Now the goal is to increase the quality and quantity of your twitter followers. I found this task to be VERY time consuming considering that I don’t blog or don’t give speeches often, etc. So if you’re like me and not a ROCK STAR but still want to enjoy a growing audience. Here’s a few tips.

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1. Set Up 3 Newspapers Paper.li

Paper.li is a wonderful way that let you create a daily report based on the tweets of a portion of your followers or someone else’s followers. For example it can be based on one of your list or simply all your followers. Everyday you twitter account will tweet automatically this report and mention your followers.

You’re done. This will not only help you to get more people to know about you since they are mentioned in your tweets but also help you to catch up with filtered news more easily. The Paper.li newspaper is, indeed, very well designed.

2. Create self-updated lists with @formulists

Formulists is a great way to stay in touch with your followers using lists. When you add someone in a list it does two great things:

1. The person notices you and might say thanks and follow you back
2. You can filter your timeline

So now the goal is to list a maximum of relevant people in your lists to expand your network. Which is exactly what Formulists does. I would suggest your create at least 3 formulists:

• One from the “Filter Who You Follow” category.
• One from the “Expand Your Network” category: I really like the “People Like Somebody” list.
• One from the “Manage Your Followers” category.

Now the settings:

• Make sure to select “Exclude people I already follow from list” when you can
• Set up the “Maximum Size List” to 500 (which is the limit)
• Change the list description to something more friendly than “List generated by @formulists”

That’s it. Let the magic happens.

Now you have a nice way to grow your twitter followers spending absolutely 0s a day. Well don’t forget to be interesting, have a nice avatar, background, tweet often and ask questions. But this is the basics.

Let me know if you know others tricks in the comments! Good luck.

Top News VS Most Recent

The “Top News” feed is based on an algorithm which decides whether or not your post should be shown into their main stream. The “Top News” Feed is (indeed) more exposed so it is interesting to understand how to write better posts to get a bigger audience. Here’s few tricks:
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1. Specify your target

If you specify a target, you show to Facebook you are dedicating your post to a certain category of people. Meaning they are more likely to enjoy what you are posting so your post deserves to be seen.

2. @Tag Others

Facebook loves people who share with others! Right? When you tag others people, you add meaning to your post so it increases your chance to get in the “Top News” Feed.

3. Attach content

Photo? Video? Event? Link? You choose! But attaching content is more engaging for your audience and increase your change to be in the News Feed as well.

4. Have a thumbnail

It’s just more eye-catching and more user friendly. If your page linked doesn’t have pictures in it. Add this line in your code or read this.

5. Engage your customers

Ask questions, avoid the closed questions. Try to engage your customers, let them tell you what they have to say!

6. Ask Your Friends to Break the ice

The idea is that the algorithm will put more easily your post in the main stream if you already have few comments and likes. So as soon as you post, go to your chat box and ask your friends to comment.

Conclusion

Here’s a good one! Any better ideas? Comments? Feedback?

I want to thank the company BrandGlue, the real master at this art. Here’s there presentation:

1. Not 140 but 120 characters.

It’s a pretty common mistake, writing a 140 characters tweet is already too long! why ? To make your retweeter’s life easier. When you retweet you add to the sentence “RT @username” which add at least 10 characters. So to allow multiple retweet, 120 characters is a maximum you can deal with. Have a look to AllTop twitter account which I consider as one of the most interesting one to study:

2. No special characters

That kind of tweet is hard to read and so reduce the chance to be retweeted or even read. However,  

It is way better. Some article say of twitter that it makes you write better. Because writing shorter helps to write better.

Let’s keep in mind that []()-/| are characters to avoid in a tweet.

3. Add a short link at the end

In the web browsing behaviour, we click more easily on the right part of your screen. Don’t ask me why, probably because we are use to the scrollbar on this side.
Adding a link to your tweet also gives it more value, less selfishness and add more sense to the existence of Twitter (-;.

Now let’s tweet better!

Alternative interesting reads:

• How Twitter makes you a better writer
• The formula to get retweeted
• The Science of Retweet