Brent McLean is an Account Director at AlterSeekers, Inc.

As with any social media strategy, attracting a successful Twitter following starts with a clear, definitive plan. Spend the time to create realistic and measurable goals, then decide what kind of followers you want to attract. Study their behavior, how do they interact in Twitter? Learn to speak to your target audience in their language. How frequent are their tweets? Make sure that your Twitter strategy is flexible enough to be able to learn to interact with your followers on their terms.

Make Your Twitter Presence Known

Use your existing online and offline presence to promote and leverage your Twitter strategy. Put links to your Twitter account everywhere, not just in the virtual world, but in the physical world as well. Emails, print media, web pages, email signatures, other social media accounts, anywhere you can find a place, add a link. Make sure to completely fill the details of your profile; people are a lot more likely to follow someone if they can ‘get to know’ them.

Have Something to Say and Say it Frequently

Tweet often, and make sure to leave enough time for your Twitter followers to react. Use a conversational tone and don’t hesitate to ask questions, because that is the fastest way to start an interactive dialogue with your Twitter followers. Sharing valuable information should be at the core of your Twitter strategy. If your content is good, people will retweet (repost your tweet) to their followers. Nobody is going to retweet meaningless drivel or spam, so make sure that your tweets are entertaining, education, and above all relevant. The more compelling, entertaining, and interesting your Twitter content is, the more retweets you will enjoy.

Use Hashtags to Find Relevant Conversations

Hashtags are used to group content and aid in keyword searches on a particular Twitter topic. Search for hashtag conversations that are occurring that are relevant to your business and jump right in on the dialogue. In the Twitter dialogues you initiate, use hashtags (#keyword) for your target keywords.

Track and Measure Your Results

As with any social media strategy, be sure to measure and track your Twitter results against your goals. Applications such as Twitter Counter will track your daily follower adds, and Qwitter can track how many people ‘unfollow’ you. If you are not adding Twitter followers on a daily basis and rapidly increasing your numbers as quickly as you had expected, it is time to re-evaluate your Twitter strategy and make some adjustments.