Social media is now a mainstream part of digital marketing. More and more companies are signing up to Facebook, Twitter, Linkedin and more to market their products.

Today I’ll be focusing on Twitter. To gain targeted followers on Twitter, make sure you try to follow these steps. Please remember, however, that it takes time and you wont have a million followers overnight.

Re-Tweet – If you like something someone has said, re-tweet it. Every time someone re-tweets something I’ve said, I say thank you to them. All my followers then see me thanking the person who re-tweeted me. If the person has a high following, you might get a few more followers out of it.

Link to good content – If you find a good blog post or article, link to it from your site. If the author has a Twitter account, let them know. People love being promoted, so they could end up following you and returning the favour.

Contribute to conversation – Find a couple of authority tweeters in the industry and join in the conversation. Make sure you contribute well and hopefully you’ll spark up a friendship with them. This can lead to links, blog posts and an increase in followers.

Ask to be added to lists – There are a lot of lists on Twitter, usually created to distinguish between different niches. If you spot a list that you think you should be included in, ask the person who created the list to add you in. They can only say yes or no!

Answer a question – Twitter is for personal use as well as commercial use. Make a search for keywords in your industry and see if anybody has asked a related question. They’ll thank you for it and you’ll come across as knowledgeable in the industry. Win all round!

Recommend someone – If someone’s done a job for you, tweet about it. They’ll be more than happy about the recommendation and might offer you something in exchange.

Put an ‘add this’ button on your website – So many sites have a Twitter presence, but don’t tell people about it on their site. This is a sure fire way to add followers, as they’re already on your site.

Use #hashtags – People search for hashtags all the time. If you write a tweet about engineering, use #engineering at the end of it. If you’re making good content, chances are you’ll get noticed.

One thing you shouldn’t do is just go adding every Tom, Dick and Harry to your follow list in hope that they follow you back. There is no point in having hundreds of followers if they’re not industry specific. If you follow thee steps then you’ll soon start to see an improvement in your following.

How not to increase followers – If you spend all your time spamming and self promoting (unless you’re a celebrity or very well known to your industry, people will soon get tired of you and block you. With everything on the internet, The Twitter experience has been made a little bit more difficult by spammers.

Ways of spotting a spammer:

• Lots of tweets with links but no conversations.

• No photograph

• Photograph of a beautiful lady (not all profiles with photos of a beautiful lady are spammers, but if they feature any of the above two ways, be wary.

• Following thousands of people but not that many followers

Please follow these tips and don’t become a spammer. It can be very annoying and as soon as I suspect that someone is spamming, I remove them completely.