I’m very new to this and my general strategy to gaining followers is very basic and quite possibly very outdated.
I’ve currently set my follow sources to friends and active followers of some accounts who match my target market and unfollow within a day if no follow back. My follow settings are tweeted with the past 5 days, has at between 10 - 300 followers and followings (I’m not quite sure if this is optimal or not, but I’m trying to weed out other promo accounts and invaluable users who’ll never notice my tweets) I have no settings on follow/following ratio.
I have a user avatar of a realistically attractive girl, because my target market is majorly males aged 18-30.
I don’t have retweet, favourite or mention/comment operations running.
I’m following between 400-600 daily.
I upload some relevant content a couple times a day and a few ‘realistic’ tweets to make the account feel more genuine.
I have had my settings like this (with a few tweaks here and there) for 2 weeks and only gained 150 followers. Can anyone see anything wrong with what I’m doing so far? Or am I expecting too much?
Honestly that seems all pretty accurate for getting things going. The one thing I’d aim for is engaging and retweeting, because Twitter is seen as a conversational platform and if you’re just posting stuff and following, people won’t necessarily follow back. I don’t know if that return is a terrible ratio for Twitter, it might be a bit lower than average but it’s not as horrible as my Instagram return.
If you’re able to retweet / quote / comment and favorite things you find “interesting” posted by those you want following you, they may do so in return. But, I feel your pain and struggled a bit with Twitter return but by sharing the content of those I wanted to engage with me, it resulted in that - but ultimately I just stopped using it because I don’t think the platform has a real future, in my opinion.
Instagram on the other hand, definitely does… and don’t get me started on my failure there, I’m hitting a 1/100 followback right now, which is enough to make even the biggest user throw in the towel
Thanks for the feedback! A lot of people I’ve spoken to have said the same things about twitter actually. I still believe it holds some value but I can see it becoming obsolete within a few years too.
1/100 followback rate seems insanely low. Maybe the niche is just too small?
I’ve been on Twitter for almost 6 weeks now and I’ve got a little over 1K followers. I do maybe 3-5 posts a day. Engagement is still low at 2.2% - 2.8%, but it’s growing. @ian is right about commenting, retweeting, etc. All of that does help, especially commenting (at least for me). Commenting brings in followers every day.
I post images with every single one of my tweets. The difference of tweets with versus tweets without images is noticeable. Even ugly pictures do better than tweets without pics.
I also pay really close attention to the analytics (through Twitter). Analytics helps me understand what types of pictures to post, what features the tweets should mention, what times I should post, what content I should post at specific times, the best times to retweet, and so on.
Finally, try to ride on the coattails of trending hashtags. Last Sunday one of my tweets made it to the Popular page for a trending hashtag and it got 6x the normal views, 12% engagement including a ton of clicks to my website. You have to be able to think fast with trending hashtags, but it’s worth it if you can catch a few each week.
I think thats a great suggestion. I’ve tried keeping my eye out for trending topics which I believe match my niche myself but nothing has been very relevant so far.
You have to be creative with trending hashtags… but also remember that everyday you have standards like #MondayMotivation, #WednesdayWisdom, #ThursdayThought, #SundayFunday.
As I’m typing this, one of the trending hashtags is #InMyFantasyLife.
A sports car blogger: #InMyFantasyLife slow drivers in fast lanes would receive $600 tickets & 5 points
A SEO blogger: #InMyFantasyLife I could pay a Google worker $20 and a Tic Tac to rank my sites high
A personal trainer: #InMyFantasyLife hot fudge sundaes would be the pre-workout food of champions
I was actually going to open a thread too. Twitter has slowed down a lot for me too.
Do you find that by liking posts, you also get more followers? Twitter only has two ways to like either by keyword or direct post, so I am not sure if likes help gain users.
If not I will keep my likes low just to look human. Every time I go above 200 likes, I get warned on every account, yet never for aggressive follows.
For me, liking never really did much. I’m sure it helped with super small accounts that don’t get much attention… but to me, it seems that people just post shit and walk away, let it collect likes and rarely look at who liked it.
They’re far more interested in who is sharing what they had to say, or commenting on it, because that validates their reasons for sharing, especially if it’s a blog post or new product.
Even retweeting seems to result a lower engagement rate, because it’s so close to (and probably as pointless as liking) because it’s a single click with minimal effort. I think that’s become pretty transparent for Twitter users, especially as more brands just dump links and use it as a way to hope people click-through. Also remember Twitter “likes” used to be Favorites, where you’d save a favorite post and it wasn’t just used like Instagram - which is what I’m saying.
If you’re smart with who you choose to like, that may be more effective.
Maybe one day I’ll try again, I was able to grow my Twitter account pretty quickly but the engagement was just too low to bother, even though to be honest … I could use the YouTube views from the videos I make and share. Though YT is growing organically because of the quality video I produce, but that’s a whole other story.
You are the third person to say this, so I might as well lower it back to normal. Not sure why the people who say it is useless have such high settings though. I can aggressive follow no issue, go above 200 likes and get warned every time.
If you want people to take notice, commenting is your best bet. I get the most follows when I say something in the comment that actually shows I’ve skimmed the article they’re promoting.
I don’t do this all day, but I may choose 5-10 pieces to comment on every day.
Sometimes, I wonder if these “popular” sources are followed by a lot of paid bots. When I click the users, many of them who are engaging (liking), seem to be brand new and have like one or two tweets.
My follower count has seemed to diminish even more lately.
