Over the past several years, social media has evolved from a convenient way to stay in touch with your friends and loved ones to a powerful tool for promoting business or creative endeavors -- or simply yourself. Whatever your purpose for using social media, one of the key factors tied to your success using sites such as Facebook and Twitter is the number of other users who follow messages you post. Increase the number of your followers to maximize the impact of social media.
Instructions
1. Post relevant, fresh, entertaining content on a regular basis. Over time, no other aspect of your social media presence attracts and retains devoted followers than the quality of the information you share on your network.
2. Follow other users whose content is relevant to yours to forge mutually beneficial electronic relationships. For example, if you're a fashion blogger, find other fashion bloggers on Twitter and follow them. In many instances, users who notice you have similar interests and goals to them will "Follow" you back.
3. Use multiple social networks to promote yourself -- and encourage those who follow you on one network to follow you on others. For instance, if you promote your self-made jewelry using a Facebook "Fan Page," make a post encouraging your fans to follow you on Twitter and to befriend you on Flickr, where they can see high-quality photos of your items -- and the link to a page where they can purchase items.
4. Interact directly with those who already follow you. If someone "re-tweets" a post you make on Twitter, thank them for doing so on your Twitter feed -- or better, "re-tweet" something they've posted. Interacting with another user who shares your work increases the likelihood of her continuing to do so, which increases the chances of her followers following you.
5. Avoid spamming techniques, such as following huge numbers of users who may or may not be relevant to your end goal and posting excessive numbers of links. Although these techniques may initially increase your followers and traffic to your website, they will eventually alienate your followers. Additionally, social media websites sometimes limit the number of others you can follow -- Twitter's de-facto limit, for example, is 2,000 users.
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