Perhaps you jumped on the Twitter bandwagon months ago hoping to ride the wave of popularity and prosperity and have found yourself beached, battered and broke.

For all of its acclaim, is Twitter helping your build your business? Are you making any money with your Twitter account(s)?

For most marketers the answer is no. Unfortunately, the Twitter phenomenon flooded the market with countless rehashed guides, software of other resources that in the end just didn’t measure up.

Like most trends, the marketing of Twitter by so-called experts lined their coffers but left most people in the lurch, no better off than before they started with regards to using Twitter as a real money making tool.

Like most ‘social’ media, the effectiveness of Twitter is based on interacting with people. While automation tools can help to get your message delivered quickly and consistently, they cannot build relationships. Forging relationships my friends is something that is totally dependent on human involvement.

What’s your experience been with Twitter and do you see it as a viable part of your overall business plan?

I’m interested in what you think, so leave me comment.

So we’re talking about Twitter, which is a micro-blogging service that has seen exponential growth in the last few months. Twitter has been in the news media more and more in recent times which has exploded the ranks of its users.

So in this article I’m going to talk a little bit about how to get people to follow you. What sorts of the things should you Twitter about that will get people to follow you and more importantly, what are some things you should not Twitter about that’ll most likely keep people from following you.

There are lots of different schools of thought as far as how to get people to follow you, this is what I believe:

1. Don’t spam: what I mean by this is don’t just send out offers to join your list, or send out offers for special products, and tweets that are only related to your business. Let me rephrase that, unless you’re Dell, Southwest Airlines, JetBlue, or some other business that is on Twitter, don’t only send out messages related to your business. Most people don’t care. Most people will care about you and what you are doing rather than what your company is doing unless you happen to be one of the above mentioned companies, or you happen to have or happen to be Twittering under a company account.
2. Be engaging: like I mentioned people want to follow people not companies. What the above companies are doing on Twitter is that they are engaging their followers. I’m telling you here to be engaging. These companies are going to where the users or customers are and then engaging their customers where their customers are at. Don’t just be a marketing robot. Yes, Twitter can be a marketing tool. Having said that, I feel that you should not only use Twitter for marketing.
3. Be entertaining: say something fun, refer people to a fun website it can be your own website by the way, the more funny you are the more people will follow you. Of course there’s always an exception to the rule, however, most people want to have a good time on Twitter so if you’re always recommending things that are fun, or interesting you’ll get a a lot of followers.

I should mention, that you should not look at your number of followers as a scorecard. It doesn’t matter if you have 10,000 followers, 50 followers or 10 followers. You should try to interact with everyone on your list at least once or twice. And if you have too many followers to always engage with then only engage the people that you find interesting.

These are just some general tips for what to do in order to get people to follow you.