How to build Twitter audience?
After seeing so many people here using Twitter for marketing , building a community etc., I was thinking of going with 'building in public' idea that most people recommended here. It seems like a good way to keep yourself accountable and also validate / get early feedback on ideas.
But first, I wanted to understand, how do you go about building a twitter audience from scratch ? Like, if you hardly have like 5-10 followers, how do you grow them into a decent number to get feedback / validate ideas etc ? Of course, the obvious answer might be to post interesting stuff initially, but how do you make sure, the content you post is reaching your target audience ?
I'm looking for any tips that would help in building an online social media presence from scratch ?
If you have links to good articles / books about the same, please share them as well.
If you're starting from zero my advice would be to focus more on building genuine relationships with other people like you than on creating exceptional content that nobody will read.
Some things I've experimented with recently that I think are worth trying out:
DM every single person that follows you and start a conversion. I usually ask how they found me. It yields helpful information and usually turns into a more interesting discussion.
Post more media content. It's easy to scroll through text on Twitter, but when you see an image/video, it's harder to ignore. I'm not saying post your tweets as images, because that'd be really annoying, but if there's unique content you have that can be posted as an image, try it out! I've posted a couple sketches recently and they are some of my most engaged with tweets.
Participate in conversations started by people with large audiences than you. But be practical. Don't be the billionth person to reply Elon Musk and try and piggy back off of his fame. Find people on Twitter that interesting to you and have at most several thousand followers. Your replies are more likely to be seen and engaged with.
Answer other people's questions. Sometimes people have problems and they ask for help on Twitter. Or they put out a poll and are asking more as a curiosity. Either way, take the opportunity to respond if you have something interesting to say.
Thanks, they are some really good points. I think the 3rd point especially is really valid, more often than not, when you share your inputs, the thread/people in the thread have already moved onto something else.
I can tell you :)
When I started working on building my audience, I had just around 5-7 followers. I was obsessed with the idea of "building in public" so I started daily reporting on what I'm doing, which problem faced, show some designs, etc.
I also did the following things:
As a result my grow is approx. 10 followers in a day.
Welcome to my twitter account (see in my profile) where you can see exactly what I'm doing.
Good points, may I know, how much of time do you spend in acquiring an audience on twitter ? Do you use tools like buffer to space out your tweets ? I presume that sharing intelligent/useful information is work in its own regard and requires considerable effort ?
A lot of people focus on posting in the beginning. That's def important, but one more step is required: to find like-minded people to build relationships with so that they can see what you share.
It is a LONG LONG process. Also why a lot of people give up after trying for a few weeks.
But the way I think about it is that if each week you can make 3 new friends on Twitter, that's 3 more people that can support/help you. Let's say you give minimum effort and make 36 friends in 3 months, that's actually enough people to amplify your voice!
Invest in relationships. Don't take shortcuts. And a shameless plug 😅 for a free email course I made to help others.
There's a good book "how to gain 1million followers in 1 month" it's facebook but it's helpful
I'm bad at following this but it's good advice from a founder who does well on both Twitter and Linkedin:
https://www.linkedin.com/feed/update/urn:li:activity:6773601064760545280
Thanks, getting an error like below : The media could not be loaded, either because the server or network failed or because the format is not supported. Any other youtube / working link ?
Try this one
Thanks !!
start adding to conversations around people you like, respect, and folks in your industry or niche that you're exploring!
may I shamelessly plug tw500 here
the name itself contains 500, and the whole thing is designed to guide you to your first 500 followers.
https://www.subscribepage.com/tw500
I was hovering around 7 followers for months until I started following and engaging with accounts that have my target audience as followers.
For example: my target customers are bloggers and I follow several accounts that have more than 10,000 followers most of whom are bloggers.
Having a good elevator pitch on your profile and then simply following your target customers to get your profile in front of their eyes also works.
I now have 39 followers.
Think about a good bio.
Make your posts valuable (share a lot).
Post regularly, let's say once a day.
Comment on posts that are related to your potential audience.
Repeat.
Change things if they don't work. There really isn't much else to say I think. All the paid courses basically say the same ^^.