Learnings from 2000+ people trying to grow on Twitter

From January to March of this year, my co-founder and I organized a "Twitter Growth" challenge anyone could participate in.

2245 people entered, and we found out a few interesting things about what they did and how it correlates with succeeding at growing an audience.

Thought I would share it with the community here.

Just for context: the challenge contained a ranking system, based on number of followers, follower growth, and engagement rate.

Number of tweets

On average, each participant tweeted 564 times. That's about 6 times per day and it includes replying to other people's tweets.

Someone tweeted a whopping 14,000 times (and yes I checked, it wasn't even spam).

And if you take the top 5% of rankers, they averaged 2300 tweets (about 27 tweets and replies every day).

Engagement rate

It's hard to find a definite stat about the average engagement rate on Twitter, but I've read in a few places it's around 0.5%.

The people who joined our challenge averaged a 2.27% engagement rate, which is really good.

If you take away those who didn't get any engagement whatsoever (some people entered but didn't go through with the experiment), the average engagement rises to 3.7%!

And the record holder in that aspect averaged 16% (I excluded those who had an insane engagement rate because of too few followers).

Follower growth

On to the main course: followers

(though I'll agree it's not the single metric you should optimize for, most people who want to grow on Twitter do make it a key metric)

The average growth rate was 146% (but that's biased because some people had just a couple followers when they entered).

And the average follower gain was +624 over the course of the challenge.

This number jumps up to +1733 if you tweeted and replied 5 times per day on average.

24 people gained more than +10K followers over the 3 months.

Less than half of them had less than 10K followers when they started, which is some pretty impressive growth.

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That's for the stats I was able to analyze today (challenge ended yesterday) and that I wanted to share with IHers.

As for the lessons, I also found out the following:

1. The more you tweet, the more you grow

Of course you need to tweet good content for it to work. But on average, it's true. There's even a very sweet linear line of growth based on number of times you tweet every day. For every extra tweet/day, it seems it leads to an extra 200 followers over 90 days.

2. High engagement is a growth factor

The higher the engagement rate, the higher the audience growth. It didn't prove to be true when looking at "growth rate" because of the bias with small accounts. But filter on accounts with a good starting follower base and it held up.

This points that good, engaging content does lead to a bigger audience.

3. You CAN get +10K followers over a few weeks even if you're a small account

But it's tough. There's no magic trick. All those who achieved that tweeted a lot and very consistently. And even when you do that, it doesn't mean it's always going to work. Probably the take away here is to know it's possible, but it's not the outcome most people have so you shouldn't feel discouraged if it doesn't happen for you.

4. Growth is a lot more fun when you're not competing and just supporting each other

People on Twitter tend to compare themselves to others. And it can lead to some feeling like they're a lot better or worse than everyone else out there.

I was a bit wary of that when we started the challenge, but it turns out most participants were super friendly to each other, supported others, and provided advice and feedback. That was a really nice outcome, and it makes so much sense to challenge yourself while being part of a group dynamic. I wish more "growth-related" things had those social mechanics. For example, it could be fun to have an "MRR growth challenge" with an Indiehackers grant to win or something like that.

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Overall, I would call the operation a success. It motivated a lot of people to stay focused and consistent, it drove results for most of them, and we got a few sign ups to our product in the process.

We're definitely going to repeat that kind of experience in the near future!

Cheers everyone!