Improve your Twitter experience and rank in 3 easy steps

At the time of writing we follow less than 100 Twitter accounts, yet we have well over 1,500 followers and rank in the Top 10 on TwitterGrader in our region. We use Twitter for a variety of purposes and our experience of it is excellent. So, how do you get the same ratio of followers and enjoy a similar experience?

Find out your Twitter Rank

First things first. You need to know how well you are rated on Twitter at present. This is not a scientifically accurate way of knowing what people think of you. Instead, it is a gauge of your number of followers, numbers of people you follow and your frequency of posting - coupled with a variety of other factors such as how many of your tweets have been retweeted.

It is important because it gives you a starting point and something to track. So, go to TwitterGrader, type in your Twitter account name and see what it tells you. It will give you a grade (a percentage) and you can then click on the region or regions it associates with you to see how you rank in your immediate locality.

Remember it. You need to keep revisiting TwitterGrader in future to see what progress you are making.

Start dropping Twitter accounts you do not want

This has a collosal impact. Firstly, nearly everyone on Twitter who has not gone through this process will discover they are following an awful lot of accounts that are dormant. You know the kind, they joined Twitter and left after a short while.

These people impact your rank. Secondly, you will find a lot of people you follow do not actually contribute a great deal. They might post once or twice a month. If you never read what they say or find it unimportant or of no value - now is the time to get rid of them.

Finally, if you have accumulated hundreds, thousands or more Twitter accounts that you follow - how many of them do you actually even get to see? This is generally the biggest cause of people losing interest in Twitter. If you have too many accounts to follow you end up with a mass of onscreen tweets and end up missing the ones from the people that might be of value to you. It is time to be cruel to be kind (to yourself!)

Luckily, help is at hand in the form of Twitter Karma. This rather uninspiring in look website analyses everyone who you follow and allows you to sort them.

You can see who you follow that does not follow you back - and if they are of no interest to you, you can unfollow them from Twitter Karma. You can also see people who have not posted recently - and make sure you unfollow those accounts too.

In a nutshell, use Twitter Karma to go through your accounts and unfollow anyone of no interest. Work on reducing your list of followers to a number you can manage and to those who you know you want to read. Get rid of anyone else. The Twitter etiquette rule of following those who follow you does not work towards a better overall experience. You see less of value, might miss important tweets, business opportunities and at the same time your Twitter rank is impacted.

Spend time over a few days dropping accounts. Then, revisit TwitterGrader and see what a dramatic impact this will have had on your status. In most cases the resulting rank change is significant.

Use StumbleUpon to attract a more varied source of followers

You should always try to generate as much unique content for tweeting as possible. Yes, we know you want people to come to your website - but you have to be more open to the audience. So, posting tweets of content that you may never have otherwise found is of great value. It brings you a whole new audience.

Use StumbleUpon to generate such content. When you find something of interest to you, or that you feel may be of interest to a wider audience - tweet it. You will be amazed how many followers you will pick up in a mere 15 minutes of posting stumbled tweets.

Make sure you tag those tweets appropriately though. Use hashtags (#news, #design, #funny, #pr etc) to try to get the tweets seen by the audience you would ideally like to attract. Whilst these are of excellent use throughout Twitter, they are invaluable when used with stumbled tweets.

Watch what happens

Now, revisit TwitterGrader. You will need to make sure you run these little housekeeping tasks once in a while of course, otherwise you end up back in the same position you started.

Just make sure you keep following us!