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Grow your Twitter audience

This post is a summary of tips on growing your Twitter presence from Anthony Castrio and Samantha Williams.

Watch the full video here:
https://youtu.be/l7sybzw_O98

Follow Anthony and Samantha for more tips on growing your Twitter presence:
@AnthonyCastrio | @TestStart_Co

Everyone can do what I (Anthony) did if you put in the time and effort.

Outline

0.) Point of audience building?
1.) Profile design
2.) <1000 - Bootstrap
3.) >1000 - Optimize
4.) Build in public vs Build in Community

Short version of this talk

“Be interesting on Twitter and you grow.”

Two kinds of twitter accounts

1.) Famous for something else.
2.) Twitter native, most of us.

0. The point of audience building

  • Sales, you can market what you are working on.
  • Twitter as a hivemind, to crowd source information and get answers to questions faster.
    -> In the beginning you won’t get these benefits. You have to be more outbound and social in your approach.

1. Profile design

  • A bad profile is looking like a bot.
  • Be interesting, don’t be boring. Make people want to follow you.

2. <1000 followers - Bootstrap

  • Focus on replies
  • no one will see your tweets if you’re not replying
  • Sort timeline by new (don’t use the magic algorithm (sparkle emoji). That allows you to be quick yo reply to new posts.
  • Use Twitter like a social network, to make friends.
  • Focus a lot of the time on your feed and reply instead of tweeting.
  • DM people. Informal. Start with Hey, I love what you’re working on. Not like a cold email.
  • The Twitter algorithm seems to favor people you interact with. E.g. their timeline is more likely to be filled with your tweets if there have been interactions between you and them.
  • Follow/unfollow. Follow people you’re genuinely interested in. Unfollow them if they’re boring after a while or not active. That’s the white hat version of following and then unfollowing to improve your following/follow ratio. Don’t worry too much about the ratio.
  • Use the search feature to find interesting people to follow.
  • In summary, follow, reply, tweet interesting things ocasionally, grind it out to get to 100 and then 1000. In the beginning no one sees your tweets anyhow, so no need to tweet more of once per day.

3. >1000 followers - Optimize

  • Specific to you, your brand and nice. E.g. Indiehackers, bootstrappers favor the build in public format.
  • Look at analytics button on your tweets
    • Engagement to Impression ratio above 10% indicates that the tweet impressions are still growing.
    • Monitor profile visits, which correlates strongly with follows.
  • Optimize these metrics and find the format that grows them. Anthony uses a tool called typefully. Hypefury and blackmagic are alternatives for seeing overviews of your tweet stats. The creator studio is built into Twitter and free. It shows how spikes in profile clicks correlates with spikes in followers.
  • For Anthony it worked well to update his profile banner and tweeting about it, so viewers have to go to his profile. It also works well was to just tweet how that has has updated his profile. Selfies also have high engagement.
  • What to talk about?
    • Things you are building
    • Things you are learning about
  • If you are looking for inspiration Go to twitter advanced search and look up successful twitter accounts like @noahwbragg and filter to only see tweets with more than 100 likes. That will show you formats that work.
  • Use the advanced search to copy other people’s tweet styles (e.g. @naval tweets with > 10.000 likes and use their format for your content. Copy lots of people and develop your own style.
Twitter data analysis from Samantha
  • Every follower counts
  • It’s easy to get stuck without results or progress
  • Be aware of your level of motivation until you get to 100
  • Take note of who is unfollowing you. That way you can understand who you want your following to be. Understand why are people unfollowing you. It hurts, but probably has nothing to do with you. Don’t take it personally. If your profile stalls try something new and make changes.
  • It’s important to have a mental shield, so the sometimes toxic Twitter environment doesn’t cause you too much harm.
  • Do treat Twitter like a social network, but don’t take it too personally when these friends stop paying attention to you. Watch your mental health and don’t fall victim to negative thought processes.
  • Schedule tweets to have 1 per day without having to be on Twitter every day. That can generate responses, reactions which pulls you back into Twitter.
  • Your tweets need to generate consistent engagement, otherwise the Twitter algorithm will punish you for it.
  • An example 1000+ account does roughly 207 tweets, 1 thread and 376 in a 60 day period.
    • A lot of work to maintain the audience and consistently engage people and keep growing.
    • The platform mechanics require you to not stop.
  • Twitter does not reward you for being your whole self. You are rewarded for being a brand version of yourself and be specific about what you tweet about. E.g. be the newsletter guy, the community guy. Be about one thing. If you really want to talk about multiple topics, have multiple accounts. Or defer being your whole self to once you’re bigger.
  • If your endgoal is to make sales, you might be able to use pre-built community. There are easier ways than painfully growing a Twitter community.
  • Twitter following doesn’t correlate with real world success.
    • Flipside of this is that even bigger accounts can be reached via DM. It’s better than cold email that way.

4. Build in public vs Build in Community

There are many benefits of joining a pre-built community. It’s more time efficient and doesn’t distract as much from building your business.

Notes

  • Make sure your replies are interesting.
  • Twitter seems to underpromote that have links, hashtags or tags on the first level tweet.
  • Images and video are rewarded.
    Clicking on an image counts as engagement.
  • Ensure you don’t have too many fake followers.
  • Tweetstorms are helpful if the first tweet is strong.
    Can be used to promote something underneath a popular tweet.
  • It’s harder to grow a business account than a personal account.
    A hack might be to use an avatar with a face of a person. Apart from that the strategy is the same as with a personal account. Growing a brand account is often done of platform (e.g. links to twitter brand account from newsletter).
  • Tweeting in the wrong language as well as the wrong topic can also lead to unfollowing.
  • Don’t put all your eggs in one baskets, e.g. a newsletter with an email list can protect you from changes to Twitter.