When used correctly, Twitter is an excellent way to bring in unpaid and organic traffic to your business, website, or informational products. With millions of users on Twitter, a large following can beat paid traffic that typically results in low conversion rates. However, building a significant following on your Twitter account is no easy feat. Going from 0 to 5,000 followers is the hardest part of the process, and many people do not make it to that point before quitting.
In this guide, you will learn the proven steps to building a following on your Twitter account. Learning these steps will remove the painstaking trial-and-error that most people will go through to gain followers.
Step 1) Crafting the Perfect Profile
The main parts of the perfect Twitter profile are the bio and the profile picture. These two components will be the basis of your Twitter brand. The bio of your account should give a brief overview of what your followers should expect to see on your account. Including personal information about yourself will not provide any value to your followers.
The profile photo is also a vital part of your account. This is what potential followers will first see when viewing your account. If you are a business, have an attention-grabbing image of your logo that will spark your visitors’ curiosity. If you are trying to build a following as a personal brand, you should have a professional-looking photograph of yourself.
Step 2) Replying to Other Accounts
Twitter’s setup makes finding new accounts a tough process unless directly searching for the user. Many new Twitter users will start by tweeting to no followers, hoping this will bring in traffic out of nowhere. Unfortunately, Twitter does not work like that; you need to get your name out into the world by actively replying to other Twitter accounts.
Choose accounts that are related to your niche or industry to gather followers who are interested in what you have to say. Reply to these bigger accounts with something of value, using your expertise to add new insights to the tweet. If you provide enough value or personal experience in the comments, you can bring in followers who are looking to hear more from you.
Step 3) Setting a Tweet Schedule
After you have gained a few followers, you can start to tweet your thoughts and ideas to your followers. To stay on track, set a schedule that you will follow for your tweets. You want to aim for around 5-6 tweets daily when you are first starting to gain traction with your followers. If you flood your followers with too many tweets, they can easily unfollow you.
Not sticking to a schedule is one of the main reasons people fail to build a significant following. Gaining a following on Twitter is not linear; you will go through weeks of gaining minimal followers, and sometimes you gain hundreds in a single day. You need to stick to the Tweet schedule weekly. To ease this process, you may consider using automation software that you can set weekly to send your tweets at specific times.
Step 4) Improve your Tweets
Twitter is all about providing value to your followers and building your authority in your niche or industry. If you do not contribute anything useful to your audience, you will have a tough time building a following. You need to stand in your potential customer’s shoes and think about what they would be looking for in the perfect Twitter account.
To make an example of providing value to your customer, we’ll use a credit repair business. To provide value to the customer, their Twitter account should be sharing various credit score tips to the followers to show their expertise. To further drive their authority up, the credit repair business should show authentic testimonials for their services that showcase their success.
Things to Avoid
Now that you know the basics of what makes up a successful Twitter account, you should learn what methods do not work when attempting to start a following.
- Spamming hashtags – Many businesses and people will attempt to gain a following by using multiple hashtags on each of their posts, hoping for people who researched that hashtag to find them. This method may work when starting, but once you have a larger following, this should not be used. The excessive hashtags make the tweets look unprofessional and outdated.
- Tagging larger accounts – If you want to get the attention of larger and established accounts, providing value in the comments is better than tagging the accounts, hoping to get a retweet. This type of behavior doesn’t look good and may ruin your credibility to your followers.
- Tweeting too much – There is a limit to how much you should be tweeting each day to your followers. The maximum you should send each day should be around 10. This is enough to provide value to your followers or market your business, but not fill up their Twitter timeline.
