Cheesy sounding title aside, this is something a lot of folks who are on Twitter would want to know.

In the morning, I posted a few tweets on this topic.

I felt there’s a bit more to unpack here so following it up with a blog post.

Before we jump on the tips and tricks, let me share what all I look at before deciding to follow someone or not. While I might have a different approach, I believe most other users of Twitter would be following a similar approach.

Step 1: Visit person’s profile and give a cursory glance. Since Twitter profile (unlike Facebook) has limited fields, it makes the job easy for me to get a quick sense. 

{ Hi Mahesh, if you are seeing this. You are famous 🙂 }

Quickly listing parameters (in order of importance to me) and tagging them into two categories user parameter (customisable) and system parameter (un-constomisable)

1. Name – User Parameter
2. Display Picture – User Parameter
3. Twitter Handle – User Parameter
4. Description – User Parameter
5. Background Image – User Parameter
6. URL – User Parameter
7. Follower Count – System Parameter
8. Joining Month – System Parameter
9. Followed By – System Parameter
10. Tweet Count – User Parameter

If this quick glance is satisfactory, I check out the person’s Tweets. To find out more about what kind of tweets does this person make, are they just tweets, RTs or replies to other people. This is a bit of a subjective one. What might be interesting for one might be boring to another (say politics).

So to get more people to follow you on Twitter two things need to happen

1. More people should check out your profile (though one can directly follow also, but I don’t think non-bots do that much)
2. Get more people who check your profile to click the follow button

Here are some quick tips for both

Getting More people to check your profile

1. Tweet regularly and try to keep the tweets interesting (a mix of your thoughts, good stuff you found on internet etc). 5-10 tweets a day is good.
2. Interact with other people and their tweets often (Talk to people, RT and Like good tweets you find). 5-10 replies and interactions a day is good.

Getting more people to click the follow button.

Tweak all the user parameters:

1. Name – Use your full name (nothing more, nothing less)
2. Display Picture – Have a clear picture of yourself
3. Twitter Handle – Keep a sensible handle (unless your sense of humour is through the roof)
4. Description – Share a bit about yourself (so folks can relate to you)
5. Background Image – Not that important really but don’t screw it up by putting a lame background image. 

Tried to keep this post short and useful at the same time. If you try this, do let me know how it works out.