Free Twitter Tools To Grow Your Followers

I see a lot of links posted on Twitter for software and services to help you grow your Twitter followers list, so I thought I’d give you the rundown on some free alternatives as well as some of the paid offerings.

Whether you are new to Twitter or not, many of you are probably wondering how people get so many followers to their Twitter accounts so quickly; surely they can’t be that popular? The truth is, outside of having a celebrity profile, or being a Webstar, the majority are using tools and techniques that help them grow their follower list faster and larger then would happen organically.

There are many reasons to develop a large followers list, the majority of them being gaining more exposure, allowing you to attract more people to your site, or simply earn more money through advertising. Some people may think that this makes your group of followers less authentic and to some degree it is, but it has also allowed me to meet some people and get information, products, etc that I otherwise would not have heard about. I should also say that I have only been using these techniques for about one week on this account and in that time I have more than doubled the number of followers.

Whatever the reason, if you want to grow your follower list, there are several free options available to you that will allow you to grow your list fairly quickly and relatively easily.

The one caveat to all this is that you should not become a spammer. People wont listen to what you have to say and there is also a good chance that your account could be flagged, which will kind of defeat the purpose of growing your follower numbers.

How To Get More Followers

Put simply, the basics of getting more followers is to add more people. The problem with this is that, Twitter has limits on the number of people you can follow each day and adding a couple of hundred people manually takes time, a lot of time, even more if you are looking to add people with particular interests. This is where the automatic tools come in handy.

There are tools you can buy that cover almost every feature you could want, but these range in price from $55 - $197. Luckily, there are free tools available that will give you most of the features you require.

Using Firefox

The first tool is a simple Firefox Greasemonkey script. If you don’t know what Firefox is, it is a free Web Browser that offers many more features then Internet Explorer. You can download your free copy of Firefox here. Once you have FireFox installed, download and install the Greasemnkey plugin. Once you have added this, just download the free Twitter Friend Adder.

With all this setup, you are ready to start adding friends automatically. To do this, find a big name you want to follow, to begin with preferably in the same niche you are in. For example, if you are in the tech niche, then you might go to Chris Pirillo’s profile and click on his followers (see image below). In the top left you will see a button saying “Add All Followers”. Clicking this will automatically start adding one of his followers every 2 seconds until your follower limit is reached. In theory, you are permitted to follow 1,000 people each day, but there are some constraints to this number, which you can read about in my post on Twitter Limits Explained.

Finding Followers

If you are stuck for profiles to add, just got to wefollow, where you can find a list of the top Twitter users across a range of niches.

Another tool I use to add users is a service called twittgeek, which allows you to add users based around specific keyword. You provide a list of keywords that you’re interested in and twittgeek scans profiles to find who uses those keywords in their statues and automatically follows the.

Deleting People Is Important

Remember before where I said in theory you can follow 1,000 people each day, well that would be true if each of them followed you back. Unfortunately, in reality, that rarely happens, so it is important that you delete people that don’t follow you back, otherwise you will quickly be hammering at your Twitter account limit.

The other reason you will want to delete people is because, is that your following to follower ratio is important for several reasons. If you have lot less people following you then you are following, you will not make you look very popular. Like many aspects of life, people want to associate with popular people, so it is important to keep this ratio in check.

You should automatically unfollow everyone who doesn’t follow you back, so you keep your following to follower ratio in balance. You should only do this every couple of days, as you want to give people the chance to follow you back before you delete them.

One script that allows you to automatically unfollow people is Twitter Karma. Using it, you the option to unfollow everyone not following you in one action. Once your list begins to get large it does take a while to load though. Another tip you may want to use is to unfollow those who do not tweet very often. Untweeps is the tool to use for this. The reason for unfollowing those who haven’t tweeted for a while is that the lack of tweeting means that they aren’t really active on the service and so do not really lose anyting by unfollowing them. The other advantage to this, is that if they aren’t active on the service, then there is a good chance that they wont know you have stopped following them. Untweeps allow you to set the number of days since a profile has been updated, but personally, I would choose something around the 14 - 30 day mark.

Pro Twitter Tools

As I mentioned earlier, there are paid tools that provide the functionality I have detailed in this article and much more. If you are serious about using Twitter for marketing or some other purpose, using a professional tool will greatly simplify your tasks. I will gove a full review in a later post, but in the meantime, you can check out what I feel is the best of the current tools, tweetadder.

This really is the complete tool for taking your Twitter marketing to the next level, go and check it out now.