Oh, my geek! How do I get Twitter followers now! Yea! I can guess your thoughts. In fact, you are not alone!
81% of Twitter Users have Less than 50 Followers Now, I don’t need to ask why you need more twitter followers. Really! Here are some of the reasons.
- Twitter is a #1. content curation and sharing platform.
- Twitter can drive a great deal of well-targeted traffic to your site if you have many followers.
- Twitter is just the right place you want to establish your brand trust.
- Twitter is fantastic for generating leads and turning sales.
As a new brand, one of the first thoughts that come to your mind is how to build your brand recognition on Twitter. Now, In this post, I will walk you through the strategies.
But first, hear my twitter story:
I registered my twitter account in 2012. Yea! that account is 6 years old. But, for good 5 years and a couple of months, I had just 45 twitter followers. Poor me!
But I later got 3,000 new followers in one month and two weeks. How did I do it?
Here we go…
1. It starts with your Twitter profile
What if I land on your twitter profile, squeeze my face, call you a bore and click away? Yea!
It may depend on your Twitter Profile.
So, what then makes a good Twitter profile?
i. Captivating description
Your twitter profile description is one of the first things that stare your profile viewers right in the face. Their reactions are expected to vary:
It’s either you seem cool, lovely, boring, weird or downright bad..
A downright bad or boring profile bio? You’ve got to be kidding Tom! I can’t follow you.
A nice or seemingly interesting profile triggers the kinds of emotions that make your profile viewers interested in your personality.
So, how do you write a great profile?
A bit of informality: An friendly twitter bio tells good on your personalitly.
Keywords / Hashtags: Include hashtags or niche keywords in your twitter bio. By this you stand a chance of having your profile suggested to other twitter users who search for such keywords.
ii. Profile Image.
Your twitter profile picture influence the decisions of other twitter users; either to follow you or hammer hard on the back button.
See this:
i. Daniel Preotiuc-Pietro ( University of Pennsylvania ): Social media profile pictures tell a lot about your personality.
ii. Psychology department ( New York University ): An average social media user assess profile pictures based on three indices.
- Approchability
- Dominance
- Attractiveness
Here’s the point:
Each of these indices sends strong signals that influence the ‘following’ decisions of social medial profile viewers.
So, what makes a good profile pic?
Kevan lee: good profile picture should feature the following items:
i A smiling face
ii Squinty eyes
iii No dark specs
iv No hats – Forget the cowboy for a moment
v Head to shoulder shots
2. Follow More People to gain followers
Twitter has a set of unwritten rules. They go like this:
- Rule 1: If I follow you, then I expect you to return the favor.
- Rule 2: If you are a celebrity, too bad! You are exempted from Rule 1.
- Rule 3: If you are not a celebrity. Tom! You either return the favor and follow me back – or see me unfollow your sorry self in a couple of days.
Sorry, but that’s the Twitter game!
If you are just starting out in your niche, Tom! you are not yet a celeb. To gain followers, you have to follow.
Now, how do you follow people to gain a high level of followbacks?
Step 1. Analyze the twitter followers of one of the top influencers in your niche. To do that, go to Twitter audit and enter the twitter handle of your target influencer.
If your target influencer’s twitter audit score is greater than 90 [ as in the case above ]. Holla! you can go ahead with the next step.
Step 3. Sign in for any twitter following tools on the internet: Tweepi, Socialoomph.
Login to your account, apply the filters as discussed above and start following their followers. Now, before you begin to blast everyone with follows, please take note of the following indices.
i. Niche Interest.
Are your targeted accounts [ twitter accounts you want to follow to gain their “follow-backs” ] interested in your contents?
If not, there is no point following them. These guys won’t interact with your tweets and your Twitter engagement metric is gonna be the all time worst sucker.
ii. Activity metrics
It’s a bit scary! But here is the truth. A twitter-land is a bot land.
See this:
A study from the University of Southern California: Nearly 48 million of twitter accounts are bots. That accounts for 9 – 15% of monthly twitter users.
Example:
Tom has thousands of Twitter followers, but a quarter of them are bots.
If you are like Tom! then, your twitter followers count is meaningless. They can’t interact with your contents. Neither will they click to your site to make a single purchase.
