How I got my first 1,000 Twitter followers

ninjaPixel
Jul 28, 2017 · 4 min read

If you are starting a twitter account from scratch and need to build your followers, it’s easier than you may think.

I have found Twitter to produce high quality leads that convert much better than visitors I get from Google Adwords, Facebook and even through organic search. Gaining followers should be a key growth strategy for any startup.

When you interact with a Twitter user there is a good chance that they’ll check out your profile. That’s free advertising for you and an opportunity to get them to visit your site. By writing a good profile (which links to your website) you’ll have created a tool to generate high-quality leads.


I experimented with ways to get more followers and in lieu of having content to tweet about (I’m at still at the stage of building my product, and not ready to go into content production mode) I wanted to see if I could build my follower-base in other ways. Preferably with as little effort as possible. I also wanted to see how far I could get using just my phone, and not using a paid for (or freemium) service. 📱

I did this on the GlulessApp twitter account, a location based app for finding gluten free places to eat, drink and be merry.

Experiment A: Following others

The first strategy was simply to follow other users. I searched for the terms “#glutenfree” and “gluten free blog”, filtered by “user” and followed 293 accounts in total. The majority of those were highly relevant gluten free accounts.

Followers at start: 31

Followers after 3 days: 51

Time spent: 20 minutes

New followers: 20

Followers/minute: 1.0

Experiment B: Favouriting people I follow

I went through my own feed and favourited the first 500 tweets and retweets that I came across. I quickly scanned each tweet and as long as it wasn’t really weird, or about politics, then I favourited it ❤️.

Interestingly, 8/17 of my new followers were people that I wasn’t following. My previous burst of activity (i.e. experiment A) must have somehow surfaced the Gluless account to these users.

Talking of bursts of activity, Twitter themselves noticed my unusual activity during this experiment and locked my account. I needed to reset my password and setup 2 factor authentication to get going again!

Followers at start: 51

Followers after 3 days: 68

Time spent: 25 minutes (including password reset!)

New followers:17

Followers/minute: 0.7

Experiment C: Favouriting people I don’t follow

I searched for the latest tweets under the phrases “gluten free”, “gluten free london” and “gluten free uk”, and favourited 309 of them. I searched for ‘latest tweets’ rather than ‘top tweets’ so that it was more likely that the tweets I saw were from people that I didn’t follow.

Once again, Twitter locked my account. This happened after blasting through the first 223 tweets. After I’d reset my account, I was more picky in the tweets that I favourited, hoping that Twitter wouldn’t get angry at me again.

It was actually good to slow down and be a bit more picky with the tweets that I was favouriting. Combined with the search terms “gluten free london” and “gluten free uk” it felt like I was connecting with users who would really get value from Gluless.

Followers at start: 69

Followers after 3 days: 81

Time spent: 20 minutes (including another account reset)

New followers: 12

Followers/minute: 0.6

Experiment D: Following people that follow similar accounts to Gluless

gfcuppatea has 30K followers and I simply followed 500 of them. This experiment was a crazy success. It was really easy to follow 500 highly targeted accounts, and it only took me 12 minutes to do (spread over a few hours).

12 hours after doing this I had already gained 37 followers – which was more than I had at the beginning of this post 🤣.

Followers at start: 81

Followers at end: 148

Time spent: 12m

New followers: 69

Followers/minute: 5.8

Experiment E: Tweeting

I wrote nine tweets. A mix of links to interesting articles and pictures of funny memes. Being a content producer is hard work and unless you’re very good at it, you won’t get good results (and I was merely being a content curator here). It took a long time to write nine crappy tweets and the return on investment was poor.

It’s essential to have some tweets on your profile, otherwise you’ll look like a dormant account or a bot. But when you’re in the early stages of your business and have other things to be worry about, it’s ok to let tweeting take a back seat.

I will experiment more with tweets in the future, as they are clearly the most important part of Twitter. Follow me on Medium to get notified of new posts.

Followers at start: 148

Followers at end: 164

Time spent: 30m

New followers: 16

Followers/minute: 0.5

Summary

This isn’t scientific quality research, and each experiment will have impacted the following ones. However, it gives us a feel for quick wins when it comes to getting Twitter followers.

I was surprised at just how little effect tweeting had. But it was great to learn that following the followers of similar/competitor accounts was so effective, especially since it’s really easy to do. I ran with this strategy for a couple of months, investing about 15mins / week , and got 1,000 targeted followers.

Welcome to a place where words matter. On Medium, smart voices and original ideas take center stage - with no ads in sight. Watch
Follow all the topics you care about, and we’ll deliver the best stories for you to your homepage and inbox. Explore
Get unlimited access to the best stories on Medium — and support writers while you’re at it. Just $5/month. Upgrade