How Did I Get First 5000 Twitter Followers?

A few days ago my Twitter followers count crossed 5000 milestones. Today, I already have 7927 followers on Twitter. According to Twitter Counter my account rank #991,481. Which is quite impressive for whom who just have started using Twitter for the website.

In this article, I will illustrate all the things that helped me to reach the 5000 followers milestone. It feels great when you make strategies, implement on it and eventually pay off.

I am going to disclose each aspect and resources that I used to gain my first 5000 twitter followers. I am not going to hide even 0.1% of my secret activity. I bet even you can get your first 5000 twitter followers with ease if you follow along with a well-implemented strategy.

Journey

1^st January 2015, when I started my completely new blog websitevidya.com, I created a Twitter profile for my blog just a few days before launching my blog. I knew that if my blog has to be successful, twitter is going to be one of the most important social channels for me. Not only for traffic on my website but also for brand visibility and user engagement. Moreover, I could connect with people in my niche.

Although I had few years of experience in blogging, frankly speaking, I had no idea how to increase twitter followers. Because I had never used twitter for any of the previous blogs. It was a completely new experience.

First 3 months, I had only about 200 followers.

In next 3 months, I started posting website content on twitter and started following people blindly as I had known some people do follow back. However, I got only a few followers and many of them were not in my niche as. Therefore, the user engagement was almost NIL. Just following people randomly did not do any good. Initially, I thought I had wasted my precious time. Nevertheless, that helped me to think in a new way and do some research and planning and that eventually worked for me.

What are those techniques that helped me to increase my twitter followers from 500 to 5000 in just a single week?

Here are those techniques:

1. Create a Legitimate Twitter Account

Legitimate Twitter accounts usually possess these things:

• Photo with a nice smile or Brand Logo
• Twitter banner
• Full name or brand name as a Twitter handle.
• A nice bio section
• URL of your website (if you have website)

2. Optimize Your Twitter Bio

Never ever, leave this field blank. It is by far the most important field for your profile visitors. It is the first thing your potential follower like to see. People like to fist know about you, what you do. If they do not find a bio, chances are less they will follow you.

I have seen many people leaving this field blank or just keeping a website URL. Which is not going to help you in any case. If you are looking to get large twitter followers, you must consider writing your bio. Make it interesting and in short, tell what you do.

Complete your profile by filling all the required information like your full name or Brand Name, Username and Bio. If you have a website, must include in the website section.

Here are the two examples of my own Brand accounts on Twitter:

Website Vidya

Search Engine Bay

3. Use Custom About Page

Twitter bio field does not have that much character to explain about yourself or your brand. Twitter bio can only include up to 160 characters. Therefore, it is always better to have a custom about page on your website where you can explain about yourself and your company. You can also place links to your other social profiles.

4. Share Valuable Content

This is one of the most important aspects of all. People always look for valuable resources that can benefit them. It is not necessary that you only post content from your own website. If we talk about quality content, post content from any website that gives value to the people.

5. Tweet Frequently

Tweeting more frequently and regularly has so many benefits. It gets you more followers, increases click rates and re-tweets, increases Engagement and most importantly, it builds authority and trust.

6. Be Helpful, generous, and inspiring

Always be helpful to your followers. Answer their questions and queries and resolve their problems related to your niche. Build good relations with your followers. This is very important so that your followers stay connected with you.

7. Schedule Your Tweets

Use tools like Hootsuite or Buffer to schedule your tweets and posts smartly. Just schedule your tweets and focus on work that is more important.

Buffer is great for scheduling your tweets, so you do not always have to create new tweets all the time. Once you composing your tweets with buffer, buffer shortens your link automatically and give you extra space to enter more characters and Hashtags.

8. Follow People in Your Niche

Following more people, gives you more followers. However, do not start following people just randomly. It will not do any good rather build a list of followers in your own niche.

If you start to follow people in your niche, you will notice the increase in engagement and re-tweets. More engagements attract more people.

Research shows a strong correlation between the number of followers and following.

9. Use Relevant Hashtags

Twitter perhaps the best and very first on which hashtag was used by Chris Messina. Now Twitter is the most known hashtag implementation social channel. Using relevant hashtags in your posts gets you two times more engagement. It will help you attract new followers who are searching for those keywords.

