Finding Engaged Twitter Followers
I've been using Twitter as the primary marketing avenue for my personal finance newsletter (http://launchpersonalfinance.com). I've had decent growth with my twitter account (nearing 600 followers after a little over a month).
I've followed the usual advice:
-Follow accounts in my niche
-Engage with their content
-Consistently post my own content, etc.
One of the more common pieces of advice I see is to look through other accounts list of followers to identify potential accounts to follow (and hopefully they'll follow you back). I haven't really played the unfollow game, but have used this method to find followers. Of course, I know that engaged followers are more important than follower account.
Today, I had a realization, it makes more sense to look at the tweets from accounts you're following and see who engages with them, as they are much more likely to engage with your content as well. So I started doing that today and have added nearly 20 followers with much less work than the usual review of follower lists.
In hindsight, this seems like a very obvious action to take, but I haven't really read about it in the any of the twitter guides I've read through so I wanted to share here as well.
Thanks!
The only way to grow with engaged followers on Twitter is to post native content on Twitter that's valuable. Don't take them to another website, don't use hashtags, just tweet "micro-blog" style writing that helps people understand an idea or topic you're an expert in.
Once you have engaged followers, posting links to your other content (like websites, products, etc.) is fine, but it's not going to help you grow you Twitter audience (unless it's really valuable).
What do you think about spending time personally engaging with relevant accounts?
I think unless you really have something valuable to add it’s mostly a waste of time.
I’ve seen other people who basically summarize tweets in their own words so they can be seen in the comments and still try to look smart. To me, it just looks like you don’t have any original ideas.
I still think if you’re looking for a genuine audience, being an independent thinker who provides value through your own channels is the way to get the best traction. It takes more time but it’s way more valuable as a result.
I personally believe that posting content will not get you far if you do not already have a large established audience. With how saturated hashtags have become and how much organic reach has dropped I just can't see how posting content with no outreach will generate results.
I'm agreeing with you here 100%. There is more content in the whole internet than people could ever consume. You need to bring the content to your audience until you reach some arbitrary turning point. From then on, if you post good content, your audience will be eager to share your content and bring it in front of more people.
You have put some time into calibrating the strategy to maximize your reach. Obviously that is the only way to make your strategy work. I have seen plenty of people tweet 9x a day that are still @ low numbers. The niche and content obviously matters all things considered. I appreciate your transparency.
Curious your take on this... Do you think a url link to a prospects most active social profile is as good as an email address?
Sorry, I don't think I understand your question, can you please rephrase?
Do you think that a case can be made that a url link to an active social profile of a lead for your business (instagram.com/chazvandemotter) is as valuable as that person's email address?
I guess it's just another way to contact someone. Usually, people tend to have a closer look at their emails than anything else, so Email is probably best, but that's only a tendency.
Ultimately, just use what you find. If you can't find an email but the IG profile, it's still your best bet.
If you post native content it will. If all you do is post links to other content, you’re right.
Like I said, it takes longer but once the ball is rolling you’re an authority in the space.
Not tryin to be confrontational here by any stretch, but posting native content with no ad dollars, outreach or high volume of organic reach behind it puts no eyeballs on the content. People seem to think that by creating original content alone that it will be a magnet for customers. I believe it takes more than that.
No problem I understand. Let me give you some stats.
I've been able to grow my Twitter from 100 followers to 3500+ in the last year very casually by posting things that help people build indie SaaS businesses. When you get more followers, people like and retweet when you have good content, and that gets more eyeballs on the content.
Here's my stats from just the last month:
That's over 700k impressions and 34k profile visits from 236 tweets.
Here's my best tweet from the last month (to show you what content works). It got 42k+ impressions.
Obviously there's multiple ways to grow an audience, this is just one way!
So, basically I don't think those stats tell anything about whether a particular strategy works or not. Also, your tweet from last month isn't relevant - you already had probably more than 2k highly targeted followers at the time of posting it. It's all just isn't relevant.
Also, I have to agree, that "just posting great content" doesn't make the cut. It will greatly help you to convert profile visitors into followers, but you still need to get those profile visitors.
It's just like everywhere else, you can name it: YouTube, your self hosted blog or another website, Instagram, etc, you won't make it with "just great content". Everybody knows this, everybody has believed in it and everybody has come to the realization, that it is a lie.
Maybe you're the exception, that's cool, too. But that's the most of it.
📈 There is one metric though, that I would consider as relevant to determine, how important content is, or rather said how well your content performs. It's the number of profile visits relative to your follower gain.
Explanation: When a user visits your profile, the content is probably what will be the deciding factor, whether the user presses the "follow" button or not. The fewer profile visits you need to convince a user to follow, the better your content (or maybe just your profile makes a better impression).
