The Biggest (And Easiest) Secret of Growing an audience on Twitter.

Recently, I shared a milestone under a tweet of IndieHackers' official account: "I got 1K followers on Twitter ✅" and an indie hacker asked me to share my experience on how I accomplished this.

I have been very intentional about growing my Twitter following over the past year. I am not sure that there is a "secret" recipe, but here is what has worked for me.

Find your niche audience : better be small than large

My first advice is to find your niche audience and stick to it. A niche audience is a community that shares a passion for a topic, interest, or hobby. Whether it's a passion you have or skills you've learned
How I found mine, you might ask? Well, I wrote my first (ever) blog article one year ago and shared it on Twitter. It was addressed to two audiences, the Rust community, and the Flutter/Dart community. Only one of the two got the better of the other. What do I mean by "better be small than large"? Well, I consider the "Programming audience" to be way too broad, so I decided to narrow my audience down to one group, the Flutter/Dart community. It's easier to find your voice, get noticed, and stand out in a small crowd.

Observe what works

Before my first article in 2019, I created my account in 2018 and did nothing but observing.

So my second advice is once you find a niche audience, take a look at the top influencers in your niche, and see why they are succeeding.
Observe what works best for them, what kind of content are they posting, are they posting consistently, is their content always top-notch or are they lazy? What kind of content is their audience reacting to the best? Is the content they share related to your business in any way? The top influencers are the ones that are growing their audience the fastest, and they are the ones you want to target. You will need to find them by using the search feature on twitter, search for keywords that are related to your business and see who is posting about those keywords, and who is engaging with those people.

The best way to build a community is to engage with them

Engage with the tweets of those "influencers": like, comment, quote. Show your expertise in those tweets. You need to show that you are relevant in your niche and you know what you are talking about. People need to feel that you give actionable advice without it being a sales pitch.

Follow people that like the content you just commented on. Be careful to not follow more than 400 people per day (hard limit of Twitter unless you are "verified"). Try to be one of the first people to comment on. The reason why this works is that on Twitter, people tend to scroll down the page. If you comment on a tweet that is highly visible on the page, you will get exposure to a lot more people. In order to do that you'll have to modify your Twitter settings to show recent tweets first.

Stop interacting with those "influencers" if they don't interact with you, they probably hate your gut and you can go as far as to unfollow them (no harm is done). If it happens poach their audience and try to interact with them instead. By now, you should have a list of people that are probably interested in what you have to say. You found your voice. You'll start to have some faithful audience commenting and liking your tweets

Now, you can start interacting with them.
Tweet at them.
Answer them.
Connect with them.
Start conversations.

Be consistent

Tweeting less often but at a regular time will help you connect with your audience. What does that mean? Well, if you’re anything like me, I use Twitter to get my message out to my audience. I post tweets all day, every day. I don’t want to, but I feel like I have to. So what I did to make the best use of my time and tweets was to schedule every tweet to be posted at a specific time. I recommend searching on Google what are the best hours to post on Twitter. I use Buffer for that (in the free version you can queue up to 10 posts).

I noticed that by tweeting less, I got more interactions in my tweets that the one in my niche that tweet a lot. My understanding of the situation is: if you are tweeting a lot – most of your tweets will be ignored – people are busy and they won’t notice you if you don’t have a really interesting tweet.

If you are tweeting less – your tweets will be more relevant, more interesting, and more attention-grabbing.

If you tweet less – you will be more visible in the Twitter timeline – since there will be fewer tweets about your niche and people will see your tweets more often.

If you tweet less you’ll grow an audience that will like and pay more attention to you.

Alternate content

Not everyone is on twitter for productivity porn or to grow their audience. People are also here to take a break and chat with their friends. If you are looking to grow your audience on Twitter, you have to look past the self-promotion. There are several ways to do that.

Try to be funny 😄 memes that only your audience can understand works in most cases.

Don’t just tweet to your own followers everything that you do. Go through your followers’ timeline and like or retweet their tweets. If you have a large following, people will notice you and will want to get to know the person behind the tweets. If you don’t have a large following, then your intention should be to listen. Assume that no one is interested in what you have to say and listen and try to engage with other people’s conversations. People will start following you on their own if they see you being a good listener.

Start chatting with people who will eventually follow you. Why this works: People like to chat. People like to make friends. People like to do things that make them feel good. If you are looking to grow your audience on Twitter, you have to connect with people and make them feel good. This is not a trick, this is common sense.

This is a known technique but ask your audience some questions you asked yourself once. Be creative and original.

This technique is taken from the book: “How to Win Friends and Influence People”. It’s about how to be a good and successful person. The book is written by Dale Carnegie, and it was first published in 1936. In the chapter “Six Ways to Make People Like You” he explains how to help people to remember you. One of the ways Carnegie mentioned was that if you ask a person some questions, he will be much more likely to help you later.
That's a very simple thing and very effective but don't abuse it.

Tweet tips that helped you in your journey. Write about the tools you think are useful.

Ask people for advice. Because people love helping others, especially experts. They get a sense of accomplishment and connection to someone they admire.

Stay humble and keep growing with the friends you made

Stay humble and don't take yourself too seriously. I don't get why people with a lot of followers don't follow anyone. To put it in perspective I like to represent myself Twitter as an ocean. I see a lot of big whales in the top influencers in my niche that follow absolutely no smaller fish. They follow other whales that are in other bigger related niches. I think it is an error cause you know less your audience if you don't participate with them.
In my niche most users are around 100, 400 is starting to be interesting 600 you know they are starting to grow an audience.
This is not a competition, grow with the small ones instead.

Keep the house clean

I have tried all sorts of things to grow my audience but by far the easiest way is to follow more people. The only problem with this is that you will get a lot of people not following you back but it's worth it in the long run.
It doesn't look good if you have more followings than followers so of 2:1 or 3:1 (followers to following). This makes your account look more legitimate and more genuine to your followers.

In order to do that, do unfollow people to keep your timeline healthy. My rule of thumb is to unfollow people that don't follow you back after 1-2 days and people that pollute your feed with content that is unrelated to your niche to some extent (politic, cute cat videos, etc).

I also delete tweets that don't perform well. For example, if a tweet gets less than 5 likes or retweets, I delete it.

Be yourself

Tweet in your own name. Add the best photo of you. Add a banner of something cute or whatever figure it out. People need to put trust in you.

If your name is not visible, if your photo is not visible, if people don’t know who you are, they won’t follow you. So if you tweet a lot, and you tweet in your name, and you put your best photo up there and a banner up, that makes it really easy for people to say, “Hey, I know this person. I want to start following him".

If you follow my "strategy" there is a likely chance that people will like you and will read what you have to say.
You don’t have to pretend to be anyone else.
You don’t have to be smarter, funnier, or better looking than you are.
You don’t have to be perfect in order to gain an audience.
It’s all about being yourself and putting yourself out there.

TL;DR

Find your audience. Observe what works. Engage. Be consistent. Alternate content. Stay humble. Be yourself. Rinse and Repeat 🔁.
That’s the biggest secret of growing an audience on Twitter.