Sunday, March 16, 2014

Ten Days to a Thousand Twitter Followers

Twitter is a great way to reach an audience.  However, it’s really hard to get to the first thousand people – the point where your content can drive organic growth.  So, I spent a couple weeks learning the ropes on Twitter and in just ten days I built up over a thousand relevant followers.



Each day I’d spend less than an hour on twitter  - following the simple five step process laid out below.  At the end of this process we were able to drive over 300 visits from complete strangers to seed Contastic's initial user base.


1 – Build Your Profile
This is your elevator pitch.  In 160 characters you need to explain who you are (one sentence) and what you’re doing (one sentence).  Each should be packed with the most eye-catching details about yourself that will make someone want to follow you.  
2 –Follow Other's Followers
Following another user generates a notification for them and has a good chance of encouraging them to follow you back if it is relevant.  I identified a couple similar companies with significant followings and then would systemically follow 1-200 of their followers a day. Followers are ranked on Twitter chronologically, so each day you can through to see their new followers (at the top) and scroll down to find older ones.  I work top to bottom (newer followers are usually more engaged).

3 – Favorite Relevant Tweets

When you favorite someone’s tweet Twitter also sends them a notification.  This is another way to get on a user’s radar to generate a follow. TargetPattern is a great service that enables you to quickly favorite hundreds of tweets a day from relevant topics.  As a bonus their analytics are pretty good, so you can get a sense for which keywords drives the highest engagement.




4 – Make Friends
Since we’re on Twitter to engage real people with our product (just just get a big number of 'vanity followers') it’s important to respond quickly to everyone that contacts you.  I ended up sticking with the web interface since mobile/secondary providers/email were very unstable and ended up in tweets being lost most of the time.

5 – Content
As you develop a real following your content becomes more important.  The name of the game is to generate content that others will share.   At the end of the day that is how you can grow your account from one to ten thousand followers. 

Unless you’re already famous nobody cares about your opinion.  Focus on statistics, news or images. Generate value by curating or creating facts that your audience will find useful.  That’s what get’s widely shared (and grow your followers).  And even when posting as a company, follow the 9&1 rule – you need to tweet nine interesting general comments for each post about your company or product.

As you post be sure to strategically use @ and #.  @ will notify a user hat your tweet is about them – generating a higher chance of a share.  A # will go out to everyone following that topic – again generating more shares.   It’s especially important to focus on groups you belong to (Schools, Companies, Professional Organizations).  These groups are more likely to be supportive of you and share your content.

A Quick Note on Twitter Practicalities

While Twitter sends notifications to users for most system activities (follows, favorites, @mentions), the intent is not to allow people to spam the entire system constantly.  So, when putting the steps into practice err on the side of patience rather than volume.  While the technical limit is  1000 follows per day, consistently doing that will certainly get you banned.  The reason this took me 10 days (without getting banned) was that I did just a bit every day – manually and organically building relationships.  For more see:


Also, once you follow 2000 people you won’t be able to follow anymore.  Use JustUnfollow to cull the list of folks who haven’t followed you back after a couple days. 

Happy Tweeting!


9 comments:

  1. These points will certainly come in handy. I never seen Reddit as a platform to improve stocks and viewership. That's on me, but I will definitely begin focusing on it.

    I'm wondering with Tweriod. . .are there any other tools which help you realize the best way to post on unique programs based on your own followers? That might come in handy
    Social skips

    ReplyDelete
  2. Amazing article! I need individuals to know exactly how great this data is in your article. It's intriguing, convincing substance. Your perspectives are much like my own concerning this subject. Buy Active Twitter Retweets

    ReplyDelete
  3. Thank you because you have been willing to share information with us. we will always appreciate all you have done here because I know you are very concerned with our. Buy Twitter Retweets

    ReplyDelete
  4. Tirana is such a dynamic city, both day life and nightlife are filled with numerous things to do Albania Culture

    ReplyDelete
  5. LinkedIn is a ground-breaking systems administration site, crawling up on well known social systems like MySpace and Facebook.View More

    ReplyDelete
  6. You made an article that is interesting.You are so amazing.
    Thanks a million and please keep up the effective work. clipping photoshop

    ReplyDelete
  7. When utilizing video to advance yourself,Facebook video downloader the objective is to take a subject that a few people may not discover straightforward and to separate it for them.

    ReplyDelete
  8. You will get different followers on the social media sites. Followers maybe interested in your business for different reasons and also for different levels of buying process. So it becomes very important to post content that is liked by all the followers. It's your job to make your followers happy. buy automatic Instagram story views

    ReplyDelete
  9. A staple of the Las Vegas casino, the food at
    The original 퍼스트카지노 Las Vegas casino is now the starvegad only place to eat The resort's newest restaurant concept is at leovegas the forefront of the latest trends in Las Vegas.

    ReplyDelete