Twitter is, without a doubt, one of the biggest and most viral social media sites on the internet today.
It's scope and the possible impact it can have on a network marketing campaign are simply mindboggling.
Yet, many network marketers spend hours and hours on Twitter trying to build a following, only to find that they are not achieving the desired results.
So, how exactly do you build a Twitter following?

1. Find experts in your field and follow their followers.
   Add at least three pages worth of their followers to your list of people you are following.
   Do this once a day for the first week or so.
   
2. Use the site FriendorFollow, to help simplify the process of unfollowing people who do not follow you.
   Do this every day.
   You need to make sure the number of people you follow does not exceed the number of people following you by more than 10%, otherwise you will not be allowed to add any more people for a while.
   
3. Get into a routine of picking three people from your followers list everyday, and follow their followers (at least three pages of each)
4. Use SocialOomph to automate your welcome message to new followers, and to follow them back automatically.
   This is the ONLY part of the process I recommend automating.
   
5. Review your Direct Messages and Mentions (#RT, #FF, etc.
   ) every day.
   Reply only to those DMs you find genuine and interesting.
   Do not reply to those that are sales pitches or obvious automated messages.
   DO reply to ALL mentions.
   The easiest way I have found of doing this is using TweetDeck or Hummingbird.
   
6. Post valuable content.
   If you Tweet things that provide real value, people will start RTing (ReTweeting) and mentioning you, which will prompt some of their followers to follow you.
   Do not use more than 20% of your posts as sales pitches.
   People will be turned off if you abuse the pitches and the promotions.
   
7. Make it a habit.
   Follow this procedure every day.
   Once you get comfortable with all the tools, and establish a rhythm, it should not take you more than one hour a day to do all of this.
   Just have fun with it.
   

How exactly do you build a Twitter following? Well, I have given you some tools and steps you can follow to do just that.
But I need to give you two friendly reminders before we part ways here.
First, be clear on the fact that this is a marathon, not a sprint.
You must take the time to build momentum, if you go too fast, you will collapse.
Second, approach Twitter not as a marketer, but a person.
Go there to build relationships and provide value.
Everything else, including sales, will follow if you establish and build trust and credibility.
What's next? Simple.
Go get to it!