I'm in the 40 followers trap on Twitter, how can I get out of it?

1. Re-tweeting good content
   1.1. Adding a mention
2. Use advanced search
   2.1. Add factors like at least two re-tweets and five likes
   2.2. Sort after newest, reply with a good comment
3. Use images. They gather more attention
4. Stay laser-focused on your niche/topic

Good luck. Btw. you're getting tips from a guy with 15 followers @thisiswenzel - so you've been warned! ;) But my account is from 2009 - which makes it even worse. Haha, no, but I haven't used it up until last week.

Do something valuable that's off of twitter.

When people find it, tell them to follow you on Twitter.

Constantly tweet out value, no matter how many people are following you.

You need to interact with other people or they'll never notice you. My niche (youtube intro videos) is pretty spammy, so I built a bot to populate a list of tweets about intro videos, gaming, and youtube videos. I filter out obviously one-way broadcasts that don't seem like they were posted by real human users (porn and music videos, mostly).

I segment tweets that mention a bunch of keywords into low/medium/high value buckets. Once or twice a week I'll go through the high value bucket and like a bunch of tweets (generally people posting or talking about intro videos), which is pretty quick/easy.

If I'm super bored, I'll go through the low/medium lists. These are actually more time consuming because a lot more variety of content makes it through and I have to read it a bit more slowly and be more careful with my likes.

It feels a bit spammy, but it's really no different than the "promoted topics" or "follow this topic" that Twitter itself promotes--I'm just curating it myself. They want engagement, and as long as you're not automating it I think it's fine.

If your niche isn't super spammy, you can probably achieve 90% of that with saved searches (the search box allows you to add and blacklist keywords and lets you save searches).

The other "less lurkery" approach I've seen work is to follow influencers in your niche. Retweet and comment on their content and you'll show up when other people browse those threads. I prefer the "like stuff in my niche" approach because it's more brainless, and I usually do that as a break from other work.

Engagement/traffic are still fairly low at the 900 follower mark, but analytics shows ~4k impressions and 600 profile visits this month. In a world where most people don't know intro makers are even a thing, I'm treating that more as an education channel than a direct traffic/conversions channel. If I can plant the seed on Twitter that you can just buy an intro video, I'll hopefully scoop them up in a month or two when they search "intro maker" on Google.

Just improve each part of the funnel.

1. Awareness 👀

People aren't seeing your tweets, so put them in places where people can see them. You can easily link a tweet in an Indie Hackers post, for example. You can reply to tweets that come from popular accounts. And you can try various means to get popular accounts to retweet your stuff, e.g. tweet about them, discuss your tweets in DMs with people, making super re-tweetable tweets, etc.

All of these methods involve other people, so don't be lazy, annoying, spammy, or selfish in how you go about it. Be thoughtful. Yes, that will require lots of time and focus to do. But IMO you should only attempt growth in a particular channel if it's important enough for you to put in the time and focus.

2. Interest/Consideration 🤔

Great, now people are seeing your tweets. But if you want them to follow you, your tweets have to actually be good.

If you don't know what makes for a good tweet, spend 2-4 days researching which accounts are big and growing quickly, and look at what they tweet. Reverse engineer it. Figure out how you can take their strategies and tailor them to your unique knowledge and skillset. Then improve your own tweets.

Note that this works for all marketing. Marketing on the internet is an open-book test. It's very easy to see what the winners are doing and learn from them on pretty much every channel, but most people don't do this.

For example, you're using lots of hashtags in your tweets. I know very few (maybe zero?) popular tweeters in startup and tech circles who use hashtags. They're actually a negative signal for quality, and a positive signal for "this person is new to Twitter and doesn't tweet good stuff so they're trying to use hashtags to get seen." People will take your account less seriously when they see hashtags.

3. Conversion ✅

Consider the path of someone who follows you. They probably say, "Hmm, interesting tweet. Is there more from this guy? Let me check his profile!"

Then they visit your profile to assess you. What are they going to look at? Your photo, your bio, and your most recent few tweets. That's your pitch. So your bio and your most recent tweets need to be good. Give people a reason to follow you.

Here's what you're currently giving your visitors:

You're talking about pizza and basketball and sitting on a couch. Again, think about it from a visitor's point of view. Does that make them want more tweets from you?

Give visitors some inkling of what you tweet about, and make it sound desirable, and then stick to that for the most part. Also, pin a great tweet to the top of your profile that's in alignment with your value prop. Ideally your pinned tweet and 2-3 most recent tweets are high quality stuff that proves what you say in your bio.

48 now! I also suggest you give https://twitter.com/SantiagoMQui a follow, he's got some cool stuff for you

Hey @maorofek

From what I can see, you are generally posting useful and interesting stuff.

I don't know what the answer is.

