WARNING: When followed correctly and regularly, these methods will make you popular on Twitter and set you as an authority in your niche. Use them wisely.

Twitter is growing rapidly, and many people, on hopes of harnessing the most out of it, are looking for methods to increase their follower count. Unless you’re a President of a country, or an actor/musician, gaining hoards of followers can be a challenging task.

Sure you can buy followers for cheap, but do you really think that’s worth it? Honestly, 10 followers who interact with you are better than 1000 who just follow you and don’t add value to you.

In this post, I’ll be sharing a lot of methods to explode your Twitter account with genuine, legitimate followers.

If you have anything to add to the list, do tell me about it in the comments below.

1. Explain what retweeting is to your followers and encourage them to retweet your tweets. This can get you more clicks from social graphs.

2. Tweet about your passions and use #hashtags when you do. You’ll catch the attention of people who are searching for those topics. They can’t follow you if they can’t find you.

3. Fill out your bio. Nobody trusts a shadow. The more of your personality you share, the more likely people are to add you. List all your passions and your expertise. Add a nice photo of yourself. (Or if you’re ugly or shy, use one of these avatar makers).

4. Link to your twitter profile from all of your other web presences. If you’ve got a blog, a site, FaceBook, LinkedIn, tell people there to follow you on Twitter too.

5. Put your Twitter account on your business card, and mention how people can find you on Twitter whenever you go to a conference, do a podcast, a talk, interview, etc.

6. Follow top Twitter users and watch what they tweet. Pay attention to how they address their audience, and how they engage them. Don’t be shy to join in their conversations. You can model your tweets after what they tweet. At best, they may reply to you, or RT one of your tweets, giving you a little boost.

7. Reply and get involved in hashtag memes. Use the ‘trending topics’ list at search.twitter.com and jump in on conversations about those hot topics. People searching for current trending topics will find you and follow you.

8. Track your results with something like: TwitterCounter. I cannot stress how importance tracking is. You must find out the channels that are getting you more followers and cut those that require a large chunk of your effort and result only in a few followers.

9. Start a contest. You can get people following you like crazy if you offer the chance to win a prize for following you.

10. Add pictures to your tweets. Pictures get shared and retweeted a lot. For iPhone you can use Tweetie or Twitterific, both support on the go uploading.

11. Tweet when people are online. Usually the peak times are between 1pm and 2pm, local time. You can also use Tweriod to send out your tweet when most of your followers are online. You can also check out BufferApp to schedule when you want your Tweets to go out.

12. Follow other people. Lots of people simply follow back anyone who follows them. Find tweeters in your niche to follow by searching for niche-related keywords. This can be a good strategy for building up followers in you niche.

13. Do not automate too much. Too much automation can lead to accidental spam or simply annoy people with follow/unfollow requests. This may lead to a banned account. So be careful.

14. Tweet other people’s stuff. If it’s good, it deserves to be tweeted. Your followers know that you’re smart… and that other people are smart too. So spread the love and karma may come back to you.

15. Double tweet. You can tweet the same thing out at a few different times. Think about the time zones here. If you tweet at 4pm and 4am, half of the world will be awake during your first tweet and the other half will be awake during your second. (Tip: Use Every Time Zone to keep track of international time zones.)

16. Don’t tweet too much. If you tweet 200 times a day, every tweet after that first tweet just pushes it down the feed and reduces the likelihood of if being seen by any of your follows.

17. Entertain and inform. People live boring lives! Give ’em something entertaining, but informative about the subject they’re interested in and you’ll make it impossible for them to ignore you.

18. When linking out of Twitter, test out the curiosity appeal. See if your followers respond to being teased a little about what you’re linking to. Tell them a tiny bit, but don’t tell them the whole story and really hit their curiosity button.