Twitter is indeed a powerful social networking tool. I love it. I enjoy it. Many businesses and marketers have already discovered how powerful Twitter is for finding and engaging their audience. The fact that it’s free, relatively low on advertisements, and has such immediacy makes it a tool for everyone, from news organizations to celebrities, to yes, authors.

But then new Twitter users don’t understand how to grow that following they want and they start Googling “how to get more Twitter followers” or they fall for shit like this:

EVIL

Let me make something crystal clear here… I will never, ever follow back someone who uses the Team Follow Back hashtag. It’s stupid and every time, that person annoys me and I end up unfollowing anyway.

The one thing that I think that people don’t understand is that it’s not how many followers you have on Twitter, but how many RELEVANT followers you have. I could have 20,000 followers tomorrow, but what fun is that if none of them care about what I’m sharing?

More engaged followers are far better than a bunch that don’t care.

So there are lots of ways to do that. We’re going to talk about them.

Find Relevant people

Yes, this means you follow people like you. As an author, you might need to follow writers that write similar to you or have similar subject matter in their books. Or you might go through their follow list and find out who they deem worthy of following. Either way, you need to find people who are going to care about what you have to say.

Start with a fully filled out profile before you ever follow one person.

Most people will check out your profile to make sure you’re not a spammer or bot. This is your first impression. Why wreck it by not presenting yourself in the most positive light you can?

What does this mean? It means you need a profile photo of your face or business logo. Authors, this means your book cover is not appreciated. I have had nightmares of bodies with bookcovers for heads coming after me. It’s not pleasant. Please don’t add to it.

Also, you’re a writer. You need a bio. You’ve got 160 characters to play with so let people know how awesome you are.

Balance your tweets: find the ratio

I’m going to give you guys a very simple equation.

Total Tweets = OC*40% + MT*40% + RTs*20%.

OC = original content
MT = mentions
RT = Retweets

What does that mean? It means forty percent of your tweets should be interaction with other people, replying to their tweets and having conversations. Original content is also forty percent. This may be links that you enjoyed reading, your own blog posts, or general miscellaneous things as you go through your day. After all, Twitter was made to be mobile. Finally, RTs shouldn’t be more than 20% of your stream. This includes Triberr tweets as well, for those on Triberr. You don’t want to annoy the audience you’re building.

Interact and engage the audience

I don’t know about you guys, but I give people three chances to talk to me. I will @reply them on different occasions, usually in response to something they said. And if they don’t answer any of them, I’m unfollowing. If I don’t talk to you at all? I’m unfollowing.

And remember, they don’t ahve to follow you in order to interact with you. I’ve found most people on Twitter will talk to you if you send them a message. You could jump into one of their conversations with relevant comments or RT one of their links. When you participate in these conversations, it gets your name out in front of NEW people.

Twitter chats are also a good way to meet new people. Anyone can host a chat by using a hashtag (#).

Promote your Twitter account in other ways

As always, people need to know you’re on Twitter. So include links to Twitter on your other social networks. There are services that will help to sync up your content, but use this sparingly. If you sync it all up, people are getting the same material on every network. So why should they follow you in all those places. One place would do just fine.

What do you think?

As I work on building my own audience, I have to wonder if any of this makes sense to people other than me? What kinds of things have you used to build your own relevant Twitter audience? Talk to me about being social!