How to grow your Twitter to 15,000 followers

Twitter has made us about £50,000 over the last year, and it’s such an underrated platform.

We’re going to run you through to how to grow your Twitter following with out relying on lucky breaks, fluky shoutouts or viral posts.

Our growth on Twitter has been pretty slow and steady. You can grow faster if you can dedicate more time to it, or if you get lucky. But this if how you can do it in an automated, time-efficient way.

Why Twitter?

Writing clarifies your thinking. And Twitter is a great training ground to practice clarifying your thinking and refining your message so that you will:

  • resonate with your audience
  •    
  • get clients more easily
  •    
  • generate leads more easily

Each tweet is like an atomic blog. You’re sending a thought out into the universe, phrased in a particular way, and seeing how your audience responds.

You can refine the message very easily and the platform itself is very responsive to growth.

On some other platforms, you need to already have a big following for your posts to get traction.

But each tweet has a decent shot at getting exposure.

And the clear feedback loop means that you can easily run lots of micro tests to try out your ideas and see how they land with your audience.

Over time, each thought becomes stitched together until it becomes a blog post, video or something bigger. And you know that it's going to be such high quality because every little bit of it has been tested with your audience already.

Have something to say

It’s important to think about your purpose. If you want 20,000 followers, why is this important? You’e got to give this a bit of thought.

If you have a very niche offer and you're tweeting about everything, you can grow faster because there are more shots at reaching a wider audience. But that audience is not going to be as relevant.

On the other hand, if you specialise really early on, you’ll grow a more relevant but you’ll curb your growth.

It’s a double-edged sword.

What do you write about?

The mistake that people make is that they’re interested in so many different things, and they wan to write about them all.

But if there’s no cohesion between topics, it will look chaotic.

Why would someone follow you if they don’t know what you’re about?

But if you can master communication around a particular thing, you can nail your core message. This is your key offer and the value you can provide to your audience.

Once you’ve got this in place, you have infinite talking points. Because you focus all of the topics you’re tweeting about around the main result. That applies to everything else, too - your email marketing and any other storytelling.

The classic format of an email a marketing email is:

  • Pain (something that resonates with your audience.
  •    
  • Story
  •    
  • Solution
  •    
  • Call to action

And it’s such an easy formula to apply on Twitter so that your tweets becomes relevant to your offer.

Don’t be boring

Twitter is a platform that's designed around short, punchy, polarising text.

You only have 280 characters, so you need to keep posts brief and find your tribe. But with so few characters, you’ll never be able to fit in all the nuance.

So how do you do this without being a sensationalist?

Most content will fit broadly into one of these types of content:

  • Authority
  •    
  • Growth
  •    
  • Authenticity

Each of these have value in themselves, but if you combine them they have an even bigger effect.

Some of the accounts you follow might have a blend of some of these, and you can see where they’re weak or strong.

If you have strong authenticity and growth, but not much authority, you get engagement. But you tend not to get sales or loyalty.

If you have growth and authority but you're not very authentic, then you might produce sales but won’t get repeat sales.

How you buy is how you sell.

You can’t appeal to everyone. When you follow a profile, you’re buying something with your attention. So, on your own profile, you need to polarise people so that they either follow or unfollow you.

A word of warning about Twitter

It’s important to be aware that Twitter is an addictive platform.

“The Social Dilemma”on Netflix explains how Twitter will programme your mind, no matter how resilient and robust you think you are. You need to make sure that you are in control of it, rather than the other way around*.*

You can get around the issue by writing offline and checking at regular intervals, rather than always having it on in the background. And disabling your notifications.

Method

The method for growing your following on Twitter consists of three parts:

  • create
  •    
  • repurpose
  •    
  • schedule

When creating, you might already have long form content that you've written- maybe you’ll have podcast episodes, blogs or notes from your reading. Whatever it is you've already got this fertile soil of stuff to share.

If you’re an online coach, you’ll have some degree of expertise. You need to find out how to package it and put it in front of the right people.

To repurpose this content into Twitter format, look at how the native format works.

Follow a few accounts that resonate with you and look at the way that they post. You need to take an idea and sculpt it in a way that makes it palatable for the Twitter audience. Turning it into a thread will then allow you to add in the nuance. Because it's that initial tweet that's the the hook for attention.

Scheduling content will help you to create content offline and post in bulk

Schedule the stuff that you've taken from your creations and your long-form stuff,  put it into a CSV and upload it quarterly.

We found in UK time zone that posting at 3pm and 9pm gets the most engagement for those posts.

You can do it more frequently at the beginning, but just make sure that you’re writing and scheduling offline as much as possible to preserve your sanity.

