did it by investing a few minutes in the morning and another few in the evening, and not by buying bulk offers.

How did I do it? It's pretty simple:

- Each morning, I used whounfollowed.me to unfollow those accounts that had unfollowed me and check the new followers and follow those that interested me. The service is free.

- Then I went to my following list and picked one account. Before doing this, I would make sure to tweet something related to one of my books to get people interested.

- I checked his or her following list and followed the accounts whose description included the words sci fi, fantasy, paranormal, YA, steampunk, vampires, writer, author, book lover, reader, book blogger, booktube, etc. (you get the gist).

- If I had to scroll down too many times and found suitable users only here and there, I would pick another of the people I followed and repeat the procedure until I added 200 more people to my following list.

- In the evening, I used ManageFlitter to unfollow 200 people who didn't follow back. I first ordered them by following date, so I'd unfollow those who I had followed the longest and had plenty of time to follow back. This service is also free.

- At the end of the month, I used ManageFlitter to unfollow inactive accounts, more exactly those who hadn't tweeted in the month before last. There's no point in following dead accounts.

And that's about it!

Tip 1: Don't autofollow. Check your followers daily and follow back only those who seem interesting, not all of them.

Tip 2: Don't send welcoming DMs, automatically or not. There's little more annoying than messages saying "Thanks for following me!" or "Buy my book!"

Tip 3: Don't use truetwit validation. If people are interested enough to follow you, don't ask them to jump through hoops to do so. Most of them won't bother to click on the link. I don't.

And most important, do reply to tweets and, from time to time, do RT the tweets from your timeline that you find interesting. Your followers will appreciate it. Happy tweeting!