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🧮 On another note, I've crunched a few numbers. I'm not yet sure, what story they are telling, but I have taken your (@jordanmoconnor) screenshot and put the impressions, profile visits, mentions, and absolute follower gain into relation to current followers. I did the same for my account:
@jordanmoconnor:
@mxmzb (that's me):
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PS.: With 236 / 28 ≈ 8.42 tweets per day average for the past 28 days, it doesn't really look like "casually" to me (IMHO!). It's actually quite consistent and sophisticated, to put good content out at that rate (even if quite a few of those are probably very casual replies).
PPS.: Maybe this whole comment is bullshit. 🤷♂️
Excellent advice!
Yeah, I took the idea of following people early for follow backs, but never got around to the unfollow part. It feels kind of weird to me to use following people as the primary way to get followers.
I like the idea of responding to people who respond to posts of people you're following (there has to be a better way to talk about this stuff haha).
I was also thinking today: Why doesn't twitter give you access to a feed of people who are following you? That would be a great way to show you're a real person - actually taking the time to help people who follow you, instead of it being a one-way comm. And it seems like it'd be easy to build as well, but maybe not an effective strategy overall.
Seems like it'd be very insightful to know what people interested in you are talking about?
Yea, eventually you’re content has got to be good enough to start attracting followers on your own. But it’s still an ok mechanism to help jump start growth.
The “follower view” you propose would definitely be an interesting mechanism to see what your followers are talking about.
Ok, just tried it. Added 34 (almost 50%) of my followers to a list.
It's pretty noisy, don't think it's very insightful ;-) Would be nice to be able to filter to only see their tweets, not retweets. Did find some tweets to engage with, but I don't think I can give much value to the task (eg: What did I accomplish by doing this?).
Ah, I should have kept reading :D
Yeah, I previously wrote a little twitter client. I might try adding a feature that creates a twitter list and syncs it to my followers to see if anything interesting crops up.
I have a gut feeling it'll be just as noisy as any other feed, but who knows!
Having a feed of your followers sounds like a nightmare to me. Why would you want this? The people, who want to get in touch with you, will just let you know anyway with mentions, replies, DMs, likes, whatsoever. People can't handle the mass of messages starting from a few thousand followers, how do you intend to purposefully use a feed of the content of all your followers, too?
It sounded interesting for a few reasons, like the idea that you should find your audience then find a problem to solve, or actually interacting with and providing value elevates you. But, yeah, that's not what it looked like when I tried it ;-)
You can add those followers manually to the List and see their tweets in the list. You can make more Lists, separate them by interests in different lists, etc. It's one of the options in the Twitter, check it.
Yeah, just created a list with almost half of my followers to see what that feed would look like. It was easy to engage with, but I don't think I found a lot of value in it.
Love the tip! I've been randomly following people but it's a total shot in the dark. Posting valuable information seems best but I'm having a bit of imposter syndrome in my niche (stock trading) because I don't consider myself a complete expert.
jordanmoconnor really hits the nail on the head too though!
Regardless, seems like when starting out, you need to test a lot of hypotheses.
Have you experimented with engaging on relevant posts for 10-30 mins/ day?
Not enough. Financial twitter seems pretty noisy so it feels like I'm still tuning my "antenna". Definitely seems like it'd be helpful when starting from zero (like I am).
I personally believe that a URL link to the right person's profile can be just as valuable if not more valuable than an email address as many accounts are more responsive to cold dms than any other form of cold outreach.
Yes, most of my attention really focuses on engaging with others and less posting original stuff. I’ve had ok success with DMs as well
I believe that there is white space for saas products to help streamline this process. As of now it seems that you give up organization for efficiency or vice versa as it relates to trying to engage at scale
Cold outreach is one of the things I have NOT done yet, but is on my list after I put a bit more polish on the landing page / branding side of things. I think you're spot on with this advice/belief! Looking forward to trying this very soon. Thank you!
I think following people in the first place is a quite bad approach. It's still a silent "follow for follow", and that doesn't get you anywhere.
It's just this unpleasant feeling of not being interested in each others content, and only following back for the follow, and probably also unfollowing if you unfollow them at some point.
It's totally okay to not follow people. If you're not interested in their content, it's no reason to shame anyone (e.g. people shaming you for not following them after they followed you). This isn't the kind of audience that you want to gather, anyway.
A very good point, and given the returns (basically none) from this approach... it is clear that you are right!
how long do u spend on tweeter everyday?
Probably an hour or so right now, I’ll hop on for a couple minutes throughout the day whenever I have time.
I see, where do u think u got most of the followers from? comments? any recommanded account for following?
I think you need to systemize your twitter growth. Make a plan, if you want to become serious about it. Schedule a time for various tasks to grow your twitter followers. Experiment a lot in those tasks.
E.g. go and find relevant quality accounts and engage with them in a valuable way. Plan your tweets. Polish your account. Try to find high engagement tweets from other users and engage in the comments there. Stuff like that, you know 🤷♂️
But make a plan, I'm serious about that point!
Thanks for this insight and reminder @LaunchPF
Cool tip! Are you promoting that with your personal twitter account or the one for the newsletter?
I have a personal account, but don’t really tweet actively there. This is for the newsletter.