Twitter Hack:
9 steps to boost your Twitter account

7 min readJan 8, 2015

How to drive your traffic and relationships with Twitter

I consider Twitter as my best space for building relationships and new contacts online. In this post I want to cover tips and best practices I examined to have a steady growth of interaction via my Twitter account.

Make sure you check the “Martin’s Take” sections to get immediately actionable advises and hints!

So you have your Twitter account setup and now what?

Before you start

Have a goal and have a strategy. Just being there and doing something will not bring you to the point where you want to come, unless you just want to use Twitter for your personal leisure only! If you want to use Twitter for business or at least to generate some traffic and some leads for your business, make sure you know where to go!

1. Twitter Bio

The bio is the first place where people on Twitter and the Internet perceive you and your offering. It will appear in every result and mention of your profile and will be one of the most visible abstracts of you all through the net. The main objective is to show yourself as interesting to attract potential followers!

It should describe you as a person (that’s important). But the largest challenge is to add a bit of creativity to stand out of all those standards bios you find out there! Keep it somehow cool and creative, but stay with easy phrases. You could see it as a kind of art already how you present yourself.

I tried to stay at the facts with some personal touch. So my bio is not that creative. It just gives what my work is about! This is constant ongoing work!

If you are not a 100% creative one, stick to the facts, tell something about you.
Improve it over the time by reviewing bios of other profiles you come along!
Keep it human and personal. Show your personality and not any anonymous “blabla”.
If you want to keep it easy, then get your bio proposal here: TwitterBioGenerator

2. How to follow and get in contact

In the beginning of your Twitter career and also later during normal growth it is important to extend and reach out to other people in your topic.

Not the pure number of follower. Finally important is the number of qualified followers or better: Followers interesting in that what you are saying or those whom you add value to!

Follow the big twitter stars in your industry. But only use them as base to find others interested in your topic. Find the rising stars and interact with them. Make use of Twitter lists. Have a list of people that you know or you’ve had contact with, as these guys will typically be your biggest supporters, retweeters, etc.

Monitor and engage with these people regularly.

Find at least 20–50 active people within your industry or your niche and follow them
Use Twitter’s list function to have people of the same topic you are following bound together, for Locals, Friends, Geeks, Startups etc.
Follow public Lists of other users
Find the big stars in your industry and follow 100 of their followers. Do this for several days and see what happens. You will be amazed. (collect these stars in a “Top-List”)

If you want to automate your growth try TweetFavy

3. Engage with new followers (direct messages)

Although it is controversy discussed in differentes sources I like the approach to send DirectMessages with a kind of thank-you-text for following. But be aware of not being too spamy or hard selling! It should be a polite form of welcome with the chance of forwarding to any other webpage. The message could have different intentions. I prefer again the formal one. But any other style is also a good choice depending on your objective.

Consider using on of the mentioned tools to send automatic direct messages to new followers (e.g. SocialOopmh)
Have a particular landing page sending your twitter followers to

4. Have a constant flow of tweets and content

Find the right amount of posting — not too much and not too little — sounds funny, but it is at the end quite easy! When ever you are on Twitter and read others tweets you potentially tend to retweet all of them at the time. So that at a certain time a whole punch of your updates are overwhelming your followers stream. So there is only you at that time which is somehow boring. Or what about it is at the wrong time — nobody would see your posts!

The other side is that you are only on Twitter from time to time in leading to some tweets every 2 or 3 days or even less.

The easy answer to this is using a tweet scheduler and to have a constant flow of tweets.

Use Hootsuite to manage your Twitter account(s) and there use the scheduling or auto-scheduling function to create a constant flow of tweets.
Schedule tweets from 2–3 tweets a day (or at least during the followers main hours) to maximum 2–3 tweets per hour

17 Mistakes You’re Making on Twitter and How To Fix Them — http://notashamedofthegospel.com/twitter/fix-mistakes-on-twitter/

5. Schedule your tweets for the right time

In the same way of having too much or too little tweets it is also not successful, when you schedule your posts for the wrong time. The wrong time is, when your follower are not online and therefore can`t see or read your tweets. So when you schedule tweets do it for the right time (which even helps for your scheduling strategy)

Use Tweriod to find out when your followers are listening

6. Make your tweets findable — use #hashtags

By using hashtags in your tweets opens the door to contribute to your topic or to your niche. Your tweets get searchable not only by fulltext. Via hashtags you get into topic streams which lead to more visibility.

But take care that the hashtags don`t take over your content. Content is key, not the keywords.

Find your hashtags. Research and define the hashtags you want to support with your contant. Hashtagify.me helps here
use max. 2 hashtags per tweet

7. Build relations on Twitter and be yourself

Other people interacting with your content are valuable starting points to build up relations. If someone retweets or favorites your content they confirm that your content and you are somehow interesting for them. Therefore use this base for further interaction and building stronger relations.

This is one of my favorite tips as it is reflecting what social and social media is all about or at least should be!

Use these relations to further spread your content by for example asking to retweet your content!

React on any interaction with your content to intensify relations to followers
At least say thank you for retweeting

8. Analytic & Monitoring

Doing something (e.g. engaging on Twitter) and not measuring or analyzing it, is like you don`t do it! So measure everything! As there are many reporting and monitoring tools around I focus on some main ones which also give me additional benefits. I don`t want to have a separate tool for every purpose.

Hootsuite: I like this tool as I also use it for monitoring my streams and to schedule my tweets. It is good added value to have very insightful reports too.
Bit.ly: Combined with Hootsuite the url shortener that will give you reporting directly built in