3 Proven Practices to Build Your Twitter Reputation, Grow Followers and Get Retweets

Twitter can be a daunting platform for the beginner. I know that the first thing you want to do is build your audience size and you'd like to get people to follow you. This can be accomplished (it can't be done overnight - sorry) and in this post I give you simple tools to build a great reputation and a stellar community.

Follow people and make connections

Start first with selecting keywords that describe your interests and your business. Then use them to find people to follow. When you find interesting people, follow them and pursue an alliance.

• Search for people on directories by topic at Tweetfind, and Followerwonk where you can search Twitter bios for keywords. Enter your favorite topics and find others in WeFollow. Twitter search is also a good tool. I'd use each tool.
• Look for Hashtags (the # symbol used to mark keywords or topics in a Tweet) on Twitter that relate to your business. You can also click on a hashtag that you see on Twitter (or a trending topic) to see who is talking about it. 
• Find twitter lists from influencers. You'll find people who have hundreds, thousands (in some cases hundreds of thousands) of followers. To organize large amounts of people, pros curate Twitter Lists (which can be private or public). To find people in a specific niche, go to a profile page and click the down arrow next to the word More. You will find a link for public lists that the user has created (and has subscribed to) as well as lists on which other people have listed them. This is a great resource to find like-minded Twitter members. For example, Margie Clayman (Director of Marketing at Clayman & Associates in Ohio) has a list of her Top 100 on Twitter. I have a short one on eBay sellers.
• Embrace #FollowFriday. On Fridays you will see hashtagged Tweets with #FF or #FollowFriday. Click on the names in the Tweet and read the person's bio, if you like what you see, you've found somebody new to follow. Be sure to say hello too.

Once you follow someone? Don't immediately Tweet or send them a Direct message requesting a favor or to follow you elsewhere. Get to know them first. Start a conversation! Most importantly, don't un-follow them because they don't follow you back immediately. Follower churning tells everyone that you're not interested in engagement and that you're just trying to build numbers.

We’re Pleased to Announce: The Most Influential in Customer Service from MindTouch

The Customer Service community is a vibrant gathering of people focused on driving forward-thinking, customer-centric conversations in business today. These community members are dedicated to recognizing excellence in customer support and service, and pushing forward new ideas and ways to not only deliver excellent customer service, but also measure its impact both in traditional and social business terms.

Engaging and exceptional customer service is something that MindTouch is deeply committed to, not only via our awesome service team, but through our products as well.  Over the last couple of years, we’ve drawn from these leaders to inform on our product strategy, and it clearly shows, given the amazing response to our social knowledge base by our customers and peers.

With that type of influence and thought leadership, we thought it was suitable to frame our next “Most Influentials” list on this very important group. 

What does it mean to be influential?

To us, it’s not just about how many followers you have on Twitter (one-dimensional) but your strength and influence you have in all corners of the Internet (multi-dimensional). For example, how passionate your followers are about the topics you share (do they re-post, share, comment?), how well you leverage new technology, your ideas and best practices that push the envelope and how you drive conversation to benefit the industry as a whole.

With that in mind, we compiled our rankings from a variety of multi-dimensional metrics to measure influence. Our formula consisted of a weighted average across a range of metrics including Alexa, Twitter, Klout, PeerIndex, socialmention (passion and strength), Twitalyzer and HowSociable. In addition to calculating out the Most Influentials using our own special algorithm, we asked for YOUR votes to name the Top 5 Most Influential in a recent poll. The outcome were astounding. With over 1,000 votes – we took the wisdom of the crowd and applied those results to our final list. Thank you to all those who voted and contributed to our final ranking!

The following infograph illustrates how much influence the individual has in relation to the other thought leaders. We published a few of the scores we considered for this ranking; Twitter followers, Klout and PeerIndex. These thought leaders were first scored for influence then compared to one another to create the top 25 ranking.

And the results…drum roll please…

Congratulations to all those included on the list! You have proven that honest-to-goodness passion and smarts can lead to thought-leadership and influence within the customer service space. Thank you for influencing people and businesses, alike.

Follow the top 25 on Twitter with one click

Honorable mentions

Jeffrey J Kingman, Mark Fodor, Shaun Belding, Jeanne Bliss, Lynn Hunsaker, Gary Sherman, Janet Jozefak, Pratibha Rai, Aaron Silvers

via mindtouch.com

I'm posting this as a tribute to everyone on this list. You do great work and the time for online customer service is just beginning!