This article is guest posted by Dee Barizo.

One of the reasons many people join Twitter is to converse with other people in their industry to learn more about their niche. You may have seen bloggers who wrote about asking a question on Twitter and then getting many responses.

So, you join Twitter, follow a bunch of people, and then start asking questions. However, no one replies to you.

That’s what happened to me. I followed many people in my niche and most of them followed me back. However, no one would reply to my questions.

I then realized that I had to do more to build a responsive Twitter network. Here are the things that worked for me.

1. Answer questions.

Instead of just waiting for people to answer my questions, I started answering the questions of my followers. Because I became helpful, many of my followers now respond to my tweets.

2. Retweet liberally.

As I followed my network, I realized that they had a lot of interesting things to say and interesting links to pass along. I retweeted those tweets and some of them thanked me for it. A couple of them have become regular responders to my tweets.

Retweeting is like linking out in blogging. It improves your reputation, helps others notice you, and provides value to the community. Do it a lot.

3. Contact people directly.

Instead of asking a question to nobody in particular, I tried asking my question to specific people. This worked well as the response rate went way up.

Also, some of my followers were bloggers. I found their contact info from their blog and contacted them. For example, I emailed a blogger to see if he would do an interview with me. I also told him about my Twitter account and that I enjoyed his tweets. Today he responds regularly to my tweets.

4. Be interesting.

I raised the quality of my tweets. Instead of just tweeting the first thing on my mind, I asked myself first if it was interesting. Also, I started following the best blogs in my niche with an RSS reader and I tweeted the interesting content on those blogs.

As a result of being more interesting, many people followed me without me following them. I actually now have more followers than people I’m following. This increase of followers has given me a bigger audience, which led to more responses to my tweets.

Dee Barizo helps run the twitter search answer tool, TwitQA.com.

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