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Many in the social media world think Twitter is dead. But for masters of the written word Twitter is a Godsend.
It’s not enough to tweet to the wall. You must learn the game of twitter.
You need to:
- Write Better Tweets
- Engage with your audience
- Master analytics
- Automate the process
It sounds like a lot, but it’s not. You’ll get the hang of it in a week.
Follow me and I’ll show you how to gain your first 300 twitter followers.
Get Your First 300 Followers
If you want to grow on Twitter, you’ve got to write better. There’s no way around it.
Write Better Tweets
When starting out it can be tempting to use the platform to vent and seek validation for your personal opinions. That’s not what we’re going to do.
We are going to start a personal brand and grow our influence. To do this, you need to do three things:
- Educate
- Persuade
- Entertain
Think about your audience and write for those three purposes.
If imagining an audience is too difficult, write a tweet that would be helpful to you. And attract followers that are like you.
Engage
Small accounts need to tweet a lot to grow an engaged following. And by a lot I mean:
- 3-5 Original Tweets
- 5 Retweets
- 20-50 Replies
- Unlimited Likes
We are on twitter to grow an engaged following of raving fans. It’s going to take a serious networking to get there.
You need to set up a private list and engage with the same 20-50 accounts everyday. That’s how you build relationships on the timeline.
Create Value!
That’s what everyone on Twitter says. I used to think it meant writing more and better information. It actually means being a valuable person to talk to. Make sure to reply, as if you were speaking directly to the account owner. You’re trying to build a connection.
You will never sell anything, if people don’t like you. Engage in a way that disarms the reader, and makes them want to know more about you. Be yourself. Your audience should reflect you and your values.
If people don’t like you, they probably don’t share your values. And you don’t need them.
If people aren’t liking your posts, it may be time to dig into the analytics.
Analytics
Analytics helps us understand what’s going on in our twitter account. It puts numbers to all the conversations.
You can boil all the information down to 3 important metrics. Impressions, Engagement Rate, and Profile Views.
What are impressions?
An impression is the number of people that had an opportunity to see your tweet. This would be considered how far your tweet is reaching on Twitter.
The way for you to improve your impressions is to tweet more. And by tweet more I mean a lot more.
If you look at my impressions in the chart below, you can tell I slacked off from June 28-July 12. And my impressions suffered as a result. I did 400 impressions.
On July 13th I got my head in the game. And by July 15th, I started doing 20K impressions. All I changed was my activity. I increased my replies to 60 times per day.
There are 330 million monthly active Twitter users. You won’t reach anything close to that at first. Initially, it will take 30 tweets per day to hit 7500 impressions.
To put that in perspective. That’s not even 1% of twitter traffic.
Stay Motivated. Keep tweeting. And grow your reach.
What is an engagement?
An engagement is any action that someone takes on your tweet.
Twitter analytics considers an engagement any like, retweet, comment, or link click. The benchmark engagement rate for a tweet is 2%. If you’re hitting 2% engagement you’re doing good. Hit 5% engagement and up. You’re doing great.
If you’re not hitting the 2% engagement number, you may need to make some content changes.
Why do profile views matter?
Profile views help you understand why your account growth may be stalling. Your followers should be growing at 1% of profile views.
If you do the math, that means you need 10,000 profile views per month to get 100 new followers. This is why it’s so difficult to grow a new account. New accounts get fewer impressions and low profile views.
It’s a neat process. The math doesn’t lie. Check your analytics here.
Follow/Unfollow Not Completely Bad
I have heard many times that follow/unfollow is a bad way to get an engaged following. I think this is true for accounts of 10K followers and up. But in the beginning, it’s hard to get started.
You don’t have the reach. So you have to grease the wheels a little bit.
Use the Twitter search function and find people that are tweeting content that resonates with you. Follow them and engage with their content. Eventually, you will see an offer for a follow train pop on your timeline. Hop on it and ride the wave.
Do not do follow trains with people that are too far outside your chosen niche. It will lead to a ton of unfollows down the road.
I did two follow trains on my path to 300 followers.
Join Engagement Groups
An engagement group can help you increase your tweet count and get more impressions on your content. It’s also a great way to network with other hustlers.
Yes. You are a hustler building a twitter empire.
If you can’t find an engagement group to join, build your own. Just make sure to set a limit on the number of times each member can add tweets.
Use Apps
Applications can lighten the load of growing your twitter account. There’s no need to do everything manually when you can automate.
I use two apps on my account. A tweet scheduling app and a profile management app.
The tweet scheduling app I use is HypeFury. This app allows you to write all your tweets for the day at once and schedule them throughout the day. It also has an evergreen function that automatically retweets your best content when you’re having a slow day.
Recently the developers at Hypefury added a brand new function called quote shot. This tool allows you to make a nice quote graphic that supports your original tweet. See the example below.:
Dashbird is the app I use for profile management. As a small account, you can’t afford to let your follow to follower ratio get out of whack. It can end up making you look less influential.
Use Dashbird to identify accounts that unfollow you. And manage them according to their value.
The dark side of Dashbird is you can get sucked into tracking your follower numbers more than keeping up with your engagement. Keep your priorities straight. The goal is to get all the impressions you can. Spending time following/unfollowing takes time away from writing tweets/replies.
Now that you know how to write better tweets, engage an audience, track your analytics, and automate the process. It’s time to put the lessons into practice.
Winning the Game
Start your day by scheduling your 3 original tweets. Then, set aside some time during the day to engage and add value to others.
Take some personal time in the evening to spend time with friends/family. Then engage some more for 30 mins before bed.
I’ve been following this schedule for a few days. And it seems to keep me in balance.
Put these lessons into practice and watch your Twitter growth skyrocket. Keep in mind, your account needs attention every day.
One day, you will be able to concentrate on writing original tweets. But until then, keep engaging to grow your account exponentially.
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