Not all of the small businesses I meet in the course of my Las Vegas based social media consultancy have a Twitter account. Many of those that do have set it up, linked the posts to Facebook, and done little else. Maybe some are Tweeting, but they are not sure how to gain new followers and get their message out there to their audience. To be effective on Twitter, you need to attract an audience of followers who find your tweets interesting, and even better, share it with their followers. Here are tips to make that happen:
Focus
Many personal Twitter accounts tweet about their general daily life and opinions, but that is not the way to run a business account. Choose your specific topic, and stick to it. Tweet about your business, your industry and the complimentary industries and news stories.
Consistency
Concentrate your tweets on your specific topic. If someone has started to follow you based on your previous tweets and bio, they want to see your content stay stable.
Be interesting
Make engaging comments and share great links, so that people want to share your tweets with their followers.
Be Tweetable
If you have a blog, or other online media content, include buttons for social sharing. Try to keep posts short and sweet, to keep them accessible.
Keywords
Follow others who are in your industry and use the same language as they do. If people are searching Twitter for certain words and terms you want them to be able to find you tweets.
Hashtags
Find out how your community is defining words and phrases using the Twitter hashtags, and use them too. You can get involved in lots of Twitter conversations that way.
Discuss
This is a social network. Just as you would not stand in a room at a party and shout out things about yourself, don’t do that here, respond to others, ask and answer questions.
Participate
Join in on Twitter chats, you can share your ideas and maybe even learn something.
Follow Back
Check those who follow you and retweet you, they probably have interests that are in line with yours. Thank them for retweets and follow them back.
Retweet
Once you have found those people who are both interesting and complimentary to your topic, retweet their stimulating tweets, your followers may want to read them too.
I would love to hear from other who have suggestions on how to build a Twitter following.
FreeSocial online marketing and social media coach 
Great article! Another tactic to use is to @mention other accounts that are in your niche with a large following. You have to know the right time to @mention, though – do it at a time when the content you are providing in the tweet will be sincerely helpful to that niche or market. That’s when you have the best chance of getting a RT out of it. Also, if you find a tweet that you really love with content that you think your following will enjoy, go one step further than just RT that tweet. Instead, @mention the user with a little quip about how awesome their tweet was with a link to the content found in that tweet. That can really help build a relationship and is more easily recognizable by the other user than a RT, which they may not notice right away. Overall, great post and I look forward to reading more!
-Hannah, BizBrag Team