Up until about two months ago I was what my colleague, Mohammad Rafiq, would call a "social media ghost." I made a Twitter account to begin properly promoting my personal blog because, let’s face it, I was struggling with page views. I began to realize that just posting links to my blog updates wasn’t enough to gain the followers I wanted when I began a trend of losing, like, ten followers overnight! I kid you not. There have been times when I worked hard for weeks to gain just four measly followers only to lose ten in a matter of just 24 hours. As a college girl, who’s just trying to make a name for her brand by becoming influential in the world of journalism, this is extremely discouraging. It makes you wonder if the work you’re putting into self-promotion will even pay off.

I then turned to the best thing you could possibly turn to when you have questions about the internet: the internet. The internet is plentiful with articles on how to gain more Twitter followers, yet the majority of them provide the same set of guidelines for building your popularity. You should be posting at least three times a day. I wasn’t even on Twitter that much – in fact, there were some days when I didn’t visit Twitter at all! This little tidbit certainly surprised me and made me wonder if my phone would suddenly have to be glued to my hands.

Next, you must be wary of the most opportune times to make meaningful Twitter posts. The best times for posting are said to be before nine in the morning and after six in the evening. If I don’t have class early in the morning, I am likely sleeping until ten in the morning. So if I have a fantastic blog post or article that I want to promote I have to be up and ready to post before everyone goes to work instead of enjoying a well-deserved slumber. Yay.

I also learned that your posts aren’t just about you. You should try to find other relevant links to tweet. This gives you something interesting to post, especially if you don’t have anything worth mentioning to say for yourself. I hadn’t realized I was being so selfish.

You’re probably reading this and thinking, “so what’s the big deal? This doesn’t sound like too much work to me.” Properly engage and attract a ton of people in 140 characters or less and then get back to me. Maybe I’ll seek apprenticeship under you. And I’m sure I’m going to get a few readers who roll their eyes at the points I make, but let me tell you this: If you don’t use Twitter or you’ve never even attempted to promote something important to you through social media, don’t you dare say that Twitter is easy.

Some may say that it doesn't cost anyone anything to just follow someone on Twitter – just one click and boom, you're now following some random face. As we humans constantly prove, boredom comes naturally to us. Twitter users don't want their feeds filled to the brink with boring posts they have no interest in reading. Lack of engagement is the perfect equation for an instant "Unfollow." And sometimes posts need to be tailored a little to suit the desires of the target audience. Honestly, the best way to figure this out is probably (a lot of) trial and error. That means more effort and dedication on your part!

In just the last few days, I’ve been giving my tweets a lot more attention. Twitter success is also about finding the right balance between marketing your brand and letting your followers in on parts of your real life. They want to know that there is a living, breathing person behind the account that posts links to some blog all day. At the same time, your tweets shouldn’t be as mundane as updating every hour of your day. This is probably worse than not updating at all.

Another strategy I’ve been implementing is including company handles in my tweets. This lets you expose a company to your followers, and it exposes you a little to a company or organization. They can retweet you to their audience so you’ll gain a little more exposure. I did this with Starbucks and was extremely excited to see that they retweeted me and other users favorited the tweet! For someone who pretty much sucks at Twitter, like I do, this is basically like a Christmas gift.

I can definitely say that my efforts thus far have not been in vain. I have been gaining a few more followers daily, which is a great source of encouragement to continue to go forward with building a Twitter presence.

To those of you who feel that users snap their fingers and get 100 followers, I hope you now see that there’s way (way) more strategy involved than commonly believed. And to those of you who have built a strong Twitter presence from the ground up, I congratulate you because a feat such as this is absolutely, positively, not easy.