Without followers, you can’t really be successful at Twitter marketing. You need people to hear your message and help spread it, so it’s important that you take every step you can to build up a strong base of followers and to retain the followers you acquire.
Of course, if you’ve been using Twitter for any extended period of time, you know that losing followers is just part of the deal. It’s unavoidable in some cases; in other cases, you can avoid losing followers by correcting some mistakes you’re making.
The first step to improving your follower retention rate on Twitter is to understand some of the reasons people unfollow you in the first place. With that in mind, here’s a list of the common reasons people unfollow others on Twitter:
- You aren’t meeting their expectations—When someone follows you, they do so with a certain expectation of what type of content you’re going to be Tweeting. If you don’t meet their expectations, they may stop following you because they’re not interested in what you’re Tweeting about. Now, that’s not necessarily a bad thing. You won’t appeal to everyone, and that’s okay. However, it’s important that you do your best to make it clear from the get-go what you’ll be Tweeting about so that followers have the right expectations. You can do this by filling out your profile information with details about who you are, what you do, and what you Tweet about. You can also send a welcome message to new followers letting them know who you are and what you Tweet about.
- You’re too aggressive in your marketing—Yes, Twitter can be a great marketing tool. It can help you reach new customers, increase brand awareness, drive traffic, and even make sales. However, no one gets on Twitter because they want to be advertised to. They get on Twitter to have real interactions with real people. So, you can’t take the traditional advertising approach when using Twitter. Rather than constantly blasting out promotional messages, you need to focus on building relationships and providing your followers with useful information.
- You Tweet too often—Twitter moves fast, and there’s nothing wrong with being very active on Twitter. Staying active in the conversation is a good thing. However, you have to be careful that you’re not clogging your followers’ feeds with several Tweets per minute. Try to avoid being a binge-Tweeter; instead, do your best to space out your Tweets a little bit so that you’re not the only person showing up in your followers’ feeds.
- You don’t Tweet enough—Worse than Tweeting too often is not Tweeting enough. See, Twitter (and all social networks) are about building relationships, and regular communication is the key to building relationships. So, how can you build relationships on Twitter if you never Tweet? Make sure you Tweet on a regular basis to build familiarity with your followers so that they don’t unfollow you.
- You don’t interact with your followers—Sending out blanket Tweets to all your followers all the time isn’t a formula for success. You need to take the time to interact with individual followers to build personal relationships with them. That means replying to people’s Tweets, ReTweeting other Tweets you find interesting, asking your followers questions, etc. Whenever you interact with your followers on a one-on-one basis, you build deep relationships with them, making it much harder for them to decide to unfollow you when they do some spring cleaning on their follow list.
- You’re losing bot followers—Losing followers isn’t always bad. Twitter is filled with a lot of bot accounts. So, you’ll get followed by these bots, but eventually, the accounts get shut down for being spambots and you lose them as followers. There’s nothing wrong with losing low quality followers like this because they aren’t real people anyway.
I recommend that you keep track of your unfollows on Twitter. There are plenty of free services out there that you can sign up for that will send you an email anytime someone unfollows you. Some of these services include:
Do you track your unfollows on Twitter? What are some other reasons you believe that people unfollow you? Share your thoughts by commenting below.