I started Twitter about a week 2 weeks ago and have 66 followers so far @harlan_zw, I know about 5 of them IRL. This is by no means to brag - it's not an impressive number.

This is what has helped me so far:

• Add fellow IndieHackers. We're all in this together trying to grow. The key here is to follow people who you've actually talked to on a thread
• Tag users and projects who you think will engage
• Follow people who engage with your content
• Find 'newsletter/newsy' type twitter accounts without heaps of followers and try and get your post featured by them. For me, this seemed to just magically happen, I followed everyone else who has featured

The law of reciprocation is a wonderful thing. Ignore the inbalance of the followers / following for now.

Best of luck with it

Perhaps try the opposite of what you're doing now. Selfishly mass spamming everyone who reached out to help you every day for multiple days in a row. 🙃

When does IH get a block button :(

There are already great tips here in the comments.
Additionally, I would suggest you to give this email course a try
https://www.subscribepage.com/tw500
p.s. I'm the author

I wrote a whole post on how to build your Twitter audience from scratch, I'm sure you'll find it valuable: https://www.indiehackers.com/post/how-to-grow-your-twitter-audience-from-scratch-b0f97c784f

TL;DR Focus on commenting on others' content instead of posting your own when you're small.

Disclaimer: I'm the author of a Twitter growth hacking blog and founder of a Twitter growth hacking tool

The formula is easy, but unfortunately it is a lot of hard work. No shortcut.

1. Polish up your profile to make it attractive
2. Interact with people like you mean it
3. Follow people you enjoy reading from
4. Post good stuff consistently

Then just repeat everyday. Results won't show in a day or two, but they will come.

Firstly, I would lose the hashtags. It comes off as very corporate. Secondly, your tweet numbers are quite low. If you want to reach more and gain good followers, then you have to be active. And if the idea of doing that makes you think you might lose followers, that's not a bad thing - they probably weren't useful followers. In my experience building social accounts in the past, the most success comes from replying to others (adding something useful perhaps) and sometimes being a little opinionated. People with no opinions do poorly on social media. Good luck!

Establish credibility by showing what you do that is UNIQUE in profile.

With engaging content, you should follow the most recent hashtags. With the right content for recent hashtag and mentions, I think you can engage more people. Similarly, include hashtag or mentions of companies. Like you can write a good post about IndieHackers and can share it with hashtag and mentions. So, if IndieHackers twitter handling team would find it worthy, then they would definitely retweet it, and you would find a way to get more followers.

If you get stuck on Twitter, go off platform. Build something cool or write a great blog post and post it here, on HN, Product Hunt, etc. Include a link to your Twitter. You might have better luck there which will then drive people to follow you.

I'm in a similar boat. I think the best thing you can do if growth is your objective is to be extremely laser focussed on a dominating a small niche.

You don't want something where there's zero competition because there's probably no appetite. Instead, it should be starting and you should feel like you could do better.

I like talking about a variety of topics and that doesn't lend itself well to growth. What's something you're interested in and how can you do better in that niche than other creators?

Also recommend following other people (around 10-30K) that do well and seeing what stuff you can steal (preferably in unrelated niches). Perhaps they're doing pics, or long threads, or pics of books that they than discuss etc.

The short answer is you can't, easily. You need charisma, sheer luck, and a lot of external help.

I know because it's the same trap you snag into at 500, 100, 1500 followers and so on. Or about 2.800 followers, like mine.

Everyone recommends the same stuff, which makes sense. Post great content, tweet consistently, post native content like threads, engage, ask questions, mention influencers, tag experts when sharing their content, add relevant hashtabgs, you name it. But nothing seems to work.

retweet others post, reply to others using Hootsuite stream feature. You can set keywords to get the curated tweets for which you can start engagement.

One trick we did when I worked for a media company was to follow those following your followers but check their accounts first.

Thank you for these awesome feedback guys, here's my Twitter account for your review:
https://twitter.com/maorofek

I'd recommend engaging with some people who have maybe 10x the followers you do, and trying to give them value. Helpful suggestions etc.

Twitter is a weird imaginary balancing act. I feel like you shouldn’t follow way way more than follow you or it looks weird.

I jettisoned an old account a few years ago, I had more followers than people I followed so that was a bit difficult. My follower count hasn’t recovered on the new account so far, but I haven’t really been actively trying to increase follower count until recently.

I think the way I did it last time was to follow a collection of folks I liked, then over time i would mention them, and some would follow back. Then add another collection a bit further down the line, and repeat.

I guess the other way is to work on a popular project, or in some role where you have to be active on social media.

I suppose the important thing is to have the right people follow back though, not much point having a load of bots or people you have no interest in following you.

I follow back! Feel free to follow me: https://twitter.com/BoostlaneNews