Grow 10x on Twitter
A Guide to Skyrocket on Twitter
In the previous post, we discussed some general strategies to grow your following on social media. Now we will move onto more deeper strategies - discussing individual social platforms.
Since most of you are from Twitter, I will start Twitter (although it is one of the lesser used platforms compared to the likes of TikTok and Instagram).
Disclosure: My IRL account has more than 100k Twitter followers, although I am not really active there (most of my following is elsewhere). I use it as complimentary social media just in case. So, this was clearly not my strategy. But, I have been using the following strategy to grow the BowTiedPlant account and have seen quite a few friends use it successfully.
I grew BowTiedPlant to ~100 followers in 1 day, ~1000 followers in less than a month, and then took a hiatus. Started serious posting again and grew to ~2000 in less than a month again. I’m aiming to reach ~10k followers in the next 3 months, you can see the progress live by following me on Twitter.
Is Twitter Right For You?
Not every platform is good for everyone. Sure, be active on every possible platform - but you need to know what to focus more on.
Twitter is best for the following content
Brand communications
Political commentary
Value packed content (money/crypto/redpill twitter)
Anonymous accounts
Finding high value entrepreneurs/clients
B2B in *some* cases (LinkedIn is the best here)
Light entertainment/casual content
Complimentary social media for influencers
Writers who want to market their publications/newsletters
It is NOT good for:
Primary social media for Influencers (IG/TikTok/YT better)
Serious meme/funny posting (IG is better)
Relying *only* on it for B2B lead gen (that would be LinkedIn)
Entertainment content (you may use it for light meme posts and complimentary social media, but IG/YT/TikTok are much better for this)
I’m pretty sure that most people reading this are probably in the first camp, and if you happen to be in the second camp, don’t worry - I’ll talk about IG/YT/TikTok soon in other posts.
I am quite bullish on Twitter for a lot of reasons:
Possible acquisition by Elon (we can debate about it, but it’s a no-brainer that the platform will grow quite a lot with him at helm)
Probably the highest IQ and wealthiest audience (if you’re into money twitter)
Lots of features being added lately (newsletter, spaces, communities)
Almost all celebrities and brands have a Twitter account, including government officials. Adds longevity and legitimacy to the platform.
Not the most popular, but a very dedicated audience
Regardless of if Twitter is important to you or not, you should be active on it and grow there. It never hurts to have more followers and on another platform (don’t put your eggs in one basket!)
First 1000 followers
Let us first discuss some strategies to get to the 1000 followers count. This is going to be tough, you’re basically a nobody. No one trusts you, no one knows you, and this becomes specially hard when you are anonymous.
This portion will be longer, most of you probably belong here. Some suggestions to grow:
Have a nice profile.
Make a Profile pic that stands out. A well written bio mentioning how your audience will benefit from you, important links (website/newsletter/email list). Have a nice pinned tweet with best tweets/links.
Basically, you want to show the value you give at the first look of your profile. People have short attention spans, and you got to capture it fast! Let’s look at my profile:
Look how I have clearly stated in the Name that I post about Marketing. Anyone who sees my profile and is interested in it would go to my profile.
There, it is clearly written that I am someone who knows marketing and business and has achieved some success doing it (proof of work), followed by links of this substack.
Anyone who lands up here is surely going to be a marketing enthusiast or business owner, exactly the kind of people I’m looking forward to interact with. I’ll easily gain followers & subscribers - I simply have to show up.
Start in a community
Join communities - popular NFT projects, Money Twitter, Wealth Squad, Fan accounts in case of entertainment, etc. This way, you will get some 100 or so followers by merely follow backs and instant recognition.
For example, if you start a crypto twitter page with the PFP of a popular NFT project (BAYC or Punks) those who have similar interest will check out your profile and probably follow you as well. There is *some* trust.
You can see this in action with “fan accounts”. Any Lebron fan page will attract other Lebron fans (you are effectively riding on the trust created by Lebron). Taylor Swift fan girl pages have a similar effect. You can later switch to a more general sports/music page and create your own communities, brands, merchandise, etc.
Most of you probably don’t want to start a fan page, but that’s a good example of the power of community. Don’t ignore it!
Engage, engage, engage
Since you don’t have a following of your own, you’ll have to rely on others’ engagement. Follow smaller users in your niche & interact with them. Since they need followers too, they will follow you back (door to door sales).
