If you’re well known on the internet then getting people to follow you on Twitter is easy. You just need to link to your account and watch your follower count go up and up every day. However, if you’re not a famous actor, musician, writer or don’t run a popular website then getting followers is a little more difficult as you don’t have people waiting to hear what you have to say. Which is the position which most Twitter users are in.

So how do you get more followers? Well there is a variety of ways to get more people to follow your updates. Amongst other things you can promote yourself in Twitter directories, to friends and associates on forums and blogs and organically by simply being active on Twitter (and other people seeing your replies on other users accounts).

However one of the most popular ways of getting new followers is also the most effective : Following others. As I mentioned last week, this is a technique that many people use and was the reason why I saw my follower count drop a little one day.

Here’s a brief explanation of how you can get more followers by following others :

• First of all you need to find someone to follow. If you don’t care who you follow then this step is easier but personally I like to follow people with similar interests as me therefore I recommend checking Twitter directories for like minded people.
• Once you have found someone, make sure you pay attention to their follow/follower ratio. If their ratio is close to 1:1 then it’s likely that they actively follow those who follow them. These are the people you want to follow.
• At this state you can either do one of two things. You can either forget about them and move one or you can stop following the people who didn’t follow you back. This is a strategy used by a lot of people. All you need to do is wait about a week or so after following them and then remove those who didn’t follow you back with a service such as Buzzom.

There are other good ways you can grow your follower count but this technique is definately one of the most effective. What do you think : Is following the best way to get followers?

* Just to clarify : I dont think you should just blindly follow anyone. Quality is better than quantity so It’s important to choose who you are following and not just autofollowing anyone

Retweetist is a cool site which tracks the latest retweets. It’s a great way to see what the latest news is because that’s what people generally retweet (that and good articles).

As well as showing the latest retweets, it also shows who the biggest retweeters are. It’s worth checking Retweetist out

Link : Retweetist

I mentioned a few days earlier that I periodically check those who don’t follow me and unfollow many of them. One site I used a few times to automatically unfollow those who were not following me back was Huitter Mutuality but for some reason the owner of that script out a restriction on that only lets you use the script 3 times. Although useful, the Huitter script unfollowed everyone and that isn’t what I always want to do as there are some accounts I want to follow who I know will never follow back.

For example, the shopping bargain site Hot UK Deals has a Twitter account which posts the latest bargains from their site. This is all automated therefore the account does not follow anyone.

FriendORFollow is a great site which lets you quickly see who is not following you in return but it doesn’t let you unfollow them, you have to instead click on the users profile and unfollow the regular way through Twitter. So I started looking for another site which would let me unfollow a lot of users at the one time and thankfully, I found one.

Buzzom is a great little site which lets you do a variety of things. First of all, it provides a small list of stats about your account including a ReTweet Count, Influence Score, Retweet Score , Tweet Efficiency Score and a InRev TwitIn Score. None of which I am particularly interested in but I’m sure some people are.

However, Buzzom does much more than provide stats. It also has 3 useful services :

• Flush – Unfollow those who are not following you.
• Grow – Gives you suggestions of users who are likely to follow you back if you follow them.
• Reciprocate – Follow your followers back.

Each service brings up a list of about 20 or so Twitter users in a frame. It shows the avatar of each user, their name and the number of followers they have. Next to each user is a checkbox so you have the option of checking everyone and following/unfollowing them or you can deselect those you don’t want to change.

It would be great if they showed 100 users instead of 20 or so but it is still a very useful service nevertheless and one which I encourage you all to check out

Link : Buzzom

Yesterday I spoke about two websites which let you use Twitter to find a domain name or a job. Dntwits and TweetLancers were both good ideas but they just weren’t developed properly and seemed like they hadn’t been finished.

StockTwits, on the other hand, is a Twitter service which does seem to live up to it’s potential. The site is best described as a ‘Twitter for Traders’ and works in the same way as Twitter in most ways. For example, it doesn’t ask you ‘What you are doing?’, it asks you ‘What are you trading?’.

You can add stocks you want to monitor to your portfolio then monitor updates related to your portfolio on the home page. Alternatively, you can see all updates or just the ones from friends.

If you do a lot of trading then I recommend checking StockTwits out

Link : StockTwits

I found another Twitter ranking site today called TwitRank. The premise is very simple : You enter your Twitter username and then a rank out of 10 is calculated from the number of people you follow and the number of people following you.

I got 6 out of 10, which doesn’t sound too good! There isn’t a TwitRank button to place on your blog so after using it once, I fail to see why you would use it again but I thought I would share it with you all anyways

Link : TwitRank

DNtwits is a cool Twitter service which lets you market domain names you are selling. In their own words “DNtwits is a free service that allows users to list the domain names they want to buy or sell by simply tweeting from their Twitter account”.

I think DNtwits is a great idea but it seems far from finished. For starters, there doesn’t seem to be a lot of people using it and without an audience, you would be as well posting your domain name for sale at a popular domain name forum like DNForum.

Secondly, domain ads don’t have any datestamps attached to them so you never know if a domain advertisement was placed today or two months ago. It is a good concept though it needs more features.

The owners of DNtwits also run TweetLancers. Run using the same script, TweetLancers is a freelance service which lets you use Twitter to post jobs. Unfortunately, it suffers from the same problems that DNtwits does.

Link : DNtwits