Five Simple Ways to Keep Your Twitter Followers Happy

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Twitter can be a volatile place. Most of the time your followers don’t give you an explanation for why the followed you in the first place, and the same holds true for when they stop following you. That can make it hard to know if you’re “doing it right.”

There are, however, a few simple factors which hold true across the majority of Twitter users; figure out how to balance them properly and you’re practically guaranteed to keep the majority of your Twitter followers coming back for more. Knock them out of whack, though, and you could see that follower list of yours start to dwindle quicker than you might expect.

Five Simple Ways to Keep Your Twitter Followers Happy

1. Find Your Frequency.
People get their Twitter updates in lots of different ways; on their PC’s, on their smartphones…even by SMS in a lot of cases. With that in mind, you need to understand that your followers aren’t just following you – they might be following hundreds, even thousands of other people. Nobody likes seeing their Inbox full of emails from the same person – and the same thing holds true for their Twitter feed. Find the sweet spot between tweeting too much and tweeting too little. Updating your Twitter once or twice a month? Don’t expect too many people to remember who you are, and don’t expect to garner too many new followers. Tweeting 30+ times per hour? Expect that a significant number of your followers are going to get sick of you and unfollow. Strike a balance and maintain it.
2. Keep That Rage in Check
Nobody likes a whiner – and on Twitter, it’s easier than anywhere else to turn your back on one. Take a hard, long look at yourself when you’re in a bad mood and ask yourself whether everyone on your follower list really needs to experience that firsthand. Nobody will fault you for occasionally griping about something, and as long as you can keep it entertaining, you can get away with quite a bit, but at some point everyone has a line, and you should make sure you don’t cross it. If you’re too angry to control yourself, log off of Twitter. If you’re able to control it, and even better, if you’re able to make jokes about it and stay on top of the situation, then do so, but move on to other topics before people can start to accuse you of being a moaner.
3. Everyone Loves to Laugh
Without a doubt, some of the most successful people on Twitter are also some of the funniest. There’s something about the 140-character format of Twitter that elevates certain people’s humor to nearly side-splitting levels, and those are the people who find the most success on Twitter. If you can keep your followers laughing, they’ll never turn their backs on you. Making jokes about realtime news, for example, is a good way to get yourself retweeted, which is a good way to reach followers that you normally wouldn’t have access to. Just make sure that your humor doesn’t cross the lines of acceptable behavior – even in this day and age, there is such a thing as taking a joke too far.
4. Tell Us About Yourself
Some people can pull off mysterious Twitter stranger, but let’s be frank: most of us just don’t have a strong enough Twitter personality to do it. If you really want your followers to get endeared to you, tell them things about yourself! As a baseline, Twitter people will usually follow you longer if they know your gender, nationality, rough age, and most particularly, your interests. Don’t be shy! Social networking represents the largest shift toward ego-centrism that the world has ever seen, and Twitter is no exception. Choose one day a week to share facts about yourself with your Twitter followers. If you really want to make it fun, turn it into a game – tell them four true things about yourself, and one lie, and ask your followers to guess which is which.
5. Engage, Engage, Engage
Unless you’ve got so many followers that you’re getting thousands of Direct Messages and @Replies every day, it’s expected that you’ll reply when people message you directly on Twitter. If you don’t, they’ll quickly get the impression that you don’t care about them or don’t think you’re interesting and they’ll move on to someone who does reply. For truly engaged Twitter followers, take it one step farther – don’t just reply when they contact you. Instead, be pro-active and make occasional first contact yourself! That will really let them know that you value them as followers and value the conversations that you have together. Even better, retweet them sometimes to show that you think their tweets are worth sharing.

There you have it, Tweeple! Five simple, straightforward ways you can increase your follower retention. Put that together with some of our tips for gaining more followers and you’re bound to see your count go up in the coming days and weeks.

Kevin L. Brown www.kbsinsight.blogspot.com