Following your competitor's followers on Twitter

Following your competitor's followers on Twitter can be a great way to increase your brand awareness and your follower count. Statistics say that between 30% and 50% of people will follow you back out of courtesy or interest.

Twitter allows you to follow a maximum of 2,000 accounts before it starts treating any new followers added with suspicion and may deny you from adding more. This is to prevent people spamming the system.

Therefore we recommend to only follow selected followers that:

1. You believe will be interested in your products of services.
2. Are likely to follow you back. (Check how many people they are already following in total. If the number is equal to or greater than their followers then they are more likely to follow you back).
3. Have a large amount of followers. (There is little point in following someone who only has 10 followers. If they follow you back and re-tweet your tweets only 10 other people will see this.)

How to follow your competitor's followers.

1. Log into your twitter account.
2. Go to your competitors Twitter page.
3.Displayed under their profile picture will be the number of followers they have. Click this link to be taken to their followers page.

How to follow your competitor's followers who are likely to follow back or re-tweet.

In this example we'll pretend that you own a sunglasses shop and/or e-commerce store. In order to try and attract new followers we're going to look through your competitor's tweets to find people who interact and re-tweet (these people are more likely to help spread awareness of your brand, product or services).

The tweet in the example below is a competition, asking followers to re-tweet to enter. We can be fairly confident that if we set up a similar competition on our own Twitter page and then follower your competitors follower's they will be more likely to (a) Follow back and (b) Retweet to enter you competition.

Step  1
Locate the tweet and click the expand link.

Step 2
Look for a high number of re-tweets. In this example it's 723. Click on the re-tweets.

Step 3
Scroll through the list of people who have re-tweeted. Only follow people who have a lot of followers.

If you want to check the person's profile before following just click on their name (or right click to open in a new tab). Before you follow them make sure you have similar content that they will be interested in (a current competition would be perfect in this example)...