Twitter is a great source of free traffic for any business. It is gradually emerging as the preferred medium of online marketing and communication. Therefore, for a business to widen its reach, it is crucial to have a large number of people following you. If you have more Twitter followers than your competitors, it provides a decisive advantage to your business. While the volume of followers is important, it is equally important to consider the quality of your followers.

Making spammers and irregular users follow you on is of no use. In fact, it can land you in trouble more often than not. If you have a substantial following of like-minded users, it helps increase traffic to your web pages and affiliate links without having to spend any money. In this post, I list the five most effective ways to boost your Twitter following by finding targeted users.

1) Use Twitter Search – This is one of the first few features that were offered by Twitter when it was launched. Till date, it continues to be amongst the most effective means to find targeted followers.

All you need to do is type in the keywords associated with your business and you can find all users who are tweeting those keywords. The major pitfall of this approach is that it’s fairly time consuming.

2) Encourage your Followers to retweet – Retweeting is a great way of pushing your @username to people who are not yet associated with you on Twitter. Tweet interesting messages and ask your followers to retweet them. This allows you to reach out to followers of your followers, so on and so forth.

This not only popularizes your tweets, it also helps bring more people to your Twitter profile and then to your business website.

3) Impressive Twitter Profile – I’ve seen many businesses never fill out their bio/ profile information on Twitter. In Tweetosphere, this is an absolute sin. Make sure that you have an impressive profile with a good design and appealing content. Your tweets do not reach people who are not your followers so the only way to impress such users is via your Twitter profile.

Further, your profile is also displayed on Twitter’s Suggested Users page. A blank or boring profile would hardly attract any followers. Make it interesting. Add a dose of interesting information or a touch of humor.

4) Advertise Your Twitter Profile everywhere – Link up your Twitter profile to your accounts on other social networks like Facebook, Myspace and LinkedIn. Put it in your email signature. Advertise your profile for every online presence that you have. If you have a blog, make sure to tweet about each post.

Aggressively promoting your profile is a great way to bring in more traffic to your Twitter page. Further, promote your profile in real world. Get your Twitter id on to your business cards, presentations and podcasts.

5) Use Twitter Follow services – There are numerous free and paid services which can boost your Twitter following. Since Twitter itself is free, I’m not a big advocate of using paid services unless you have lots of spare money. I particularly like Buzzom, Tweet Guru, Twitter Perch and Tweepi out of all Mass Twitter Follower services.

Further, use a counter service similar to TwitterCounter which lets you know how many new users you are adding each day.

To increase your Twitter followers is a crucial aspect of increasing your business’s footprint online. And always remember – Twitter just doesn’t create followers; it creates relationships and future customers.