Created a Twitter profile and don't know what to do next? Or are you a non-stop tweeter and don't know why your following isn't bigger? Sometimes we can be doing all the right things and wonder why we're not getting the results we want. If you're looking to find a way to grow your following or try a few new tweeting styles, take a look at these quick tips to building a better Twitter profile.

Find your audience

Are you looking to reach out to mums about organic food markets or are you a tech start up looking for guys and gals who love geeky gadgets? Once you know who you want to reach out to on Twitter you've got to try and find them.

• Try using Followerwonk to search profiles by name, location and keyword and sort through the list to find people of influence that relate to your business or profiles of people who you think would be interested in what you do. You can also export the results to xls or csv.
• Use the search functionality on Twitter to find profiles by a particular keyword. The advanced search will allow you to search by emotion, location or phrase.
• Once you know who your audience is, try finding when your audience is on Twitter and start scheduling your tweets at optimal times when they're most likely to see them.
• Figure out a realistic amount of time you can spend checking, retweeting and growing audiences each day or couple of days and use your time wisely!

By tweeting when the majority of your audience is online you are more likely to get your tweets seen by the right people. It also stops you from flooding your timeline with tweets but have a steady trickle throughout the day, meaning you can start to analyse what times you get the most interactions & shares and as an added bonus, it gives you time to respond to breaking news or even mentions of your profile.

Followerwonk, Tweriod or Hootsuite reports can also help you to find when your audience is online. Our favourite scheduling tools are Hootsuite and Buffer.

Out with the old in with the new

Re-evaluate who you are following and find the accounts that don’t tweet / aren’t relevant anymore and unfollow.

Ask yourself have they tweeted in the last year? Have I had a conversation with them? Is following the likes of Lady Gaga or Lulu really going to help boost your following? Are their tweets relevant to your audience?

Replace them with people who are interested in what you're talking about. By finding more followers who are interested in your industry of work or in the type of things you're talking about, they are more likely to follow you back, start a conversation or share your message. The more people you get following you back, the better your influence and social authority.

• Use the tips above to help you find where and when your audience is online.
• Another handy reason to use Followerwonk is that it will allow you to search your Twitter followers to find which profiles you're following have become inactive.
• Look at your competitors / similar profile accounts to yours and see who they follow or who is following them, and evaluate if it is worth following or putting them into a list.
• Hootsuite will also allow you to set up streams looking for particular keywords in a particular area.

Are you missing some of the conversation?

Often you’ll get an alert if someone mentions your Twitter handle but it can often be easy to overlook people who are sharing your content who don’t mention your @Twitter name.

These are opportunities not to be overlooked. It’s much easier to start a conversation with people who are already sharing your content. You may already have an alert set up and choose who to interact with but if not, Hootsuite will allow you to create streams that follow particular keywords. Alternatively, use Twitter to search for your name via the search bar or use Mention (which integrates with Buffer).

ASK A QUESTION - Noisy Little Monkey (Social Media): ... http://t.co/4G3kCvsYvZ via @marketingdonut

— OnlyDigital (@onlydigitaljobs) April 3, 2014

(A tweet we could have missed had we not been monitoring our own name as well as @noisymonkey)

Use images. Alllll the images

#LivedinBlueshttp://t.co/CST3rRkOn0 pic.twitter.com/chk2jtmcEe

— Gap (@Gap) April 2, 2014

Analysis has shown thattweets including an image are 94% more likely to be retweetedand now that images or multiple images (like Gap's tweet above) open automatically when included in a tweet, there's really no reason not to be sharing images. Next time you are sharing one of your blog posts which has a featured image or there are a few interesting pictures scattered through the blog, try including it in your next tweet and see if you get an uplift in interactions and clicks to your website.

Same, same but different

We try and share our blog posts on Twitter a couple of times over a few hours, days or weeks depending on how evergreen the content is. While this is great because it means that it’s more likely to be seen by more of our followers, it can be hard to keep the message varied. The same applies when someone mentions you in a tweet; it can be easy to just hit the RT button and carry on with your day. But you could be missing out on further interactions.

• Try mentioning the profile in a tweet rather than @ing them directly. E.g. “Thanks for the follow @profile name. Loving your product packaging".
• tweets between 100 and 115 characters were 34% more likely to be retweeted. Keeping your tweets short and sweet, leaves enough characters for someone to retweet, comment or reply
• make sure that your hashtags are relevant to what you’re tweeting about and are either specific to your brand or are #AProperHashtag #NotOneYouHaveMadeUp #TashHag.

Rookie Mistakes

 

#Fail #Facepalm #Hashtag

• going hashtag happy #its #hard #too #read #and #impossible #to #understand #what #you're #saying.(also don't put hashtags and links and profile names next to each other, they all hyperlink in the same format so it's difficult to distinguish where you want people to actually to click)
• Tweeting everything all at once - it's not a race
• replying to someone or starting a conversation? If their Twitter handle is at the beginning of the tweet, make sure that you put a period before it ( .@Twitterhandle ) as only that person and the people who follow you and that person are going to see that tweet, which kind of seems like a waste of time (unless of course you don't want many people to see it and like to carry out semi private conversations on a public social channel...).

Image Credits:

• Wiki
• Average Jane
• Wiki
• MHKMarketing
• Pen Waggener