Growing Your Twitter Audience From Scratch
The internet is full of social media guides from well know Twitter influencers who have gazillions of followers. For sure when you are on the top of social media chain it’s easy to give advice, but how to actually get the initial audience? I’m not a superstar, but in the last month I doubled my followers, and my overall statistics looks amazing! I have a bit more than 1000 followers at the moment, but my audience is very targeted and active. Everything in this article is battle tested by myself and proven to work.
1. Choose your niche
Do not try to follow everyone. If you came here to grow your personal or business brand, your goal is not to have a lot of followers, but have a very targeted audience. In my case, this is people interested in Golang, Open-Source, and Bootstraping.
2. Copy followers from influencers
This is so far one of the best tricks which worked for me. Find the influencers in your niche, and simply follow their followers. Just visit the profile and click on the “followers” count, to get a list of people. I personally use CrowdFire for this, because its UI optimized for such workflow.
3. Follow people with small followers count
If a person has 500 or even 200 followers, chances to following you back are way higher, then if he had 5000. As a bonus, such followers are way more active, and actually “read” your tweets.
4. Watch for your follower/following balance
Do not be too aggressive in following and unfollowing people. It is actually kind of forbidden by Twitter guidelines, and they may ban you for some time. It happened to me once, and I had to wait for a few days once things get to normal. There is gray zone if you stay within limits: the bigger followers you have, the large limits are. If you have three times more following than followers, or you followed 1000 people and unfollowed another 1000 in the same day, it will look supercilious both to Twitter algorithms and your potential followers. Try to keep equal ratio, and do not follow too many people in a single day. Distribute your activity across the day.
5. Do not overuse third-party Twitter apps
As mentioned before, Twitter use automatic algorithms to detect fraud and unusual activity. When you are trying to grow in a very quick manner, your actions may look supercilious to Twitter, especially if you “tempted” by various apps which promise you “quick follower growth”, and “full automation”. Using such automation indeed ruins the Twitter experience, and such activity quite easy to detect. If you decided to try CrowdFire or similar, do not forget to use official “Web” and “Mobile” Twitter apps at the same time to look like a “human”.
6. Unfollow inactive or not following you back users
If you go by path of “copying” followers from various sources, you need to ensure that your follower/following balance is healthy. There are plenty of apps allowing you to find such users, you can easily find them in Google. If you want to keep reading some of them, in most apps there is whitelisting functionality.
7. Be interesting, real person
You may say it is obvious, but If you have nothing to say, better not to post at all. Do not turn your timeline to the list of quotes from famous people. Wait till you have inspiration and better schedule multiple tweets when you are ready. Watch for the influencers, know what is in the trend.
8. Growth happens outside Twitter
Twitter is just a distribution platform: to make value out of it you need to craft your own content. You need to blog, talk with influencers, try to be involved into podcasts. Use alternative channels like a mailing lists or, in my case Github projects to find potential twitter leads and improve your social proof.
9. Use twitter mobile app or mobile web interface
Mobile interfaces are much more user-friendly and allow you to perform most of the actions much faster, for example, copying followers or following people, who interacted with your tweets. To access Twitter mobile interface from the desktop, just replace “twitter.com” with “mobile.twitter.com”. For example, compare my followers in default UI (which have multiple columns and card based) and mobile (which is just a list).
10. Twitter search is your friend
Search for your blog domain name, product name or just by terms related to you or your business. Most of such users already pre-warmed and follow you back with a high chance, especially if you add some replies and favorites.
11. Retweet with quotes
Twitter allows you to add your own quote while retweeting someone. Do not forget that you are here to promote yourself, and in the case of quoting your followers will see both original tweet and your quote, increasing your social proof. Most of the content in your timeline should be produced by you.
12. Use mute instead of unfollow
Once you started growth hacking your Twitter, you should care only about growth and be serving your audience. If you do not want to read someone, and he follows you, just “Mute” him instead of blocking or unfollowing.
13. Reply to influencers
When I investigated my Twitter analytic dashboard I found that top viewed tweet was actually reply to one of the “very” popular tweets. Being one of the first when responding to tweets of influencers may give you a lot of views (and chances to get retweeted by them if you are lucky).
14. Be consistent
Think of a Twitter as short term memory: people should see you every day to remember who you are. If you have an inspiration, better not to post all the tweets at same time. Distribute them among the day, or even days. Tools like Buffer help you a lot!
15. Tweet when your audience is most active
Buffer has a nice tool to show how the activity of your followers distributed across the day. Tweeting at this times of the day will give you maximum reach. If you are live in a different timezone than your audience, use tools like Buffer to schedule tweets and automatically post them while you are sleeping.
16. Be positive
If I’m grumpy and trying to tweet, I almost get no any interactions. On the other hand, if I share some positive feedback or some nice tips, such tweets always gather more engagement than negative ones. Be a nice person!
17. Use pinned tweets
This is the first what most of the potential followers will see. When you are “copying” followers of a specific niche, do not forget to “pin” related tweet. You can experiment with different tweets for different audiences. Also very useful to promote new posts or products.
18. Optimize for retweets
Add your personal comments, tell the small story, praise one of the influencers, share feedback about the products: people love it! While favorites are nice to have, only retweets grow your audience.
19. Avoid doing retweets
If you see that someone’s tweet with link getting traction, instead of retweeting it, consider creating your own tweet. You are not stealing anyone traffic; that is how social media works.
20. Analyze your past tweets
Twitter provide really nice analytics for your tweets. You can see top viewed, retweeted and favorited tweets, and way more. Understand what content works for your audience and focus on it! You may be surprised by your findings.
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