If you use correct Hashtags, your engagement rate bump significantly. Whenever you find an opportunity to tweet on the ‘Trending Topic’ just grab the opportunity with both hands.

10. Upload Your Contacts on Twitter

Upload all the contacts of your Gmail, outlook and Yahoo to twitter. It will help you connect with your friends more quickly. They are more likely to follow you back since they know you in real life.

11. Include Images

A Research by buffer app suggests including images in your tweets receive 18% more engagement than those without.

12. Place Twitter Profile Link on Your Website

There are a number of advantages of placing a twitter profile link to your website. Imagine your website is attracting traffic from organic sources like Google, Yahoo or Bing. You will have a great chance to convert those visitors into an audience. By simply asking them to connect with you on Facebook and Twitter.

13. Follow People That Twitter Recommends

You must have noticed the Who to follow list on the right-hand sidebar of Twitter. If you want more followers, follow those people twitter recommends you. Twitter account suggestions are based on several factors that include your imported contacts, the pattern of your follow history and niche in which you are. Twitter algorithm consider these factors to show you who to follow suggestions. So that you connect with the right people who are most likely to follow you.

14. Ask For a Re-tweet

Retweets are an excellent way of reaching new potential followers. Ask your followers to re-tweet your tweets by sending them a direct message. If you have good relationships with your followers (as we discussed earlier), most of them will re-tweet your tweets and this will get you some quality followers.

15. Find Influencers

Find the top 10 influencers in your niche and reach out to them. Ask them to share your content or retweet your post. You will find those influencers who will be happy to share your content with their readers provided you have awesome and unique content. If any of the influencers post your content with their readers then be ready to get hundreds or even thousands of new followers.

Luckily, I did not have to find any influencer rather few of them found me and shared my content with their readers.

16. Become a Copycat

Now that you have a list of influencers whom you want to model yourself after, go to their follower’s section on Twitter. You will get the list of thousands of their followers. All you need to do is to go through them and follow 40-50 of their followers each day. I would personally advise you to not to follow more than 100 people a day.

17. Use Followerwonk or Tweepi

Followerwonk or Tweepi is a great way to manage your followers. They are unique by its own.

Follwerwonk can help you to compare the followers of multiple twitter accounts and see the common followers.

While Tweepi helps you to do bulk follow and unfollow. Tweepi is useful for those who already have 5000+ followers.

18. Use TweetDeck to manage Twitter

TweetDeck makes it easier to manage your twitter account. You have the power to retweet, mention and engage with people who follow you and the people you follow. It also gives you a panoramic view of the notification, messages, and followers activities.

19. Tweet your best content repeatedly

Tweeting your best content repeatedly does not mean spamming your twitter account or twitter followers. I am asking you to retweet your best content that got most engagement like retweets, clicks and likes to target your audience in different time zones, who may have missed your tweets.

You can use the tools like HootSuite or Buffer to schedule these tweets for later in the day so you do not have to spend your whole day on Twitter.

20. Tweet out other’s user content

No one like those who just talks about themselves. The same goes with Twitter! If you just tweet the content of yours, people might find it boring. Because everyone has their own style of writing and representing things. Find the content of other Twitter users or share the quality content of other websites in your niche.

Many Twitter marketing experts follow the 80/20 rule – that is 80% other people’s content, and 20% your own.

While sharing content of other people, give them a mention using @username. This is going to be very useful. It will attract more retweet from the original user.

What should you never do?

Twitter Mass Follow (Browser Extension)

I would never ever recommend you to use any of the Twitter Mass Follow browser extension. It does help you to follow and unfollow people in a very quick time. It saves your time and you get a huge number of followers in no time. However, there is always a risk involved in getting your twitter account suspended.

I hope you will find these 20 tips useful and will help you to grow your twitter followers. Always remember, the more seeds you plant, the larger the harvest. Therefore, if you start implementing these basic techniques you could achieve the landmark of 5000 twitter followers in a day or two as well. It all depends on how you make strategies and implement on it.

What do you think about these strategies? Do you know other ways of attracting new twitter followers? Do share them in the comment section below.