In this post Twitter enthusiast Garin Kilpatrick shares his tips on effective ways to get more followers.

It is hard to put a price on a Twitter follower but the host of The Price is Right, Drew Carey, is offering to donate $1 to cancer research for every new follower he receives this year. The following eight tips will enable you to make the most out of your tweets and help you connect with as many followers as possible.

1. Save your best tweets for the best time

Tweet your best stuff out during peak times, and you will maximize your retweet potential. The perfect time for retweets is right after lunch. Between 1 p.m. and 4 p.m. is when I usually get the most retweets. Fast Company recently published a post called Nine Scientifically Proven Ways to Get Retweeted which is where the retweet graphs below are from.

You need to consider, of course, the time zone your followers are in. The better you can make yourself aware of the timezone your followers are in, the better you can target your best tweets for maximum exposure.

2. Build retweeting relationships

With retweets it is often true that you get what you give. Whenever someone retweets something I post, for example, I try to scan their stream for something good to retweet in my stream. Many people miss out on retweets from me if they have a purely conversational stream. I have found that good quotes retweet quite well so I would recommend throwing one of those into your stream every 10-20 tweets. Juicy content like this blog post is also perfect for retweeting.

3. Follow reciprocators

Twitterholic allows you to quickly find the most followed people on Twitter. The top 1000 most followed people on Twitter are listed and you can see which people are reciprocators. A reciprocator is someone who will probably follow you back because they have about as many followers as they have people following them. Twitter Counter is another website that counts and ranks people on Twitter and they also offer widgets that will display the current number of people who follow you.

4. Automate tedious processes

Social Oomph offers several tools that allow you to tweet more efficiently. These free services range from scheduled tweeting (the site used to be called TweetLater.com), to the ability to automatically unfollow anyone who unfollows you, and the ability to automatically follow anyone who follows you. Saving time here will give you more time to spend finding cool people and building meaningful connections.

5. Build links to your Twitter page

The more links you have, the greater your potential to find new followers. Even a few simple links on other social profiles you already have will convert to several new Twitter connections over time. Facebook offers a “contact info” field specifically for links in the information section where you can put a link to your Twitter account, blog, and other sites on the web you might have. An app I use for Facebook is Web Profiles and I also developed a custom Facebook twitter badge including a button that links to my Twitter account.

6. Cross promote your networks

My most-commented-on Facebook wall post was when I simply asked who is on Twitter and what their username is.

7. Separate content from communication

Open up another Twitter account if it is relevant to do so. Working as a community manager for Eduify I have been able to build followers much faster by using two complementary accounts, @eduify, and @eduifyQuotes, as well as a third support node for discussion and replies, @askeduify. By having @askeduify I can reply to everyone who sends a message to @eduify without polluting that stream with replies that are only relevant to a few people. This strategy of separating content from conversation has worked for me and recently @GuyKawasaki (and @guysreplies) adopted this strategy as well. Having two accounts also doubles your daily follow limit so that you can push your growth even harder, if you want to do that.

8. Take advantage of #FollowFriday

Reward the people who retweet you the most by suggesting others follow them on Friday. Retweets are one of the best ways to find new followers and FollowFriday is my best method of building retweeting relationships.

If you take the advice from these eight tips there is no doubt in my mind that they will help you grow your following on Twitter, and you do not have to stop here. There are plenty of Twitter tips and apps that will help you learn about Twitter and how to tweet more effectively. A great place to start is the free Mashable Twitter Guide Book. Another cool site is TwiTip.com, which was started by Darren Rowse of Problogger fame.

Keep reading, keep sharing, and keep tweeting! (And make sure to follow @pingdom on Twitter.)

About the author:
Garin Kilpatrick is a community manager for the writing website for students, eduify.com. Check out his personal blog at Gar1n.com.

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