These are some tactics that I use to cultivate a targeted twitter following. I welcome your thoughts and feedback and urge you to add your own techniques in the comments!

1) Having your twitter username reflect what you’re about is key.

• You can change your twitter username in settings. However this may confuse your followers who will then see a different name. I changed my username early on and It didn’t have much of an effect if any on my followers, but this step is not without risks so you have to make your own judgment call here.

2) Make sure your Bio reflects what you tweet about.

3) Upload a background photo to your twitter profile that reflects what you tweet.

4) I try to tweet as on-topic as I can.

• This is just a preference of mine, I try and limit the number of “eating a turkey sandwich and enjoying the sun” type tweets but that’s just me.

My motto is follow to be followed, I don’t care about my twitter ratio because I use twitter to network and keep my ear to the street. I would rather follow tons of people who are in the same industry in order to share ideas with as many industry professionals as possible. I use twitter for 2-way communication.

5) Follow those that follow you; use socialtoo and/or tweetlater to automatically follow your followers.

6) Follow the super stars in your industry; I use wefollow to find the superstars.

• Most will not follow you back but you will learn allot.

7) Unfollow those that unfollow you. (socialtoo/tweetlater)

• Except the superstars (totally up to you)

8.) Follow those that are interested in the same topic(s), I use monitter to search for those who mention things I’m interested in as well.

9) Follow the superstar’s followers

• This is key, if someone is following a superstar in your industry they are most likely interested in the same things as you and are more likely to follow you back.

More and more tweeps are following those that follow them, this is the base of the “follow to be followed” technique. I also see that when I follow someone interested in the same industry as myself they tend to follow back.

When you find a superstar in your industry (before you start following their followers)

10) Click on those that you follow; and start unfollowing those that do not follow you back.

• You can’t DM those that don’t follow you back so just remove those that Don’t say “Direct message”

• You can do this automatically with socialtoo, you can even give it parameters like “unfollow those that don’t follow me back after ____days.

11) click the superstars twitter profile. Read their latest tweets to get a feel for what they are all about.

12) Then tweet something that you feel will resonate with their tweeple. If the superstar tweets about international business then find an interesting article from the economist and tweet about it. This way when you start following their followers, the first tweet they will see from you will be on-point and this will increase the chances of them following you right back.

13) If you are a blogger; blog about the topic of interest, then tweet about it before you start following the superstars followers. This way the first tweet they will see from you will send them to your blog about a subject that they are interested in.

Add your own tactics in the comments, I would like this to be a free flowing list of ways to use twitter.

If you don’t want to do all of the manual tasks there are some tools that can help here is one called tweetsbot