Next, reply a lot to semi-large account in your niche (less than 10k followers). If you have nice content, they will engage and will probably become your friends too. Getting a few semi-large accounts as friends early on goes a long way.
Please keep this organic and not a business relationship. This goes a long way, you might build some great friendships along the way! I was lucky to befriend some very talented and big accounts early in my Twitter journey (this account).
Large accounts are too big for them and their followers to notice you. If you can interact with them, great - else there isn’t much to be disheartened about if they don’t!
Writing threads help a lot - if you are actually worth following, anyone who reads your threads would know and do it. Content is really the king here - which is why you need to keep reading and upskilling to ensure you write great content.
Growing beyond 1000 followers
Cracking 1000 followers is the hardest part. Everything after that is basically repeating the following:
Keep adding value in whatever niche you write about
Connect with big accounts, engage with them, collaborate with them
Launch products around your niche, make money, use it to grow your account, make even more money, repeat
Launch IG/YT/LinkedIn/etc and grow your influence
Keep writing threads and long form content, they create massive engagement
Keep track of your analytics, you now have enough followers to gain meaningful insight. See what works and what doesn’t, and improve your game
Reuse old content that worked
Use memes and shit posts to give freshness, they engage well
Once you reach 5-10k you will simply grow as per the rate of growth of your niche in general, it’s basically just post, post, post and engage, engage, engage. Maybe you can grow a bit faster if you’re good, but you won’t see any “200% MoM” growth anymore.
Not too much alpha to drop here, it’s just a long trudge now that the hard part of cracking the first few thousand followers is over.
Note for larger accounts
I know many of you who have 50k, 100k, even 300k followers might look at your follower growth and feel depressed. Even a 5k increase month feels like nothing. Know that this is normal.
You are not a new account who can do “growth hacking” and grow big. You are not a shit coin trader trying to take his $1k bag “to the moon”. You are an investment firm that has to manage risks and be happy with a 20-30% growth per year. 50% growth? Wow. 100%? Amazing. Don’t expect to take your 100k following to 1M in 6 months (can’t happen in most cases).
You have secured the bag, now focus on monetising your audience well and increasing income streams from the audience (which grows at 30-50% a year tops). This way, you can hopefully double your income every year or so.
Twitter Sucks.
Yeah, it really does. So much censorship, shadow banning, politics, less likes & DAUs on the site in general. Was this post a waste? No, you should still apply this post to grow your following. BUT,
You’ve got to try out other platforms like YouTube, Instagram, LinkedIn, etc. Some of them have way higher engagement for the same follower count (IG engages ~10x for the same follower count as Twitter for me), some monetise well (YouTube), etc.
If you are an influencer who grows to a decent viewership on YouTube, you will automatically get followers on Twitter. Just post once in a while and they will find you (see Mr. Beast for example). Social media is about finding out the platform that works for you and using everything else as a flywheel/fail safe.
Maybe you will find out that your niche favours IG more, and then Twitter becomes your secondary (or tertiary) platform. It’s all about experimentation, we will learn more about this later.
Announcement
One of the best way to grow your sales & followers is to post more content across different channels. Posting tweets to FB, LinkedIn, Instagram, etc.
But this process is tedious - I am soon launching a software to automate, schedule & simplify this. DM for private beta (only if you're serious about this & would use it!)
Summary & Conclusions
Twitter is good platform for building a high IQ, rich audience or as a complimentary social media to your main channels
Make sure your profile is good, eye catchy, with a clear intent of providing value. The value proposition must be crystal clear.
Growing to 1000 followers is about engaging with larger accounts, following similar people, and threads
Growing beyond 1000 followers is mostly about posting good content consistently - no “alpha” leaks here, you just gotta get out and do it
After 10k followers, life becomes slow. Even slower after 100k. Don’t expect 2x growth every month, you’ve won! Just keep pushing for the next milestones and you’ll get there with time.
Grow your influence on other platforms, sometimes they can be more rewarding when coupled with Twitter
Automation & scheduling help a lot with growth, DM me for helping me test a tool I am building for the same!
This will be it for the Twitter Guide. I will have a separate post on content creation where we will discuss how to create content that engages well, how to reuse content, what kind of threads to make, formats of tweets that are known to perform well, etc
Hope you enjoyed it, do leave your queries as comments - I will address them all. Like this post and share it with a friend. I’ll be very grateful if you do that:
Let me know in the comments what you want next. Till next time!
Follow me on Twitter for updates & more: BowTiedPlant - thanks!
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