So you want to increase your following? Great! There are a lot of tools out there that can build you a following quickly, but as business professionals we are more concerned about the quality of our followers, as opposed to the quantity.

Many of these “follow back” or “bulk follow” services can help you win a popularity contest, however, they won’t provide followers from a targeted demographic. In fact, following masses of people makes Twitter very cluttered and hard to use.

At the same time, Twitter has a give-and-take mentality. To gain followers, you must follow people (unless you’re Ashton Kutcher). If somebody follows you and you don’t reciprocate they will likely unfollow you. It is very time consuming to go through all your followers one... at... a... time... to follow them back.

The Tools:
There are a couple free tools that can help you out with each of these dilemmas. To acquire targeted followers, I recommend Twollow. Twollow will auto-follow individuals who use keywords or hashtags. The free service will auto follow up to 15 people per keyword (there is a 5 keyword limit on the free version) every 8 hours. The premium service, which is very affordable, will auto add every hour with a 20 keyword limit.

Other services, like Monitter, TweetLater, and TweetGrid can find you quality individuals as well. Check out the Hashtag post to learn more about them.

Reciprocation is very difficult to do manually. This can easily be automated by Twitter Karma and InRev TwitIn. Both of these services give you a bulk reciprocation (follow back those who follow you) feature to easily manage your Twitter account. Also, you can mass unfollow those who are not following you back. Yes, the “I won’t follow you if you don’t follow me” mentality does seem rather petty, but it's the game we have to play. Both these tools can keep your masses happy.

Please comment with your targeted automation and reciprocation strategies and tools!

Yes, 140 characters does seem like a very limited amount of information to broadcast. Instead of trying to say your piece in a tweet, you can easily link to a webpage or blog that you created or one that shares similar thoughts. Thanks to URL shortening tools, this has become very easy.

Tweeting links is a very popular practice and are often clicked by your followers. If you are reading this blog, chances are you may have found the link on Twitter!

Shortened URLs provide a great opportunity to create and distribute helpful information to others who have similar interests.

Rule: Don’t only link to your own content. To establish trust, find other valuable websites or blogs and distribute those links as well.

The Example:
In this blog, I insert links which redirect to other sites. Twitter does not provide a insert link feature so using a URL shortening tool like tinyurl.com (which is embedded in several Twitter clients) is a great alternative.

“Here are some great tips on becoming a better Twittizen, according to Janet Fouts! http://janetfouts.com/twitter-manners-how-to-write-good-tweets-be-good-twittizen/”

...is not tweetable (too many characters).

“Here are some great tips on becoming a better Twittizen, according to Janet Fouts! http://tinyurl.com/c77xvu”

...32 characters to spare.

Ok. Now I don’t feel so limited by the 140 character cap. But how do I know if people are even reading my tweets or clicking on my links?

The Tools:
A very valid concern. The amount of followers you have does not necessarily equate to the amount of people interested in what you have to say. This is where analytics come into play.

My preferred  URL shortening service is bit.ly because it has build-in, real-time analytics. Once you have linked your Twitter account to the bit.ly service you can track how many clicks your link has received, when your link was clicked, and the geographic location of those who are clicking your link.

Here is another tip. Tweet the link multiple times. No, I don’t mean in immediate succession! Tweet the link in the morning and in the evening. Tweet the link on different days. You can then use the analytics tool to see when your followers are most responsive to your tweets.

Using links and analytics in unison is a great business tool giving you the ability to campaign with more than 140 characters and a way to get instantaneous feedback.

Please comment with your linking and analytic strategies and tools!

Twitter is growing, and growing fast. If you currently use the service you have experienced this first hand. A year ago popular “Tweeps” may have had a few hundred followers. Today, many users are crossing the hundred thousand threshold and a few have achieved the million follower mark.

Businesses have begun the migration as well by creating customer service accounts and marketing accounts. Even executives are tweetin’ away!

The deeper you dive into the Twitterverse the more difficult it is to manage. Twitter is a powerful business tool, but has very limited features. But don’t worry. There are a plethora of FREE tools that can manage your Twitter account and exponentially extend the reach of your Twitter campaigns.

I’ve compiled a list of features, apps, tools, and strategies to use in conjunction in order to get your message out to targeted individuals.

Hashtag, Trends, and Tools

The Feature:
If you use Twitter, you’ve seen #’s. This is called a ‘hashtag’. The hashtag is a way for people to arrange their tweets into searchable categories. To create a hashtag, all you need to do is type #whateveryouwant.

Rule: No spaces, punctuation, or special characters permitted.

The Example:
Let’s say I’m watching Lost and decide to tweet about it. I could write the following:

OMG! I can’t believe Juliet set off the bomb! #lost

This gives other Lost fans, who are roaming Twitter, the ability to find my tweet regardless if they are following me. This is a great way to find people who have similar interests. If enough people tweet using the same hashtag it becomes a trend.

http://search.twitter.com is Twitter’s search tool that searches hashtags and shows current popular trends.

So... how do businesses use this? The real benefit for businesses is that hashtags are aggregated into ‘trends’. As a professional, create a hashtag regarding your company, your product, or your industry and place it at the end of your tweet. This is a powerful way to monitor what people are saying about you, your product, or industry.

As you consistently use these hashtags at the end of each of your tweets, it will eventually develop into a trend. This process is compounded as others re-tweet your messages and adopt your hashtag.

An alternative approach is find a popular trend related to your industry and start incorporating it into your tweets. Immediately, your messages will be placed at the forefront of those following that trend.

The Tools:
“Ok. I’m using hashtags now, but there are several other hashtags and trends that I’d like to follow. Using http://search.twitter.com only allows me to use to view them one at a time. Any way of monitoring multiple hashtags?”

I’m glad you asked! Monitter provides columns to monitor 3 hashtags in real time. This free sitealso provides a filter by location. This is a great way to find new people who are specific to your industry or area. Follow them, send them a reply, or check out what they have to say.

Three isn’t enough? TweetGrid is a site that allows you to track up to 9 hashtags in real time.

As somebody who works in the CRM, SCRM, and Sales 2.0 industry I follow #crm, #scrm, and #sales20 on these services.

TweetLater is another great tool that compiles a list of all the twitter-ers who used certain terms or hashtags that are important to your business. It then e-mails them to you to sort through at your convenience. This is a easy way to find desired contacts at your leisure.

Of course there are a myriad of other tools that can assist you in monitoring trends, but this is enough to get started. If you are interested in other hashtag tools, check out Mashable's list of 15 trend tracking sites.

Please comment with your hashtag strategies and tools!

Companies have continually found ways to promote their product as the populous adopted print, radio, television, and the internet. Now, with a huge migration into social networks, the challenge for most businesses is to design successful social media campaigns.

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