The more people who follow you on Twitter, the more influence and networking opportunities you have. Thus, it makes sense to try and build a following. Here are some best practices on getting others to follow you:

1. Follow them: There’s an almost automatic reaction to follow people who follow you. However, there’s a backlash against people who follow just about everyone for the sole purpose of gaining followers. In short, be discriminating with whom you follow.

2. Post some good tweets right before following someone else: Help people to decide to follow you by posting some good, informative tweets. This will help them to see you provide valuable information through your Tweets and tweet regularly.

3. Complete your bio: People rarely follow strangers, so complete your one-line bio and include your IC Site URL in the More Info URL section of your profile. People want to know who they will be following before they actually follow them so providing them this information upfront will help.

4. Add your Twitter feed to your blog or to other social media profiles: If you have a following at your blog or a lot of connections at Facebook or LinkedIn, you can leverage this audience to increase your followers at Twitter.

5. Reply to people you are following, especially if they’re not yet following you: That’s a good way to engage someone and get them to follow you, even if they didn’t follow you immediately. Remember, though, some people have thousands of followers, and may not be able to respond to every reply.