To curtail that effect; you need to follow accounts with with reasonable engagement rates; tweets, mentions, retweets.
iii. Followers count
This is not a fixed metric, Okay, but I made it a point of duty to follow accounts whose twitter followers count exceeded 1000.
Step 4. Many of the twitter follow tools have filters for the above metrics. Apply your filters and start following your target influencer’s followers.
Step 5. To guard against the twitter spam bots, I limited the number of accounts I followed to about 100 per day. Now, that threshold is just fine! Don’t go beyond it.
3. Use Hashtags in tweets.
Okay, I understand that a lot of twitter users are probably guilty. Right?
Too lazy to insert a single character in a tweet – Hashtags.
A study by Twitter: The use of Hashtags can spike twitter engagement counts by 100% for individual twitter accounts and 50% for corporate accounts.
According to stonetemple’s study, the use of hashtags increases the likelihood of at least one retweet for each tweet.
Hashtags make your tweets visible to other twitter users whose interest align with yours.
Avoid them?
Your tweets would have really poor engagement metrics – and that means a more difficult time getting new twitter followers from every single tweet.
4. Follow influencers.
Following influencers to gain followers is what I call a reverse pumpkin hacking.
This is what I mean:
You are not the only guy on Uncle Lee’s internet who follows influencers’ followers as a means of gaining “return follows”.
Now, what if you could reverse the strategy?
That is:
Follow the big guys in your niche and make the rest of the peeps search for you and give you follows. It works great!
5. Unfollow non-followers at the speed of Booeing 1.
Following people in order to gain follows is the easiest strategy on Twitter, right?
But, it has a downside!
It increases your following to followers ratio. That becomes counterproductive in two ways.
Your new potential followers land on your twitter profile. They see your outrageous following to followers ratio and they are like:
“Hey, why the heck is no one following this guy, even though he follows a legion. He’s probably some weird guy that no one likes.”
You will soon hit the Twitter algorithm limit of 2000 and you ‘ll be unable to follow more users.
So, what next?
Get rid of the of the following guys from your following lists.
The stingy guys who refused to return your follows.
The sneaky guys who unfollowed you a week after in order to keep their low following to followers ratio low.
The guys that look like bots. I mean the guys that barely engage with their twitter accounts once in a Month.
So, how do you track down these peeps and unfollow them right away?
It’s a pretty simple process. You may try out any of the following twitter unfollowing tools. Many of them are freemium tools: Crowdfire app, Tweepi, Hoothsuite or Socialoomph.
6. Get down on your twitter analytics.
Your best tweets are the tweets that get you the most engagements. These are your potential viral tweets and they can spike your followers count.
Twitter analytics is a fantastic tool for tracking your tweets engagement counts.
Here are the procedures in quick steps.
Step 1. Navigate to twitter analytics by clicking the small profile icon at the top right corner of your twitter account and selecting analytics.
Step 2. Find the tweets that resonate most with your audience. Here are the engagement indices you need to take into consideration:
- Retweet counts
- Click through rates
- Comments
Step 3. Reschedule your top performing tweets and blast the sirens away.
Step 4. Determine the common theme in your best-performing tweets.
- Do they feature rich multimedia?
- Are they funny?
- Are the titles short?
- Do they support a social or common cause?
Step 5. Modify your worst performing tweets in line with your result and reschedule.
7. Tweet at the right time.
A short story:
“Tom is such a smart kid! He makes his ice cream sales pitch in a seriously cold winter”
No, that is not smart?
The best time to send out your tweets is the time when your twitter audience or followers are most receptive. Simple!
Otherwise, your tweets end up in Twitter’s dust bin – No engagement, no retweets or even clicks.
Sadly, here is the Twitter formula:
Engagement metrics ∝ New followers Acquisition.
Now, if you consider your tweet engagement metrics as variables on y-axis, then your new follower acquisition as variables on x-axis.
To increase your twitter followers count. You must ensure that every tweet you send out into your twitter feed counts; high engagement metrics, clicks and retweets.
So when is the ideal time to tweet?
Dan Zarella’s study.
1.Twitter’s engagement rate increases by 17% during the weekends.
2.Tweets posted at noon have the highest click through rates.
3. Tweets posted between 5 pm and 6 pm get more retweets.
Here’s the point:
Channeling most of your twitter activities to the specific periods of time when your twitter audience is most active increases your overall twitter engagement count. More engagements; re-tweets, clicks, and likes = more exposure = more twitter followers.
