Did you know that the average Twitter account has just 208 followers?

If you want to do better than average (who doesn’t?), then the tips in this article will be invaluable for you. They will show you how to easily and consistently grow your follower base.

Warning! Before we get started, let me caution you about taking up the endless marketing offers of purchasing thousands of Twitter followers for just a few dollars. Please don’t do this. There are an estimated 23 million Twitter accounts that are actually bots. It’s likely that instead of purchasing genuine followers – you’ll be purchasing bots! Worse than this, do you really want to give your payment details to some fly-by-night organisation?

Now for the good news… There are plenty of ways to attract high-quality followers without any financial expenditure on your part.

Let’s take a look.

1. Follow other accounts that share similar interests to yours.

You don’t want followers for the sake of followers, you want people who will enjoy and share your content.

The simplest way to achieve this, is to select several Twitter accounts that are similar to yours – but which have substantially more followers. The next step is to follow as many people as possible from these accounts within the daily Twitter limits. Typically, this will allow you to follow approximately 150 new people per day.

You can expect at least 25% of the people you follow, to follow you back.

The secret to this technique is to keep doing it regularly. Daily is best, but weekly or monthly is okay too.

You should see your follower numbers tick up nicely by following this method. Just remember to unfollow any accounts that haven’t followed you back after a week or so.

2. Retweet content from other accounts that is relevant to your account.

When you’re tying to grow your follower base, it’s important that you’re not just sharing your own content. You need to be frequently retweeting other accounts content too. Just make sure that it’s strong content, that is relevant to your account and followers.

With my own Twitter accounts, I follow a rough guideline:

For every three tweets  promoting my content, I try to retweet at least one other person’s content.

By retweeting content from other people, you’ll be surprised at how it benefits your own account – and helps to attract the right type of followers.

3. Tweet regularly.

This tip may seem obvious, but have you noticed how many Twitter accounts hardly ever tweet content? It’s a lot, for sure.

Accounts that infrequently tweet, are like cars that are left in driveways for months at a time – they seize up and fail to start! In other words, these are dead accounts.

If your goal is to significantly expand your Twitter follower base, then you MUST be an active member of the Twitter society. It’s not hard to tweet at least daily, and preferably several times a day. Just ensure that your tweets are valuable, interesting and shareable.

4.  Promote your Twitter account via your blog or website.

If your Twitter account is linked to a blog or website, then you have a fantastic opportunity to attract new Twitter followers.

Firstly, you need to make sure that a Twitter ‘Follow Me’ icon is prominent on your site. It should be easy to find from all pages.

Secondly, you might want to add a Twitter feed to your site. This would allow visitors to your site to see your latest tweets. If your tweets are interesting, then you’ll definitely gain new followers through this route.

5. Be social.

Social media should be social.

In the Twitterverse, this means interacting with other users through likes, retweets and direct messaging.

You can be creative with this step, as you can connect with friends, thought-leaders and even celebrities. (Can you believe that Katy Perry has over 94 million followers?!)

While you may not get replies from everyone, direct messaging can be especially powerful. Ask the right questions, and not only will you receive some great replies – but you may also gain some new friends and business connections too.

The five steps above can be summarised like this… be a spirited member of a Twitter community that is interested in what you are interested in.

Be social, share and reply.

Be active, be appealing.

Be someone YOU would like to follow.