Few days ago my Twitter followers count crossed 5000 milestones. Today, I already have 6178 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 website.
In this article, I will illustrate all the things that helped me to break that magical 5000 follower milestone. It feels great when you do R&D and get success while implementing those techniques that you learn while you do R&D. I will illustrate each and every aspect and resources that I used to gain my first 5000 twitter followers. I promised you that I am not going to hide even 0.1% of my secret activity. And I bet even you can get this amount of twitter followers provided you follow the things honestly that I am going to explain.
So how did I break that magic 5000 follower milestone?
1st January 2015, when I started my whole new blog websitevidya.com, I instantly created a profile for my website. I knew that if my blog is to be successful, twitter is going to be one of the most important aspects. Not only for traffic on my website but also for brand visibility and user engagement.
Although I had 8 years of blogging experience, 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 whole 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 was knowing some people do follow back. But I got only few followers and many of them not in my niche as well. It is not at all going to drive engagement, or traffic on my website.
It was a time when I started doing R&D and learned a lot of techniques that helped me increased my twitter followers from about 500 to 5000 in just a single week.
Here are those techniques:
- Optimize Your Twitter Bio: Never ever leave this filled blank. It is by far the most important field for your profile visitor. It is the first thing your potential follower look at. I have seen many people leaving this field blank or just a website URL. Which is not going to help you when it comes to large following, engagement and website traffic. So always keep in mind that you complete your profile by filling all the required information like your full name, username and bio. If you are a brand, star or a website must include your tagline.
- Use Custom About Page: Twitter bio field does not have that much character to explain about yourself and Your brand. Twitter bio can only include upto 160 characters. So 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.
- Share Valuable Content: This is one of the most important aspect 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 people.
- Tweet Frequently: Tweeting more frequently and regularly has many great advantages. It gets you more followers, increases click rates and re-tweets, increases Engagement and most importantly it builds authority and trust.
- Be Helpful, be generous, and inspiring: Always be helpful to your followers. Solve their question and queries and resolve their problems related to your niche. It will build good relation between you and your followers and you will be benefited in the longer run.
- Schedule Your Tweets: Use tools like Hootsuite or Buffer helps you schedule your tweets and posts smartly according to your strategy. Follow a tweeting trend and schedule according to it. Posting content regularly will increase your engagement and visibility. It will help you to gain more twitter followers.
- Follow People In Your Niche: Following more people definitely increase more followers. But if you start following people in your niche is even a better choice. You will notice the increase in engagement, re-tweets and followers. Research shows a strong correlation between the number of followers and following.
- Use Relevant Hashtags: Using relevant hashtags in your posts gets you 2x more engagement. It will help you attract new followers who are searching for those keywords.
- 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. It is more likely that they will follow you back, especially since they know you in real life.
- Include Images: A Research by buffer app suggests, including images in your tweets receive 18% more engagement than those without.
- Place Twitter Profile Link on Your Website: Placing a twitter profile link on your website gives you a huge advantage and increases twitter followers. Imagine you get traffic to your website from search engines like Google, Yahoo or Bing. You have a great chance that these organic visitors will follow you on twitter or any other social network provided you have quality content on your website that give value to your audience.
- Twitter Mass Follow (Chrome Extension): I installed Twitter Mass Follow chrome extension. It helps you follow and unfollow people quickly. You can search for twitter profiles in your niche and follow their followers. You will surely get huge number of followers within sometime. Later you can un-follow those who do not follow you with just a single click of a button.
- Follow People To Whom Twitter Recommends: You must have notices twitter shows a list of profile under Who to follow on the sidebar. If you want more followers, follow those people to whom twitter recommends you. There is the highest possibility that they will follow you back.
- Ask For A Re-tweet: You can ask your followers to re-tweet your tweets by sending them a direct message. If you have good relation with your followers (as we discussed earlier), most of them will re-tweet your tweets and it will give you some good followers.
- Find Influencers: I was one of those luckiest people who does not have to find any influencer rather few influencers found me. I would advise you to reach out to other thought leaders and features 10 people on your blog. They will be happy to share your content with their readers and eventually it will lead to growing engagement, and followers.
I hope these 15 points help you grow your twitter followers. Always remember, the more seeds you plant, the larger the harvest. So if you start implementing these 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.
Please leave me a comment, question or suggestion.