You’ve recently started on Twitter and now you are following 200 people with only 5 following back (or 2,000 and 100 for that matter). You wonder why. These are some of the things that you may be doing wrong:

1. You followed 200 people before tweeting anything at all. You get one chance (if even) when you follow somebody. They will look at your profile and if they see no tweets then they won’t know if you are worth following, so they don’t bother.
2. There is no location on your Twitter bio or stated that your location is “the world”. Location means where you physically sit, not where you do would like to do business.
3. Your Twitter bio is full of hashtags and says absolutely nothing but a bunch of annoying keywords.
4. Sometimes not having a photo will do it too. Twitter and social media is a personal thing. You need a photo or at least your company logo.
5. Your last tweet was 3 months ago – if you don’t tweet often enough then people won’t bother. There’s no point following an idle account is there?
6. Your tweets are of no value. You need to think of your audience and who you want to follow you. Target your tweets to them and what they would want to read about.
7. It’s all about you, you, you. No it’s not. It’s about your followers. So if all you do is talk about your own marvellous product then your twitter feed will look like one big ad. Remember, 80% should be about the industry and things other than you.
8. You’re not using hashtags. Hashtags help people other than those you have followed find you. But don’t use too many or the tweet becomes unreadable (2 is plenty). In fact Twitter Counter stats show that engagement with tweets with more than 2 hashtags actually drops by 17%.

Hootsuite suggests that you use either a hashtag or a URL, but not both. I tend to agree. You have a captive audience for about one mili-second. if you provide a choice of things to click on, they may chose the wrong one. This is particularly relevant if the URL points to your own blog or website.

Also make sure when you are following people that you follow them in small spurts. The 200 following with 5 followers is a bit uneven and so people don’t follow back. So if you follow in batches of around 10, it gives your followers a chance to catch up. A one-one ratio is good, or of course even more followers than you are following is better.

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