12 Twitter Tips to Grow Your Followers and How It Worked for Me
How I resurrected my Twitter account after almost three years and managed to grow followers 18% in one month
It all started on November 19th, 2019, with the purpose of help others sharing experiences, reflections, and thoughts on Medium. After publishing some blog posts, I decided to push a little bit more for readers on Twitter and learn on the experiments to apply what best works to my company.
My Twitter account has been dead for almost three years, so I did some experiments to resurrect it and grow Twitter followers based on the readings of other blog posts and experts. Let’s explore what I tried, and the results observed during this month:
1. Design a Brand Strategy (Personal or for Your Company) and Tweet Content Related to It
No matter if your Twitter account represents you or your company, the audience you cultivate will be connected to the topics you talk about. Those topics should be related to the purpose and the goals of the brand you are representing at Twitter. There are plenty of accounts that I am sure that do not know about it, but they do it unconsciously.
In my case, given my passions, knowledge, and future career goals, I want people to relate my name with innovation, business strategy, & entrepreneurship/startup. For that purpose, I try to consistently tweet (and write, and speak, and learn) about:
80% of the content: innovation, business strategy, & entrepreneurship/startup
20% of the content: leadership, cutting-edge technology, other management areas, climate change, economic trends/info, curious things, and other topics.
2. Engage With an Improved Profile Bio, Photo and Background Consistent With Your Brand Strategy
Think about your decision-making process to decide whether or not to follow somebody: you see an interesting post, then you visit the profile, read the bio, and take a quick look at some of the posts. If you like the profile bio and the topics of the posts, you follow this person. Almost all of us do the same, so the profile is one of the main criteria to follow people.
All the tactics in the article might drive visits to your profile that could be new followers. So we better start from here to earn new followers.
PRO TIP 🚀 Use hashtags in your profile bio: When you look for hashtags in the search, your profile could be shown in the search results.
Twitter search results with the hashtag #entrepreneur
3. Write Responses in Posts to Influencers
Usually, they have posts with lots of RT and comments. People who comment sometimes take a look at the rest of the comments.
If you write a bright comment they will visit your profile. Then it depends on your content and your bio if they decide to follow you.
4. Mention People With <1000 Followers When You Publish Something Interesting for Them
Mentioning people is a common practice between influencers (which I am not). Some people don’t like to be mentioned because they think it’s spamming. It is fair, but when I mention somebody is because I genuinely believe that the content I am posting could be of interest to them.
When mentioning people, I’ve observed that people under 1,000 followers are much more thankful and willing to engage with you than people with more followers.
This kind of mention can drive RTs for you, exposing more your profile and thoughts, and driving profile visits if it is the first time you mention them.
5. Mention People With >10,000 Followers
The likelihood of RT is very low with these accounts but is worth it. The worst scenario is no engagement action, but most times, the people you mention will like your tweet to say “thank you”. It is good because it helps to keep alive your tweet for more time, adding impressions.
PRO TIP🚀Use lists to organize accounts you want to engage with for different topics.There are hundreds of exciting accounts, and I am not able to remember all of them!
6. Get Involved (and Create) Conversations With Lots of People
I still have not tried to create one of these on my own. However, I was mentioned by an influencer on productivity within another 20 people. As I have a small number of followers, I felt grateful because this influencer asked me, so I answered. Not only me, but most of the people mentioned by this guy answered him.
The engagement rate and visits among the profiles participating in the conversation boosted. During this month of analysis, this response has been the most viewed. This was the day with more new followers for me.
Screenshot of the massive conversation
7. Quote and Curate Content Instead of RT — Add Value to the Tweets
When you don’t have time to create your content, you still want to feed your Twitter consistently. For that purpose, quote or curate (which means taking the link, video, or image) other’s content (tweets or other fonts) writing something that is genuinely your opinion/thoughts/reflections.
Always mention the source of your content. It’s fair to mention the source with the words “RT” or “via” to attributing them to the original content.
Sometimes these accounts retweet you, which boosts the impressions of your tweets and the likelihood to drive visits to your profile and earn other engagement actions.
PRO TIP🚀Use lists to have fresh content to curate or bookmark the articles to keep them for when you have more time to curate and schedule the tweets.
