How to get more followers on twitter - doing it

This afternoon I am going to spend an hour or so working on our twitter account to promote several events we have coming up and thought I would track the process here, share the results with you and show what I am up to.

So the starting stats are to the right and as you can see we have 894 followers as I start and are following 1143 people

The time is 16:04 on a Wednesday afternoon and lets see what we can achieve in the next few minutes!

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The first thing I did was to un-follow all of the people that weren't following us to keep our proportions between followers and following low.

I used http://tweepi.com/ to do this; which makes it easy to un-follow people.  This took me a total of 14 minutes.

My objective for this session is to increase followers from Reading University and to drive registrations for our next Pop-Up Business School which will be at the uni from the 10th - 14th of June.

With this in mind I have altered our bio to reflect who I am looking for.  I added the line

"Coming to Reading University 10th - 14th June"

to the end of our bio.

After removing people that weren't following us and changing our bio I found
@HenleyBSchool and
@UniofReading who I preceded to work down their lists of followers and follow and message as many people as I could.

I looked for something in their bio to help start conversation and sent them  @messages.

The next bit took the time

I spent a total of two hours following the people from the above accounts and messaging them.

Not many people replied.  I did start a few conversations but you have to speak to a lot of people to get them to talk back!

We reduced our following down to 648

Step1. un-follow all the people who weren't following us; except a few interesting ones!
Step 2. change your bio to reflect who you are targeting
Step 3. choose several accounts that have the followers you are after
Step 4. Follow all their followers
Step 5. ask them questions, strike up conversation and get things started

So what did we achieve?

We invested about three hours of work, and then nothing more than the normal tweeting we would do anyway. We achieved:

• 52 increased followers
• An offer to go on Reading University Student Radio (we were targeting students after all)
• An offer to write and article for the student magazine

Not bad for a few hours work.  The point of this blog post is to inspire you to get on and DO IT.  Get on twitter, play with your bio. start posting, messaging and following people and have fun.  If you do that who knows where it will take you!

Have fun and make sure you follow us here:

Follow @popUPbusiness

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