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How I grew my Twitter (+9K) and Newsletter (+6k) in 3-4 months. AMA.

Hey Indie hackers!

I wanted to share with you some lessons and tricks that I used to grow my social networks.

Right now I'm starting Youtube channel, this one is going to be much harder. I would appreciate it if you give me some advice here.

In exchange, here are my learnings about growth.

Twitter

Here is my daily follower growth

Daily Followers Growth

And here is the list of the top 5 tweets:

So let's break it down step by step.

In the beginning, I had ~1K followers. This is the organic number of followers, most of them indie hackers. A nice opportunity to get to know new people (and thus new followers) is to participate in "Let's hack Twitter" posts here, on IH. As well be active on Twitter.

Important!

When you don't have many followers, it's not reasonable to try to tweet a lot and make viral tweets. You can get a viral tweet of course, but the probability is lower. Just because not many people see your tweets because you don't have many followers.

So if the number of followers is low, the better approach is to participate in discussions, engage with others, get followers from external sources (reddit/IH/HN).

Another approach is to launch a small product on PH. It should be good enough to get to the top, but not very complex so that you don't spend months building it. If you get traction on PH, you can also get a decent number of followers.

Now, when you get your first 1-2K, you can switch to tweeting good stuff. By this time, if you tweet every (!) day, and the content won't be some random motivational BS, then you'll have organic growth ~10 followers/day.

Randomly if your tweets are very good or funny or exceptional, they can get viral. This way you can get 1-2k followers in a day. This is what actually happens very rarely, but when it does, you get a significant increase.

My path was:

1K - Organic/IH/Engagement
2K (+1K) - When I sold my product I wrote a good store over here and got some traction on Twitter
3K (+1K) - Organic (tweeting daily)
5K (+2K) - viral tweet
6K-7K (+1-2K) - viral tweet + organic
7K-9.5K - Organic + shoutouts/engagement.

And somewhere in the list above, I made 2 PH launches. One for a newsletter, another one for a free book. This of course got me maybe ~1K followers.

So yep, that's it. Now I consider ~30-40 followers / day as a good result. But the average is about ~80 due to random traction on random tweets.

Newsletter

I have 6200 subs right now. Now a big number but still.
Open rate ~40-45%.

So what I actually did is

  1. Tweeted about it (~800 initial subs)
  2. Made a simple landing page, where I put some of my tweets as an example of what content people should expect from me.
  3. Launched it on PH (product #2 of the day). (+ ~1500-200 0subs)
  4. Made a free e-book and launched it on PH and twitter (+3K)

And now I have organic growth about ~20 subs/day.

  1. 5

    This is awesome stuff. Congratulations on your success!!

    For those looking for a "Let's hack Twitter" post, I just made one 😊

    All the best!

  2. 2

    How did you get yours first 100 followers?

    1. 2

      I think about ~20 of the first followers just followed me out of nowhere.

      Then I participated in IH topics "Let's hack Twitter". From IH I think I got ~100-200 followers

  3. 2

    I just started to play the Twitter game and working my way up to the first 100 followers. Your article was really insightful, especially:

    When you don't have many followers, it's not reasonable to try to tweet a lot and make viral tweets. You can get a viral tweet of course, but the probability is lower. Just because not many people see your tweets because you don't have many followers.
    So thank you so much for the article, hope to more about your Youtube channel in the future :)

    1. 2

      Yeah, first followers is the hardest thing to get. You can get them from external sources (e.g. writing a good article somewhere), or talking to people on Twitter.

      One funny or good comment can give you first 100 followers

      1. 1

        Thank you! I'll be sure to thank you after I have my first 100 :)

  4. 2

    thank you for the great detail tutorial. I admit that I am terrible at growing followers with social media. This helps a ton!!

    1. 2

      You should link your Twitter to your IH profile!

    2. 2

      Practice makes perfect! :)

  5. 2

    Thanks! It is awesome!

  6. 2

    Do you have a plan about the maximum number of subs, or this strategy implies as many as possible subs?

    1. 2

      Well, people say that engagement > followers/subs.

      But. On the other hand, the more followers/sub you have, the more engagement you get.

      I don't have any specific numbers. But the thing is, when I launch my paid book, I need to have decent numbers. So about 20K both on Twitter and Newsletter might be good.

      But will see how it goes. If I wanted to just get random followers/subs, I'd spam everywhere and get bots, instead of real people.

      So it's 50/50. I work on the numbers, I work on the engagement as I can, numbers motivate me, but the quality should be good too.

  7. 1

    Thanks so much for the pro tips, Victor. I'd love to hear more about what it took to get those numbers: https://www.indiehackers.com/post/tell-me-the-other-half-of-your-success-story-7dec3e3d17

  8. 1

    Amazing stuff, @Akcium! Followed you though I don't have that much time on Twitter at the time.

  9. 1

    Congrats, when you said " get followers from external sources (reddit/IH/HN)." How should we go about doing this? Interact on the platforms with our twitter in our bios?

  10. 1

    Really great stuff, Victor. I think your approach makes a ton of sense.

    Aside: Your "I made this with CSS and I do provide code." tweet made me laugh.

    Any tips for launching a newsletter on PH?

    1. 1

      For newsletter on PH it's important to show some content before people sign up.
      That's what a mod told me.

      So that it's not just a sign up form

  11. 1

    Congrats and thanks for sharing.

  12. 1

    That's amazing! Congrats! I've seen you really active on twitter :D
    How much do you spend on twitter, per day?

    1. 2

      At least one hour, usually more :)

      1. 2

        That's quite a lot!
        Besides having this audience, the question now is: is it worth it?

          1. 1

            Let me state again -I think what you've done is amazing!

            Second, about the article:
            I've heard this over and over (the "build an audience" bullshit), and I still don't think it's worth it.
            If you will have something to sell, and actually manage to do that, then yeah, probably.

            Also, I really love the first comment in that post :)

  13. 1

    Lots of good ideas in this !! Thank you !!

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