**Timothy Fox is an SEO and social media consultant.  Contact him on twitter you @sogeshirts. He also sells  Great T- shirts at www.sogeshirts.com including shirts for bloggers.

I am honored and glad that Tim Soge of  www.SogeShirts.com accepted my request to write a guest post sharing Tips to Build a Twitter Following.  I love Twitter and have met the most amazing people and contacts on it.  And I get a lot of requests from other bloggers, Etsy shop owners and small business owners asking how I have gotten my 4300+ followers.  I love helping but am small compared to others.  Tim is an ally I know from other business sites and one of those rare breed that are always available to help.   I respect and appreciate all of his advice and am glad I get to share it with you!   He knows Twitter well and is a better help than I.  Please read, implement and share this article and enjoy watching as your Twitter following grows!**

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Have you ever wanted to grow your twitter following but find it to be a very tedious process or just really difficult?  Well today I am going to share with you some tips to grow an engaged twitter following that is a bit more fun and will get you more followers.

Hashtag fun

One thing to do to build a twitter following is to join in on some hashtag fun. If you are a blogger on twitter on a friday night you might want to use the #wineparty tag and follow everyone using it. If you talk to some people, have a glass of wine (optional) and use the tag from 9 pm eastern till whenever it ends you are bound to get more twitter followers. Everyone there is really nice. Of course this is not the only tag you can follow. There are many other twitter groups that use hashtags. You just got to find them and jump right in. They are usually all quite friendly. For instance if you are a dad you might want to get to know the #dadstalking hashtag group. Don’t worry that means dads talking not dad stalking haha. Also other hashtag groups like #usguys are also cool. Participate in hashtags and you can get to know some awesome people and get more followers/ have more fun. Nothing like getting more followers while enjoying wine or having a good time talking to people.

Participate in other social sites

Another way to grow your twitter following is to go onto other social sites like Tumblr or Pinterest. On Pinterest you can follow lots of people and those people usually display their twitter handles on their Pinterest profile. If you follow them on Pinterest and Twitter you have a great chance of getting followed back. If i see that someone is making an effort to follow me on multiple social sites I am definitely going to follow them back because it shows they want to get to know you and are savvy enough to use other social sites.

Tweepi.com

A great way to get more followers is to use the free site Tweepi.com All you have to do is login via twitter and it allows you to manage your twitter account completely. You can unfollow 20 people on a page at one time of those not following you back. Do this by checking the box next to their name and everyone else’s name that you want to unfollow by clicking the unfollow button at the top or bottom of the page. Tweepi also makes it easy to follow new people. If you have someone that you know on Twitter that has great folllowers or follows great people you can just go to the top of the tweepi.com screen where it says Follow Tweeps, and target a users followers or a users friends.

I like searching for a users friends because that means that they both follow each other. All you have to do is put in the @ name of the person’s twitter friends you want to see. If you want to see mine for instance just put in @sogeshirts. You will then get a list of people that I follow who also follow me. Once again the friends will be laid out twenty at a time. You can even see when someone has tweeted last. For me I like to follow people that tweet recently so if I see they have tweeted within a day or two I will follow them. You can add followers in bulk as well by again checking all those on the page that you wish to follow and hitting the follow button at the top or bottom of the screen.

How to increase engagement on twitter

Now between the hashtags, other social sites, and Tweepi you should have found some cool people to follow and some should be following you back. Let’s get to know these people so that they are engaged followers. When someone follows you back why not thank them. Check out their bio and if they have a site, visit it first. If you thank them for the follow and comment on something you like about their site or bio you are going to make new friends fast.

To keep track of all your new followers you might want to add them to a new friends list. If you have lots of new friends organize them by new friends 1, new friends 2. Once you list your friends you can add that list to a column on tweetdeck/hootsuite or twitter.com and keep track of their tweets easily. If you retweet a post of theirs or a funny tweet they might do the same thing for you.

Feel free to ask me any questions about how to build a twitter following by commenting on the article here or tweeting me @sogeshirts!