9
27 Comments

How did you grow your twitter followers?

Hated all forms of online presence but recently (grudgingly) realized the importance of it if I'm to run a startup. Picked up twitter and I find it interesting yet it baffles me how I'm supposed to run this. I managed to get only 30 followers and I'm stuck on how I can grow this within the next few months.

Anyone have experience regarding twitter follower growth? Any battle-tested strategies?

posted to Icon for group Growth
Growth
on June 27, 2020
  1. 6

    My tips:

    1. Publish content (blog, ebook, whatever) and link back to your Twitter
    2. Reply fast (within 1 minute) to big accounts in your niche, so you get mentioned and gain a lot of impressions.
    3. Write interesting stuff. Give people a good reason to follow you
    4. Explain this reason in your bio, with a short pitch of yourself.

    Extra: a few days ago I saw a post here on IH about Indie Hackers following each other on Twitter. I see this kind of post every month or so. It's a good opportunity for a start.

    1. 2

      I completely agree with all of your tips, especially about Indie Hackers following each other. I recently got 99 followers just from it.

      1. 1

        Are they useful followers? Meaning do they contribute any significant value to your online presence (do they comment on your stuff, retweet, give likes)? Just curious!

    2. 1

      Replying fast is an interesting strategy!

      Never thought about that. Will give that a try :)

    3. 1

      I am still quite new on my Twitter journey but what helped a lot was the one about replying fast on Big accounts in your niche.

      I only have 70+ followers but from one only interaction, I gained around 14-15 followers. One condition, you need to provide high value with your comments

      1. 1

        Yeah, you have to be faster than others and write something useful and relevant. Not as easy as it sounds!

  2. 5

    I usually outsource my marketing efforts and Twitter growth is definitely one of these as it's pretty time consuming.
    I had a lot of success using Hypegrowth and steady follower growth of 400 followers or so per month.

    1. 2

      I am curious about hypergrowth. How does It actually work? Are they engaging for you? Are you still posting content or do they?

    2. 2

      Are you able to convert your followers into a sales channel?

      1. 1

        Curious about this as well

    3. 1

      I'm usually weary of services like this as it's hard to analyse the legitimacy of it. Hmmm I'll do more research on this.

      Did you have any practical, observable impact from their services? Like more engagements, views, etc?

      1. 2

        I would be interested on hearing this aswell

    4. 2

      This comment was deleted 4 years ago.

  3. 2

    Who is your target audience? I've also just started to invest in twitter a bit more (only at about 100 followers - up from ~20 last month). What's working for me so far is:

    • sharing the learnings from building my company
    • sharing data I have as a result of running by business that other people probably don't know [0]
    • following people who are my target users and post about my space

    (See example tweets below [2], [3])

    In an onboarding call yesterday, I learned that the new user found my product because he has a saved search for AppleNotes (a competitor). I had referred to AppleNotes in my tweetstorm, so it came up in his saved search. I'm curious to explore if other users who are actively looking for new notes tools have a similar saved search for competitor tools - perhaps they do in your space too?

    Also want to link back to this useful post from IH this past may [1].

    [0]: Content marketing handbook: https://priceonomics.com/the-content-marketing-handbook/
    [1] https://www.indiehackers.com/post/the-indie-hacker-guide-to-building-a-twitter-audience-89d227e300
    [2] data tweet: https://twitter.com/cara_jacqueline/status/1280937230144425984
    [3] personal learnings tweet: https://twitter.com/cara_jacqueline/status/1283453964323708929

    1. 1

      Great insights @cara

      I'm also thinking about sharing my personal experiences building my company more and focusing on giving value to other people. Following target users isn't something I tried yet but I'll give that a shot!

  4. 2

    Here's how I've been doing it. And it comes with results, grown many times since that post.

    However I've decrease my Twitter time now that it's not very important to what I need right now.

    1. 1

      Bookmarked! Great read. Will reference it during my strategy session :)

      1. 2

        Best wishes! If it feels too much for the whatever reason just take a break. Twitter can be a drain on energy big time. Depends on who you follow and what you pay attention to too.

  5. 2

    It's all about the value you provide with the credit you have.

    I found this course very useful to grow the twitter audience and account overall.

    1. 1

      It's so obvious but I have just started to think about the value part of the equation.

      Go to where your audience and provide value.

      Really simple and obvious but somehow I got caught up with how THEY can help ME. Will take this to heart from now on :)

      1. 2

        Fair point :)

        You could try the above course. It has some great tips and helped me grow my Twitter account from 10 to 250.

        1. 1

          I shall check it out :)

  6. 2

    I would argue that online presence is completely unnecessary. I know plenty of founders who are not online, as far as their real identity, and they are still making lots of money. One "big win" example that comes to mind is Plaid CEO, he's got like 400 tweet followers, and sold the company 5 billion dollars. You need to be where your customers are, but that doesn't mean online, or at least not on social media.

    There is only an illusion that you need to have a social media presence, created by people who are either really good at it, or figured out how to hack it, and now want others to compete in the social media space, because they are already #1 and you competing for social attention only propels them forward, while giving you nothing in return.

    1. 2

      Appreciate the practical advice.

      Perhaps I should reconsider if I need this as well. It's always nice to have but I may just be wasting my time when I can be doing better ROI items.

      Thanks!

  7. 1

    Here is my twitter handle: https://twitter.com/mutamuls
    follow me, I follow you back

    1. 1

      Sweet! Followed :)

  8. 1

    This comment was deleted 6 years ago.

Trending on Indie Hackers
I built a WhatsApp AI bot for doctors in Peru — launched 3 weeks ago, 0 paying customers, and stuck waiting for Meta to approve my app User Avatar 52 comments Fixing broken scrapers instead of working on my actual product. So I made it my problem. User Avatar 44 comments I built an open-source PII masking layer for LLM APIs — early traction, looking for design partners User Avatar 33 comments How to see revenue problems before they get worse User Avatar 29 comments From broke and burned out as a PM, to launching my SaaS and optimizing my health User Avatar 27 comments I kept starting projects and dropping them. So I built a system that wouldn’t let me User Avatar 23 comments