Growing your audience

Going from zero to 1,000 followers is the hardest thing to do on any platform. And if you post a tweet without tagging or interacting with anyone, you’re not going to get much traction.

You’ll be better off using other accounts to help drive engagement with your own posts.

So how do you do this?

Focus on five to ten value-adding replies to larger accounts (keep in mind that accounts with around 2,000 to 20,000 followers are far more likely to actually read your comments than the much bigger ones).

The reply has to be something that adds value to the conversation. This will get you a lot of visibility and reach by encouraging people to click on your profile and see other stuff that you're posting. Make sure you've got a pinned tweet that is the best first impression of your account.

Once you’re getting interactions with your own account, go through your mentions once a day to like and reply to everything in bulk. If someone retweets you, retweet the post because as well as acknowledging them, this will boost your own engagement.

And be helpful.

If you see that people are asking questions around a particular topic within your niche, reply and offer your advice. Don’t worry about whether this converts a a sale directly. It's about establishing yourself as someone who is a credible authority that can offer help.

You can set up a feed around a particular keyword, so that you’re notified when someone posts about it.

For example, we work with a client who helps people with their sense of self-worth and imposter syndrome. She has a running feed for any time someone mentions imposter syndrome so that she can reply to the posts in bulk and offer value to that audience.

This is why Twitter is such a good platform for lead generation.

Repurpose content

Make it easy for yourself by repurposing content. Create things offline, and separate them all out the tweets in a CSV file. You can then upload everything in bulk, making it easy to automate tweets for several months at a time.

If one of your posts happen to go viral, take advantage of having people’s attention by putting a Call to Action in the comments. But make sure the comment is relevant to the original post.

What not to do

When it comes to what not to do, our first piece of advice is to avoid Gumroad. You might be tempted to use it, because it’s an easy platform to set up with and sell digital products. But it will put you in a box of this corner of Twitter with people you don't want to be associated with.

Another piece of advice is:

Don’t be anonymous.

This is because anonymous accounts on Twitter don’t tend to produce loyalty, engagement and authenticity. If you’re anonymous, you’re not accountable. So why would someone build a relationship with you?

And while polarity is fine (not everyone will like you or agree with you), don’t gain traction just by being controversial.

This might get engagement, but it won’t get trust.

Another thing to avoid is following people indiscriminately. This will just teach the algorithm to throw up wacky stuff that’s difficult to unhook yourself from. Be very careful and specific about who you follow on Twitter.

But if you do want exposure to accounts without the algorithm showing you more of the same thing, you can do this by creating lists instead.

When it comes to going viral, be careful. If you’ve written a one-off post about a particular top, people might be following you because they expect to see more of the same thing. So, you might find that you gain more followers, but your engagement tanks. And this isn’t good for the account overall.

In terms of tools and software, avoid railgun apps that will blast out about 5,000 DMS to everyone in your local vicinity. These will impact your reach, because Twitter will catch on that this is a bot rather than human behaviour, so using these apps will damage your account in the long-term.

And in terms of getting clients through paid traffic, we’ve personally found that Facebook and YouTube ads have much higher return on your spend.

Finally, don’t check your message requests. You will occasionally get direct messages from potential clients, but you might have to sift through some pretty weird stuff, too.

Tools and software

All of the software we’ve mentioned

Pablo is a great multi-platform social media scheduler. It’s free to use and can be used to schedule posts and write threads on Twitter, and there are loads of options for customisation.

Tweet Deck is also free. It's basically owned by Twitter and allows you to create feeds with particular keywords. This one is great for creators.

Hype Fury allows you to upload a CSV to schedule multiple posts. It also creates tweetshots (screenshots of your tweets) which we use to share them to Instagram. Unusually, they often tend to perform better than the tweets themselves on Twitter.

Tweet Hunter is AI-generated, with a very smooth userface. It’s a great one to try if you’re struggling with writer’s block.

Further reading

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In our full programme, we have an in-depth guide on how to maximize your content strategy and conversion on Twitter, as we as how that fits in with organic and paid traffic. It also goes through tone and style and how to set up your bio.

You can find out more by booking in a call.

If you want to find out more about our processes first, you can grab an overview video here.

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*DISCLAIMER: The sales figures stated above and in this training are our personal sales figures or sales figures of our clients. Please understand our results are not typical. We're not implying you'll duplicate them (or do anything for that matter). The average person who buys any "how to" information gets little to no results. We're using these references for example purposes only. Your results will vary and depend on many factors including but not limited to your background, experience, and work ethic. All business entails risk as well as consistent effort and action. If you're not willing to accept that, please DO NOT register for this training.

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