Beef Up that Twitter Bio to Get More Followers

If you are using Twitter to connect with and engage your constituents, you're not alone. The popular micro-messaging service has become an inexpensive, valuable, and effective way to reach an audience, and can really help communicate and personalize your message. Of course, this is an opt-in service, so to develop it into an effective channel you must attract followers to your Twitter profile.

Sharing your Twitter account via your website, blogs, newsletters, and other electronic content is a great way to get started. The network effect will get you additional followers, as people retweet your updates or find you in the follower lists of other Twitter users. You also want to make sure your background, avatar, and color scheme reinforce your organization's brand. And then there's the Bio field - the one place in your profile where you can add text that tells the world who you are. Having a great Bio full of related keywords is one of the best ways to draw in potential followers. 

With this in mind, I took a look at my organization's Bio field. Back when I setup our Twitter account, I had used our simple tagline in the Bio field: "Living green. Here." Clearly that is very non-descriptive, and devoid of any keywords that might interest people. So back on February 2, I changed it to read: "Go Green Charleston is a local guide to sustainable living. Environmental news, education, and events." I immediately began to see an increase in new followers, and it hasn't slowed down. @GreenCharleston had 373 followers on February 2, and only 18 days later we have almost doubled that. In the chart below, generated at TwitterCounter.com, you can see the follower growth rate of @GreenCharleston compared to my personal account @ChadNorman. Can you see where I changed our Bio field?

While this has helped more individuals find us, most of the new followers are organizations and businesses with similar missions. Adding these types of followers may or may not help you get the word out, but it can't hurt if your mission has a wide appeal - or if you want to have conversations and listen to a diverse audience. Measuring engagement is important when determining the success of your social media strategy, so having similar organizations retweeting or replying to your Twitter updates is a positive outcome. So be sure to mind your Bio feild when setting up your profile, as it can clearly make an impact on how sticky your Twitter account is to potential followers.