How to grow your twitter followers? What about grow your followers to over 7k in 6 months?
Sounds like a fanciful claim, I know.
When reading a headline like that, I would scoff – “more social media bull sh*t”.
Here is the proof:
And I know what you are thinking.
Sure, anyone can go and BUY a bunch of followers to boost their numbers.
But these 7K + followers on twitter are targeted, real individuals. Businesses and people here in Australia and from abroad. Real human beings that interact, message, retweet and favourite.
Here is a snapshot of the traffic we received from Twitter to our website in the last 30 days:
Yes, I know, these aren’t huge numbers.
But it has resulted in 2 x project enquiries for WordPress web development projects (approx $15K+ worth of work).
See the honest truth is, for so long, I ignored social media.
Being in the online world and promoting myself as a web expert this seemed a little crazy. The reason is I didn’t understand it, so I gave no time or effort. It really just wasn’t a priority for me.
Then I met Adam Houlahan.
When first meeting him, my honest thought was “Bloody hell, another social media expert”. He is a pretty unassuming guy. Quiet and reserved. Flies under the radar.
It wasn’t until our 3rd or 4th catch up I even took him seriously and reviewed his social media profiles.
The guy was a freaking rock star!
Almost 100K followers on Twitter, 90K followers on Pinterest, 30K followers on Google+.
How the hell did he get these sort of numbers?
I stood up, took him seriously and actually engaged Adam to mentor me and this was the process.
Here is how we approached Twitter:
1. Get the design of all your graphics looking awesome
When someone hits your profile, you have 1-2 seconds to make an impression. Make your cover image / profile picture stand out. Take a look at ours here: https://twitter.com/fivebyfiveweb
2. Start curating content
This was a revelation for me. At the time I was writing my book and just didn’t have a spare moment to be writing long blog posts. All I had to do was look at the top 20 – 30 blogs in the WordPress / Web Design area and curate the great content they were already creating (use Feedly for this). You want to be careful here to ensure you are only linking to awesome content. The goal here is to do about 4 tweets with links to articles at random times of the day. Include images in one or two of your daily tweets. A virtual assistant can easily load these up via HootSuite to be scheduled for random times of the day. The key here is consistency. Day in day out, ensure you are sending those tweets.
3. Start following
Follow other leaders and influencers, ON MASS. To do this manually is just not possible. It would take forever. In comes this web tool – https://tweepi.com/. Using this, we only target our ideal sort of customer.
The daily routine is to:
- Mass follow around 800 people per day (leaders, influencers and THEIR followers)
- Around 2 – 4% people will follow back (they will like you, your content or your message)
- If after, 5 days someone doesn’t follow back then automatically UNFOLLOW (you want to keep the number of people you are following as low as possible)
- Rinse and repeat, daily
Simple as that. It has taken 6 months to get to almost 7.5K followers (roughly 400-1,000 new followers per month). The goal is to hit 10,000 before the end of the year.
Note: this isn’t about the vanity of the numbers.
It is the web traffic and enquiries and work that it can bring in.
We are now working in content of our own (like other items from our blog).
Anyone who wants to go deeper with this, should definitely check out Adam Houlahan’s new book – “Social Media Secret Sauce”. I highly recommend it.
** Update 19/10/14 **
2 Months on this is really snowballing. We punched through 10K+ last week with over 800 new followers in just one week.
