How I Went from 50 to 500 Twitter Followers in 50 Days
Four impactful actions to start making an audience on Twitter as a writer
Are you new on Twitter or struggling to grow your follower count?
Don’t make the mistakes I made for months. Take Twitter seriously from the start but stay true to yourself. After lurking around for a few months, I decided to change things up by the end of January.
My dormant account had 55 followers then.
With a few changes, a lot of consistency and a tad of luck, I now have 500+ followers. I 10x’ed my following in the first quarter of this year.
So here are the four activities that had the biggest impact.
1. A personal connection
The biggest and first impact happened when Jessie send me a DM. We connected, he helped me out a bit and I met many new people through him.
He made me part of “A bunch of above-average Sirs.”
Don’t let the name mislead you, though. We also have a power woman in this group who’s 100% happy with her title of sir.
Having a support group like this, I can share new tweets with them and get some fast likes. It shouldn’t be a surprise that this has a positive influence on the algorithm.
What can you do?
Don’t wait for people like Jessie to reach out to you. Do it yourself. Find someone interesting and send them a DM. Why not start with me or Jessie? I know his DMs are open for everyone.
And when you find people with similar interests, why not create a group chat? For me, this has had the biggest influence on my growth.
2. Thread time
The second impactful activity was my most popular thread so far. I made a curated list of articles about writing. It started off slowly but then it went from 6 to 400+ likes overnight. It doubled my followers from 100 to 200!
And now, weeks later, I still get website visits through this thread. And more than 1,600 people have visited my website through that thread, in total.
What can you do?
Curate. Find a healthy mix of big and small creators/writers. Tag them all. The big ones give the list authority, the smaller ones will probably help you get more exposure by retweeting.
Don’t be afraid of some self-promotion. Sneak in a link to your own articles.
3. Joining a writing community
The third activity was joining ship30for30. This is a paid online writing challenge to write 30 atomic essays in 30 days.
As part of the challenge, I started posting more consistently and engaging more with the community. Replying to other atomic essays gives you a lot of exposure.
Many new shippers started to follow, of course, and in 30 days I went from 200 to 400.
What can you do?
Joining the challenge next time would be obvious but I know the prices are on the rise. They might not be accessible for everyone.
That doesn’t mean you cannot find benefit from this community. You don’t need to be a paying member to go to Twitter, search #ship30for30 and start engaging with the writers.
But if you do want to join, you can use this affiliate link to get 20$ off for the May cohort: Ship30for30. ($179 instead of $199)
4. Honest reflection
In the middle of March, I published another thread. This time reflecting on the mistakes I made with the launch of my first Gumroad product.
I didn’t think this was going to be big, but the honesty inspired people and I got another 50+ followers thanks to this one thread.
What can you do?
Do you have a newsletter, book or other writing project? Talk about it in public. People on Twitter love to celebrate wins with you or read about your honest reflections.
My four main takeaways and action items for you:
- Engage daily. Tweet and reply to tweets.
- Write value threads. Give ten times as much as you receive.
- Track what content works. More of that. Less of what doesn’t work.
- Have a support group to get early traction.
Now, go! You can do it too.
If you liked this info, please give me some love on Twitter.