8. Use Hashtags, and Combine Them With CC/Mentions
The power of the hashtags resides in how trendy are they and followed by the audience you want to attract. Hashtags help you to earn impressions that can drive engagement actions.
I’ve found that mentioning people is more effective than use hashtags to drive impressions and engagement actions.
The hashtag with more engagement during this testing month was #cibersecutiry
PRO TIP🚀 To look for the most trending or searched hashtags, use the tool hashtagify.
Hashtagify recommendations
9. Like Interesting Tweets of Other People After a Search With Hashtags
Like tweets from time to time. But do it just if you truly like them, don’t be a hypocrite to gain followers. Being a hypocrite is the best way to have false followers, the same as false friends.
Eventually, the accounts will realize about your likes and might probably visit your profile. If you implemented the first two tactics, you would be much closer to have one follower more.
10. Make Your Tweets Beautiful Using Media
The most engaging tweets have been the ones with a mix of photos, text, and links. The analytics tool I was using had no information about video tweets, but if you have impressions in your video tweets they could be very engaging when fitting with your audience's needs.
Most engaging tweet types
PRO TIP🚀 Try combining different tactics. You can see in the next image my most engaging tweet during January. I curated the tweet and used a combination of RT, hashtags, photos, and mentions.
Best overall tweets of the month. Combination of tactics.
11. Write or Ask Interesting People Who You Can Learn With
The more the followers they have, the less likely to have answers. However, there is a lot of people with much fewer followers and mentions that are willing to give opinions, help, add value and be listened to.
Look for those people and have conversations aligned with your brand strategy to earn trust. If you are clever, you’ll have RTs, visibility, and eventually followers.
12. Optimize Your Tweet Publishing Times
I’ve found that optimizing publishing times works and improves your engagement rate.
However, there is a need not covered by the analytics tools which is the segmentation of the statistics. The tools give you what is the best time for you to publish in order to maximize engagements, but you don’t know if those engagements are coming from people of the area you want to be influential. There is no geographical segmentation in the tools.
My best times to post (PST), according to the Keyhole tool.
PRO TIP🚀 Use Buffer tool to automate your publishing times to maximize the engagement rate. You can add 10 articles to the queue with the free account.
PRO TIP🚀 During the weekend, schedule two posts/day to have a complete week of tweets automated. Then take a quick look every day to your feed and do some fast RT or create tweets. That way you can have 2 to 5 posts/day with the big part of the effort done by the weekend.
(EXTRA) Use Linktr.ee to drive visitors from/to other social networks and your business pages in a centralized and easy way. I discovered this useful tool during this month of testing and I have it on my profile link. It helps me to drive traffic to all my pages and social profiles in a centralized way. That way the people can know better what do you do and what value can bring you to them.
(EXTRA) Unfollow inactive accounts to reduce your follow/followers ratio with tweepi.com. Given the almost three years that I was not using my account, more than 400 people I used to follow are now inactive accounts.
Having a >1 ratio of follow/followers means that you still are trying to grow your audience following a lot of accounts (still my case), so it’s good to unfollow inactive users.
Tweepi has a free plan that lets you look for inactive accounts you follow (or followers) and unfollows 100 accounts/day.
The Results
Followers: You can see the screenshot of the KPI’s after this month of tactics testing. I’ve increased my followers by 168, which is an increase of almost 18% in 28 days.
Tweeter Analytics
AVG engagement ratio: Sometimes more content means less average engagement ratio. It all depends on the quality of your tweets measured by your audience and the people you mention. In my case, I managed to grow and keep a good average engagement ratio with the tactics of the article.
Keyhole AVG engagement ratio
Total engagements: My total engagements have been growing consistently. If we add this to a sustainable AVG engagement ratio, we can infer that I was keeping the value delivered in my posts measured by the kind of audience I have.
Keyhole total engagements
If you are not able to sustain your engagement ratio but you still are growing in total engagements, it is still useful because what we want is more engagements with new people to have more impressions, drive visits to our profile and keep adding followers. However, I would try to understand why it’s happening.
Please write your comments and experiences with Twitter engagement. Different results and observations managing Twitter will help all of us to learn together.