So you’re new to Twitter, or you’re new to creating a Twitter account for your business.  So who do you follow?  Who do you want to follow you?

These are some of the questions I have been thinking about lately.  Since starting my business back in August my Twitter following has gradually grown, I think on average around 2 – 4 new followers per day.  It doesn’t sound much, but compared to when I was just using Twitter for personal tweets it was a lot less.

Who to follow?

For me in particular I tend to follow people who have interesting things to say.  Some I follow because I am interested in the subject, such as books, food and France.  But as Twitter is where I promote my Virtual Assistant business I need to follow people relevant to my business.  So on top of the general subjects I’m interested in I also follow other virtual assistants, bloggers (and social media) and authors.  I am gradually increasing the categories I follow to gain access to potential clients.

When you reach a certain point and you start to increase your following you can easily scroll through your recent follower additions and choose whether to follow these back.  I generally ask myself a couple of questions and look at certain things before following back.

• Do they have an interesting bio?
• Do they have a website I can look at?
• Are they real?
• Is the picture relevant to their bio?
• Do they tweet regularly?
• Do the tweets interest me?
• Are they posting spam?
• Will they benefit my business?

Once I have answered these questions I then decide whether to follow back or not.  Sometimes I like to go away and think about it some more and come back a couple of days later to see what they have posted and decide whether it’s relevant to me.

Your followers?

In terms of followers, what you’re looking for will depend on what your Twitter account is used for.  If you’re a business like me you’d hope that your followers will eventually turn into clients, whether that’s directly or through referrals.  The way you can ensure getting the right followers is posting the right tweets.  Aim them at your niche, tell them what you offer, explain how you can help them.   I think one of the most important things when tweeting is to be personable and be a real person.

I follow some really great bloggers; some of them tweet about every day things along with links to their blogs.  Others just bombard you with tweet after tweet of blog post after blog post without anything in between.  This is fine if you have a good following and don’t seem to be losing followers, but for someone just starting out you need to be careful not to scare people off by tweeting too many links and try and come across as someone they’d like to get to know.

Twitter has evolved a lot since it first started out, many people are using it to promote their businesses, their books etc… it can be quite overwhelming, especially for the new user.  If you follow my suggestions above and ask yourself these questions, you’ll grow a following of useful contacts who have some great things to say and pick up tips to help you with your goals.