Forget Pres. Barack Obama’s Twitter account. Everybody seems want to follow him, partly because, well, he is the US President – to date, Pres. Obama has more than 1,100,000 followers.

For the rest of us, using Twitter for our small business is tricky, in a sense that we don’t have the perks Pres. Obama has (obviously!)

Although having more followers is not directly helping your business to close more sales – you need to pitch the right tweets to convert, having many followers help your business’ PR and branding, as getting your business messages across to more people is generally what businesses want in using Twitter.

For those of you who are struggling to attract more followers, take heed – I just stumbled a blog post about Twitter that analyse a random 3651 Twitter accounts and try to predict what works and don’t works in influencing more people and getting more followers.

Here are the findings that could help you and your business attract more Twitter followers:

• Having a bio is an absolute must : 82.3% of unsuccessful Twitter accounts have their biography information missing.
• You should provide more than 3 links per 20 tweets and also more than 0.960 updates per day.
• If you don’t want to provide more than 3 links per 20 tweets, then try to post more than 5.857 updates per day.
• Users that post more than 3 links per 20 tweets but post less than or equal to 0.960 updates per day, will need more than 222.5 days of usage to get an adequate amount of followers.

Although the analysis doesn’t take tweets quality and keywords selections into account, it does give you an idea or two on how to have a better chance to attract more Twitter followers.

Any Twitter for business tips to share? Please do so by commenting to this blog post :)

Ivan Widjaya
How about following me on Twitter? :)
Image by JoshSemans

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