The 4 Actions I Took To Attract 72,000 Followers
1. I published a blog post every week for four years.
• They're all designed to provide value to my target audience (creators)
• Each one goes on my website, Medium, and is repurposed on social media
• Most are timeless so they attract new people forever
2. I published a newsletter every week for four years.
• It features my weekly blog post as well as curated ideas from others.
• It's how I turn casual readers into connected fans.
• The curated content provides a ton of audience growth value (see below).
3. I created a relevant community.
• You have to go where your people already hang out and build genuine relationships with them.
• I built the Newsletter Creators Facebook group and it now has 2,300 members.
• New people join every day and discover me in the process.
4. I Picked One Social Platform To Focus On
• It's Twitter.
• I stopped posting on IG and FB months ago to focus here and it took off.
• See the impact in the image below.
More about what I've done, why it's worked, and how to do something similar here: The Four Actions I Took To Attract 72,000 Followers
That's crazy how your Twitter took off. Did you tweet differently or just more?
Yeah, I'm curious, what exactly did you change when you narrowed your "focus" @joshspector?
I tweeted more consistently and more strategically. Here's how I approach it:
• I schedule 5 tweet a day to be posted every day. Most of these are excerpts of blog posts I've written or previous social posts that I know people found helpful/useful so I kinda know they're going to "work." It's almost like a greatest hits mixed in with some original new ideas I share.
• On top of the scheduled tweets, I dip in a couple times a day and post other stuff (if I have something to say).
• I don't post anything that's off topic - all my tweets are on growing an audience, productivity, creativity, social media, etc. Prior to this focus, I'd tweet more random stuff about pop culture, news, whatever else was on my mind.
• I more actively reply to other people tweets and use lists to monitor bigger people in my space and identify opportunities to reply to their tweets with relevant value.
• Basically, I went from just randomly posting stuff on Twitter at random times about random things to a specific plan and approach.
@ndor, thanks for a good question.
@joshspector, thanks for the answer
This is a great story @joshspector. it just shows how consistent action and focus over the course of time can build up great compounding returns. Keep up the great work.
So these 72,000 on what time limit is this? the four years or the last four months?
I do see a lot of people saying the more social platforms you leverage the better it is, but you saying the numbers for you differ that right?
For the most part, this has happened over the course of the past four years.
The Twitter growth specifically has accelerated in the last four months after I focused on it and stopped using other social platforms.
There are certainly advantages to using multiple social platforms, but only if you invest significant time into them. It takes a lot of time to grow an audience on one platform, let alone multiple.
Thanks for the comment, makes sense!
@joshspector this post is gold! It exemplifies why people connect with you - so much value and insight (and well put). Consistency is key. I so get that and I show up 100% for my clients consistently, but I do struggle to be consistent on non-client work. Definitely a mental hurdle I want to get over. I'd be curious if you have any tips for that!
Thanks! It's different for everyone, but my guess is one (or more) of these things is holding you back:
The non-client stuff you're trying isn't things you're excited to do (maybe wrong format or platform or you just don't really want to do it?).
You're trying to do too much non-client stuff so you're setting yourself up to fail. Scale back to make a commitment that's easy to be consistent with (for example, start with one tweet a day as opposed to posting daily on multiple platforms).
Your approach is inefficient and not systemized so it makes it harder to be consistent. It's not hard to post a daily tweet if you sit down and write 7 tweets at once and schedule them for the week. It's much harder to try to remember to come up with something to post every day on the fly.
You're just scared. Worried about being judged, or imposter syndrome, or insecure, or whatever. Everyone has those feelings and there's no magic answer to it beyond pushing past it.
But one thing you can do is call it an experiment and set up a specific (short/simple) time frame so you can build momentum.
For example, commit to do something once a day for a week or a month and then at the end of that time period you get to reassess if you want to continue or stop without feeling like a quitter or failure - you did what you set out to do.
When people start projects that are open ended, they put themselves in a spot where they're forever trying to figure out whether they should quit or not and it makes it harder to be consistent.
How did you decide to go with strictly Twitter, was it simply the channel that was working best?
It was a combination of factors, but it's the channel I enjoy the most in general, it matches my skill set well (writing, being concise, etc.), and the audience on Twitter is a good fit for my target audience.