Grow Your Twitter Following

Whatever your social networking goals are, the following tactics will not only increase the number of people following you, but you will begin to experience that old fashioned thing called "community":

1. Habituate your twittering. If Twitter is your water cooler, then drink 8 glasses a day as consistently as possible. I generally let it slide on the weekends, but during the week you can find me tweeting fairly regularly. People will start to expect to see you there. That's a good thing because this encourages more interaction with your community.

2. Engage your followers with meaningful tweets. It's kind of Facebook-y, but Twitterers like getting replies, and they arguably check for them often throughout the day. Just don't be the office chatterbox who has an answer for everything. So annoying. Helpful, witty, or informative is good. Giving people hives is bad.

3. Personable is more important than profound. Much like water cooler chat, the point is to be a conversationalist who knows when to make small talk, when to shut up, and when to speak up. It's okay to tweet about your personal life, but don't bore people with the inane unless it is going to inform or entertain. And be careful with the latter. No one likes a clown after the party ends.

4. Ask people to follow you at your Twitter URL. This one might seem obvious, but most people still aren't doing it. I admit, it was lost on me until about a month ago. Then I added the follow me request, hyperlinked to my Twitter profile, to (1) my email signature and (2) the byline under my blog posts. Next up is to change my byline for the articles I have plastered around the web.

5. Market your microblog on other social networking sites. Put your Twitter URL on your Website.

Like anything else in online marketing though, consistency is everything.