Many people are understandably keen to increase their Twitter followers, and while having an engaged community of followers – no matter the size – is often more beneficial than having thousands of uninterested followers, there are some tips and tricks you can employ to give yourself a boost:

• It sounds silly, but keep going – generally the more active you are the more followers you gain
• Make sure you’re using #tags and @handles as often as possible to draw people in
• Retweet and share interesting content from others regularly
• Use Followerwonk to analyse your followers and find industry influencers to follow and engage with
• Use a dashboard like HootSuite to schedule your tweets in advance so you can maintain constant and set-up search streams following keywords, phrases, lists of people you’re interested in
• Find Twitter chats to join to raise your profile within the community you’re interested in
• Make sure that you’ve optimised your Twitter bio with the keywords you think your potential new followers will be searching for
• Use Twitter’s Favourite button to like what other people have shared and highlight that you’re interested in them
• Don’t be afraid to show your personality – some of the most interesting people on Twitter share a mix of professional and personal updates
• Be social – thank people for retweeting or mentioning you, say hi to interesting new followers, and share other people’s content

Beware of any company offering to sell you new followers – these are highly unlikely to ever be of real value to you. And you could be paying for fakes.