A Quick Guide to Growing on Twitter

A Quick Guide to Growing on Twitter

I don't mean to brag but I have a lot of followers on my main twitter account, it's actually insane. I'm getting very close to having 12,500 followers on there. Compared to the new twitter account I created for this account it's drastically different. Still I could use some help so if you are on twitter and enjoy reading my stuff thus far it would be great if you retweeted this post and followed me on there too!

I'm more than your typical Youtube Shoutout account. https://t.co/9VLon9Oh8i Check out what I'm all about. #youtube #shoutout pic.twitter.com/t33jGC4GGz

— YoutuberShoutout (@shoutout_yt) March 4, 2017

But anyway the growth on my new twitter account has been a little stagnant. But I can still grow it by applying a few tricks and strategies that I'll be talking about in this post today!

So why use Twitter?

But before we dive into that I want to talk about why bother to use twitter at all? With platforms like Instagram that boast a 3-6% engagement rate and Facebook that rolled out live videos, it begs the question why use twitter? After all Twitter typically gives you a 1-2% average engagement rate (I currently have an average 1.1% on my main twitter page). It can easily be overshadowed by Instagram and Facebook easily.

However I still religiously use it primarily because it's very simple. Think about it. There's a character limit on your tweets which means you need to be crafty with what you say and what you use.

Twitter offer a lot of bite sized information that's very quick to go and consume. The life span of a tweet is literally four seconds! But within that 4 seconds a lot of things can happen. For one if someone retweets a post, it adds another four seconds to the life span. Not to mention that twitter is still used to figure out whether or not someone should buy a product or a service or not. Again because you need to get to the point you're eliminating a lot of fluff. By putting a limit on what you can say, it allows you to get to the good stuff you want to talk about and share. Facebook and Instagram give you plenty of time to put together a nice video or a lengthy post. Yes those can be just as creative and you can put more detail into it but you may spend several minutes digesting a post that could take you less than a minute to read if it were in a series of tweets or one tweet.

Point is Twitter is still reliable and can be used to great effect if you know what you are doing.

A Quick Guide to Growing on Twitter

So here are my tips for you all and how I plan to grow this second twitter page of mine.

Firstly...

Optimize your Profile Page

What I mean by optimize your profile page is make it look really nice and appealing. Your profile page is where a lot of people will get their first impressions of you. It can determine whether or not someone will actually follow you or not.

Let's use my main profile page as an example.

Heading

First let's look at the heading. This sets the tone for the whole page and is incredibly important. It's where you can share a little bit more about what it is that you do. For me I kept it simple and didn't pelt people with information. Instead I went for an air of mystery and curiosity. How do I help people grow? You'll have to read more about my twitter page. The Stay Awesome part is my catch phrase on my channel and is part of my brand, along with the TV with the logo inside. That's another key thing is if you have a brand, show it off.

I use Canva to create my heading. It's free and amazing.

Profile Picture

Next is your picture. Ideally you want a picture that meshes with your heading. Mine I'd say I could make a change to but it's not taking away from the experience. The image could be improved if I had the same background, however because the colours I'm using are super bright in my profile picture it's not very conflicting.

Biography

Next up is your biography. This should be void of hashtags. The main reason is every word you use in your bio is searchable. Hashtags are only acceptable in tweets. Anyway your bio should explain who you are and what you're about. It should also serve as an extension of your heading. You don't want to squeeze a lot of information in the heading, that's what your bio is for. Always include a site for your website, in this instance your channel works. If you have a blog and you use that to show your videos off there too then that helps as well.

Pinned Tweet

Lastly is the pinned tweet. Most people vouch for showing off their channel one more time and that's what I'd go with as well. A pinned tweet should be a tweet that clarifies stuff. I just changed mine today because I'm doing a live stream of today's Eric Burdon TV video on Facebook. Any other day it would be a post that leads to a blog article that provides more in depth detail on how I help people grow.

A pinned tweet in the end should help clarify things but you also want to give them a chance to follow you and check out the other things that you provide.

Managing your followers

The second thing to growing a twitter following is to manage your twitter followers. What I mean is you want to be following less people than who is following you right now. Basically you want more followers than following. The reason why is again you want to position yourself as a person of authority. Even if you are not an expert at what you are talking about the fact is if you know more about a particular topic, those people will see you as an expert. Hell there are multi-millionaires who have said they still have a mentor.

Anyway because you have less people you are following than you have followers, it's a sign your content is good and you're not getting all of your followers by following a bunch of people. This will prompt people to check you out a bit more and see your content. I'll get to content in a bit because I'm sure you're asking me how do you gain followers?

First is good content for sure. Retweeting peoples content on the regular and also chiming in with some info yourself. The more you engage and interact with people the more likely people will follow you. If you can build upon or even position yourself as again an "expert" or someone who is familiar with the topic people will start turning to you for advice.

But more importantly you want to start unfollowing and following people. Depending on your size, start with following 100 people per day. The thing is when you follow people, most are inclined to

follow you back. When they don't, give them a few days before unfollowing them. To help with making this easier (because unfollowing people manually is a pain) I use Crowdfire.

Crowdfire is amazing and if you sign up now it can help you more on a marketing stand point. It'll give you some suggested posts to share and like. Furthermore it helps with making your life a bit easier in the unfollowing department. I wouldn't recommend using the following feature on crowdfire as it shows off followers who are already following you. You can really grow if you follow someone new instead.

Also Crowdfire offers an automated messaging feature. This feature is up to you and I personally use it to let people know that I do reviews and if they want a retweet just mention me. You should NEVER use an automated DM to push your channel or blog. A lot of people do that and it pisses or turns people off. Also your auto message should be as short as you can make it.

Good Content

Lastly is good content. Once you've sorted out your followers and you have a nice profile page you want to push out content. People engage with your content based on quality. Including a hashtag or two is very helpful as well. Once in a while I use a site called hashtagify to figure out what two hashtags work good together. You don't have to constantly use it, but if you want a post that you want noticed more, take a few minutes to mess around with the site.

Here's a few things to keep in mind:

1. Include an action in the tweet. Tell people what you want them to do.
2. Have a picture. We process pictures faster than text. Use Canva to make some beautiful posts.
3. If you're inserting a link, put the link in the middle of the tweet rather than at the en.
4. Don't use hashtags excessively. Two or three is enough.
5. Post consistently. Expert marketers say four times per hour, if you can't do that, once per hour is enough. Use a scheduler if you have to, I use Buffer.

Wrapping Up

So there you have it. This is just a quick guide but this is the strategy that I use to grow my main account and it's worked great! Let me know how your results are going!