Twitter can take up a bunch of your time, you need to spend time to cultivate relationships and publish and re-publish some really great content whether it’s your own or someone else’s. And it isn’t only about the number of clicks to your site from Twitter users, but how many influencers in your industry follow you and how many ReTweets and favorites you get on your posts. Growing this “engagement” number could get you out in front of the people who you want talking about you.

So how do you get yourself out in front of the people you want to notice you? Here are three easy things you can do right now to give yourself a start so you can measure Twitter success by quality Twitter followers:

1. Follow people who write about your industry, use BuzzSumo for this and search on “influencers.” Follow them, put them on a Twitter list and monitor what they say by creating a stream in Hootsuite. Follow them from your company handle as well as your personal handle.

2. ReTweet and Favorite some awesome content from your industry influencers, they have a ton of followers and they probably publish regularly. If they see you’re genuinely interested in what they are posting they may start to follow you which is exactly what you want.

3. With all of the amazing automation out there you still need to show that you’re breathing. Publicly thank people for RTing your posts (not a DM) and give them a shout out for following you. This shows that you take some time in actually reading what people are doing on Twitter (every now and then:-) and that you’re not only fire-hosing information at them.

Eventually all of this hard work should turn into word of mouth about your business, more clicks to your site and more business.