So what next?
The results may seem a bit generic. So, I recommend that you find the time when your own twitter audience in particular is most active.
Tweriod is a freemium twitter tool you can that can help you with that.
8. Use great tweet headlines
Good headlines go viral overnight and turn you to a social media sensation. Poor headlines make you seem like a bored panda. The worst headlines make you a boring panda.
I’ll cut straight to the point.
Twitter is probably the fastest content stream on the internet – A place where you expect to meet folks with the shortest attention span.
According to the Telegraph, the average human attention span has dropped to 5 seconds. – All hail, the social media generation.
But, it’s worse on twitter. So?
Just any tweet headlines can’t cut the cake. Poor tweet headlines can’t get you retweets or engagements.
No, Tom! Not even a couple of new followers will love to be bored by a boring Panda!
So, how do you create tweet headlines that can get retweets and gain more twitter followers? Let’s dive into some analysis.
Noah Kagan at okdork analyzed 1 million of headlines across a wide range of verticals.
1. Headlines that trigger emotions generate the most shares.
2. Headlines that feature power words; best, easiest, fast, worst have the highest social shares.
3. Headlines that ask questions generated 650 million social hits – Yes! a striking 80% of total headlines.
4. List headlines with the number 10 had 4X more social shares than those containing 23 – which has the second highest social counts.
9. Create a list of influencers
The sweetest sound to a man’s ear is his name.
This is what I mean:
When you retweet the same set of influencers on a consistent basis, over a given period of time, you ‘ll ultimately get on their radar and gain from their influence.
Benefits?
It’s a great way of triggering new relationships with some of the top guys in your niche.
They feel obliged to follow you and occasionally give you a couple of retweets. This places you on the radar of the said influencers’ followers, some of whom will end up following your twitter account.
However, you need to take the following indices into account.
You need to target influencers with high retweet counts. They are more likely to return your gestures.
I recommend that you target influencers with no more 30,000 twitter followers. Since they have fewer people courting their attention, it’s a lot easier to get on their radar.
But, how do you select such influencers?
Since Twitter is a fast content stream, it’s pretty easy to miss most of your target influencers’ tweets.
To get around this: Create a twitter list.
You can do that in three quick steps:
Step 1. Search for a keyword in your niche
Step 2. Hover your mouse to the top left corner of the result page and click on “People”
Step 3. Navigate to each influencer’s profile. If the profile meets your set criteria as previously explained, follow the influencer and click add to list.
Now, the process seems a bit twisty on twitter. Most importantly, twitter doesn’t give you insights into your target influencer’s twitter analytics, hence, you
may want to take a look at the Followers wonk – It’s a fantastic tool from Moz.
Case study:
That is Kent Stuver appreciating some of his top interactors. Mentioning these twitter handles exposes these guys to more than 50,000 of Kent’s audience.
Here’s the result: A number of Kent’s followers will check out these guys and follow their accounts.
10. Hack your way to the influencer status
To make a million, you have to help a million. right? It’s a nice quote that has turned into a cliche.
Here’s a requote:
“To land a million, you’ve got to jump in front of a million. Simple!””
This is what I mean.
There are thousands of guys on Uncle Lee’s internet who are interested in following you. Yes! Y + O + U!
But these guys don’t even know that there exists a guy who goes by the name Tom! That is the basic reason why you fail to gain tons of followers.
3 Strategies to grow your brand popularity
i. Guest Post
Do you love it or hate it?
But seriously, guest posting on popular authority blogs is a real strategy to gain expert authority for yourself in a niche and get a ton of peeps check you out on Twitter.
2. Come up with something great.
I’m sure you know that good guy called Tim Ferriss. Great! The four hour work week?
Now, that is something great! It won the number one spot of NYT/WSJ and spiked Tim’s twitter followers to 1.4 million
So, what next?
It’s time to get on your feet, hold your ground, take up your trumpet and start shouting your expertise for the world to hear; books, guest posts, great blog contents etc.
According to Darren Hardy’s theory of compounding effect, people will soon begin to recognize you for the expert that you are – And hear this: you’ll get a ton of twitter followers without soliciting for any.
Over to you.
What are your strategies and which of the strategies above have you tried?
