The most Powerful Strategy to Rapidly Build a Targeted Twitter Following

Building a Targeted Twitter Following might seem a bit old hat in 2017, because it is full of spam-bots and fake-accounts.

However, to write Twitter off completely is a mistake, because it is an amazing place to test ideas and sometimes you make surprising contacts on there.

A lot of people who wouldn’t like to be contacted on Facebook or LinkedIn are happy to be contacted on Twitter because it feels somehow more anonymous.

One of the problems with a lot of ‘guru’s’ approaches to twitter is their emphasis on getting followers. Followers just like traffic on a website, really they are just vanity metrics.

Sure, it looks like you’re really popular but if most of those followers are fake accounts it doesn’t count for anything because they are not engaging with you as a person. That’s why I would steer well clear of any twitter followers for sale sites.

I started really using my Twitter account June 2016 and within about a month I was getting 100 targeted, real followers a day.

How did I do it? Well, I will explain. Best way to do it is this:

1. Write down a list of the stuff you are interested in. For me this is medical stuff, entrepreneurial stuff, technology and machine learning.
2. Find the top blogs for these niche’s and follow them.
3. Then find the influencers for those niche’s. There are various ways to do this. I recommend Ian Cleary @RazorSocial for this. He is my go-to guy for all things Social Media and runs an impressive community of social media titans.
4. Then you need to make a choice and pay a little bit of money — (Note: time is far more valuable than money, just bite the bullet). Either get Crowdfire (phone app), use one of the web platforms like Hootsuite or use a listening tool like SocialQuant. Use these to follow the followers of the influencers and blogs. At least 5–10% will follow you back.
5. Then you need to start producing your own content and use a tool like PostPlanner to help you keep on top of tweets (Note: you can’t just rely on this alone and you do have to actually man the account as well).
6. Finally and most importantly: don’t get addicted to social media! It is extremely easy to get hooked on the social media itself. I look at mine max once per day either at the beginning or end then I close it down — otherwise it becomes a time-sink.

I always test out blog posts on Twitter first because if they do well there they might well be good enough to promote to LinkedIn or one of the other platforms. Obviously think carefully about what you post as well — many a doctor has been tripped up by what they posted on social media!

Originally published at Clinical Developers Network.