If you are using twitter to promote any product, whether its a business, your blog, or maybe yourself, you need to be thinking about how to generate followers targeted to your niche. Now you have two options, the free option and the paid option. I started with the free option and then moved to the paid option. Below I will give you thorough instructions on how to generate a mass twitter following for free, and quick simple instructions on how to pay for it.

The Free Way

You know what they, say you’ve got to spend money to make money. Not always true, and to prove it, here’s the free way to grow your twitter following.

People Follow Back

Based on my experience about 10-30% of people will follow you back either automatically or by choice. The more valuable your tweets are to them the more likely they will follow you back. All you need to do is find people who may be interested in what you tweet about, but how do you know who to follow?

Follow Based On Keywords

Following users based on what they say will help you target a specific niche. Simply find people who are talking about what you are sharing valuable information about.

Search.Twitter.com

Using this website you can see what people are saying in real time and search the results. Basically you can search keywords that are relevant to your niche and follow those with tweets that are interesting. This is a great way to follow targeted people, but you need to have a lot of spare time, and be willing to get carpal tunnel. Check out how to cut through the spam in twitter search.

Twollow.com

Twollow will automatically follow users based on keywords. All you need to do is set up a few keywords and it will automatically follow users for you while you focus on more important things. The only problem is it’ll only follow about 50-100 users a day. At a follow back rate of 20% it would take more than 2 years to get 10,000 followers. You need something else.

Follow Based On Followers

Following based on followers is another way to get targeted followers. If you are a golf instructor chances are people that follow other golf instructors on twitter will be interested in you too (and you’ll be interested in them). You can either find people on twellow.com or wefollow.com then manually follow each of their followers or use..

FlashTweet.com

With Flash Tweet you can enter a certain user and automatically follow their followers. Simple enter your twitter details and flashtweet will log you in and give you the option to search a users followers. Once you have completed the search you will see a list of about 100 users, simple select all and follow. Rinse and repeat until you have followed your daily limit.

Flashtweet also gives you the option to search by keywords. This is a new feature and can be used when you start to feel the carpal tunnel creeping in after a few hours on twitter.search.com.

Follow Based On Profile

Following users based on their profile can be a good way of connecting with tweeters who feel strongly about a certain topic. Our bio generally contains the stuff we are really interested in. This is the most painstaking process but may just produce the best results.

Twellow.com And Wefollow.com

These sites let you type in search terms based on users profiles and categories. If you are targeting golfers simply search that variable and a list of names will come up. Choose the ones you like and follow away. Twellow is the easier option as it lets you sign in to the site and follow with just one click, while Wefollow looks nicer it just redirects you to their twitter page, making it two clicks to follow each tweeter.

Auto Unfollow

Once you start following a few users you will notice two things. 1, not every one follows you back. 2, twitter limits your following to followers ratio. This means you need to cull the people you have followed who aren’t following you back before you can follow more users.

Twitter Karma

To unfollow those who haven’t followed you back yet simply log into Twitter Karma every few days and show only those your following, then check all and bulk unfollow and it does the rest for you. A fairly simple process but when you need to repeat it every few days it does get quite tiresome.

Auto Follow Back

Its good etiquette to follow back tweeters who follow you. However due to the increasing amount of spam following everyone back has its problems. So you can either go through your new followers list every few days and choose the people you want to follow or you can auto followback and then unfollow people who make a mess of your twitter stream or DMs. I recommend the later and to do it I use..

Tweet Later

Sign up to Tweet Later, register your twitter account (you can have as many as you want) and then check the auto follow box and it does the rest. There are dozens of other services that will automatically follow back for your, but the reason I use Tweet Later is that it gives you many other options such as Auto Unfollow, Auto Dm’s, track keywords and that’s just the free version. Check it out at tweetlater.com.

This will get you there… eventually. Think about how long it takes when you have just one account, now try with 2 or 3! So when crippling wrist cramp just isn’t an option check out…

The $55 Way

For those who actually have other things they want to do, there is a way to build a twitter following of over 10,000 without really doing any work, but obviously you ain’t going to get it free. But if you can earn money with time spent elsewhere then its a no brainer. Buy some software and set it on auto then watch as your twitter following increases daily.

Tweet Adder

I have tried a few paid tools to grow my twitter following but Tweet Adder has to be the best. It has so many more options than it’s competitors, and runs without a glitch every time. Once you set the parameters it builds a list and targets these people automatically.

It will also schedule tweets and send bulk DM’s for you. It runs on Mac or PC and in my opinion is the only way to go when growing your twitter following.

For more information and to get your Free Demo checkout www.tweetadder.com

To get the most out of Tweet Adder or another auto follower software such as Twitter Snipe and others, check out how to cut through twitter spam and get targeted results in twitter search. It will help with getting a really well targeted list of followers.

All the best!