What are the best ways to increase Twitter followers?

Twitter is actually a great prospecting tool, and these are people you should absolutely be engaging with as a brand. The key is to engage without coming off as spammy. Instead of "Buy our product now to solve your issue", try something friendly like, "Hey XYZ! We'd love to help you [solve problem]. Let us know how we can help!" or "We'd be happy to put you in touch with one of our experts on this topic. Let us know if you'd be interested in chatting." In other words, as long as you're focused on providing value over pitching your products, your responses won't come off as spammy, and you'll not only be able to get more qualified prospects from Twitter, but you'll also grow a stronger and more lovable brand presence.

It can certainly be tough to build up a substantial follower base, starting from nothing or very little, especially if you haven't launched your product yet. But here are a few tactics to help you get in front of more people pre-launch: 1) Start sharing tons of useful content. Before you bother sending people to your Twitter feed or Facebook page, you want to make sure they'll find something valuable once they get there. If you have the time, create original content that ties into your industry, your product, or your company in some way (without directly promoting yourself, though). If you don't have the bandwidth to create your own content, find other articles from bloggers you admire or experts in your industry, and share their content. Just make sure you're putting out information that's highly relevant and valuable to the audience you're trying to attract so you can engage them once they find you. 2) Create conversation. The people who aren't following you yet aren't seeing your tweets, so how do you show them value and get them to discover you? Start a conversation! At Change Collective, we're rolling out our first course on Becoming an Early Riser. So I'll do a Twitter search for "need to wake up earlier" and find a bunch of people who are tweeting about the exact problem we're setting out to solve. By favoriting their tweets or replying with -- "That's great! We think we can help - check out our newest course & let us know what you think!" -- I'm getting our product on their radar and simultaneously providing value to them. 3) Ask for help. Start with your fellow team members, and ask them to share the company's Facebook posts or retweet some of your tweets. You can even create lazy tweets for them to share. What about your board members? Advisors? VCs? They all have a stake in helping your company grow awareness and adoption, so find an easy and appropriate way for them to help by leveraging their networks. And if you have friends and family who are excited about your business and supportive of what you're doing, they probably won't mind a friendly request to help spread the news every once in a while. Hope this helps! I just joined an early-stage startup and I'm currently building up our marketing from scratch. Happy to jump on a call and offer some tips from the trenches if you'd like. Best of luck!

https://dev.twitter.com/overview/documentation Everything you'll need (or whoever your programmer is) will likely be contained in the above link. Now, to answer your questions: 1) yes there is a Twitter API that can be accessed; 2) the API for Twitter does allow users to post tweets directly from their own account in a different app. Hope that helps!

Your interpretation of Facebook's ad platform is pretty accurate and it may not be the best fit for your purposes. This may not be the answer you're looking for, but I don't feel that traditional FB and Twitter ads offer the quality or quantity of leads you are looking for. Given that you are hyper focused on location, you want to target groups / events / organizations in your area. You are targeting small business owners so you may want to target professional networks like LinkedIn. Posting into local groups or running ads should be more successful than FB and Twitter. You are targeting business minded people while they are on a business minded network. I'm sure you are targeting ad networks because they are automated and light touch. But you may want to look at listing on websites like https://www.sharedesk.net/. Lastly, there's always a good old fashioned Craigslist post! :) If you would like to talk more about your options, feel free to give me a call. Best of luck!

Personally, I think there needs to be one, anchor Twitter account, and it has to be YOU. Not the blog, not the company, but you the person. You can (and should) still tweet about the blog, the company, and the industry (because that's part of who you are), but if I don't see some authenticity, I won't follow. That's where you should build the relationships and the following. Then you can create some other, more branded twitter accounts that you use to automate dissemination of posts and other information. My two cents from a non-marketer but early Twitter adopter!