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30 Comments

3000 Twitter Followers

Woke up this morning to see the Marketing Examples twitter go over the 3000 mark.

It’s been a really great last month on Twitter, growing more than 1600 followers users in the last 30 days! Below I've tried to summarise what I've learnt:

Create an account people want to follow

I spend 3 days researching and writing each marketing example. And then I spend a further 1/2 hours summarising the example in a twitter thread. And that's literally all I tweet about. There's no junk tweets. No tweets about the "team day out at the zoo ... " The signal to noise ratio is 100%.

Put all your value on twitter itself ...

You’re never going to grow a Twitter account linking off to blogs. So the question for me with Marketing Examples is how do I put value in the tweets? The answers is summarise the blog in a thread. e.g. - this one about Fortnite

Why threads work so well

In a 280 character tweets it’s difficult to offer any real wisdom. It all transcends into pseudo wisdom. But, with threads you lift the character limit. And it's far easier to say something meaningful.

The % of people who follow you after reading a thread is always going to be higher than from an isolated tweet. You can earn people’s trust over a string of 8 tweets where you can’t do that in one isolated tweet.

People retweet pure crystal meth

What do I mean by this is? Well, Naval Ravikant did a famous thread, titled, How to get rich (without getting lucky):

It didn’t say How to get rich without getting lucky #startups @ elonmusk @ paulgraham look at me 50 hardcore tips

No, strip away all that. It looks like an advert. People don’t want to retweet that. People retweet pure stuff. Would Walter White cook it is the question you should ask yourself!

I keep the first tweet of each of my threads incredibly short and plain for that reason. If you're going to tag people do it further down the thread.

Create paths which link from your website to twitter

When people visit Marketing Examples, my goal is to convert as many of them as possible into twitter followers. So at the end of every case study I embed the first tweet of the twitter thread asking if they'd like to share it.

People are far more likely to retweet a tweet **they actually see **, than to use a social share button. This also continually reminds people that Marketing Examples has a twitter account that they're proud of.

Obviously you've got to tweet really great stuff

There's a line from @adamwathan on the "Art of Product Podcast" where he says "It just got to a stage where whenever people see Steve's twitter icon in the timeline, they'd stop scrolling and be like, this is going to be good ... "

He's talking about Steve Schoger who grew from 1k - 50k in < year posting incredibly high quality design tips. For example

Most people put a few seconds thought into what they tweet. Steve would put hours, days, weeks into each one. When someone goes above and beyond to such an extent, they're going to get noticed. I've been trying to get Marketing Examples to that level.

Thanks for making it all the way to the bottom of this essay. Over and Out!

  1. 2

    Thanks for this, I've been struggling to grow my twitter followers so I will probably read this post a few times and try to implement them.

    1. 2

      Good luck!

      Twitter isn't right for every business. But for your business, Discover Plan Go I think it could work. Write some high quality threads. Good luck!

      1. 1

        Yeah, I have a few ideas already, I could plan a few fake holidays and post my thought process going through it and the results. That would work quite well as a thread I think. I could have a short first tweet with details of where, for how long and then make more actionable tweets underneath!

        I really appreciate your help, thanks a lot!

        1. 1

          Comment here when you do. Be cool to check it out :)

  2. 2

    Congrats Harry! The quality is top notch, so I would not be surprised to see you cross 10k very soon

    1. 1

      Cheers Davis! Appreciate that

  3. 2

    Your whole idea has been amazing. I'm following you on Twitter and subbed to your emails and the content has been very inspiring, it's no surprise that you're able to reach these numbers if I'm honest but well done on a big milestone.

    1. 1

      Thanks Michael! Very kind, and much appreciated.

  4. 2

    Summary.

    Want attention? Then create amazing content. Do it consistently.

    How long did it take you to get this momentum?

    1. 2

      If you go down my IH product page I've done updates for each Twitter Milestone.

      • May 28 - 0
      • June 5 - 100
      • June 26 - 500
      • July 9 - 1000
      • Aug 11 - 2000
      • Aug 29 - 3000
      1. 1

        looks like the growth is accelerating, congrats

  5. 2

    I'd add to this that the number of tweets is a very important metric for engagement and followers. I've built a link aggregator twitter account to 15k followers in a year or two (just a hobby), and there is a definite correlation between tweeting several times a day (even automated tweets to links) and new followers, as long as there is value in the tweets for your users and they therefore get engagement and are retweeted. I found once a day is definitely worse than up to 5 times a day for example. So I think there is some value in tweeting links as long as you are also providing real engagement as well from a human with the tricks Harry mentions above.

    I would caution though that much engagement (follows, likes, retweets) on social networks is perfunctory and performative, not real - people will only properly engage with deep content and questions as Harry points out above, so you need a human running your twitter account who provides real content, not just links, combined with frequent tweets to amplify the message to more followers.

    1. 2

      Very interesting. Thanks for sharing Kenny.

      I guess what there's more ways than the way to do it.

      Because, in my particular example I have only tweeted on 4 or 5 days so far in August. (I've replied to people on more days.)

      I certainly agree that you need a human running your account. There's tonnes of accounts out there with 50,000 followers which get absolutely no engagement. And that definitely stems from having a bot just retweet mindless junk.

      And ultimately it's engagement which matters.

      1. 2

        Yes, might also depend on the sort of content - I guess for the link aggregator that's precisely why people follow, for the regular links to third party content on a given subject, whereas in your example they're looking for more in-depth content they can learn from, and the replies are probably also really valuable to people.

        I agree real engagement with humans is more important than followers or likes or any of the other metrics the social networks push - real engagement being conversations and readers finding value in the content.

        I remember pushing a bad link automatically by accident and getting 5 likes from readers before someone told me it was a 404!

        1. 1

          Hahah!

          Yep, as you say definitely depends on why they follow!

  6. 2

    You are a true CRO master 😀

    1. 1

      haha! i just copy other people. These accounts all grew from nothing in 2017/8. just studied them and try and understand why

      1. https://twitter.com/george__mack
      2. https://twitter.com/steveschoger
      3. https://twitter.com/NavalBot
  7. 1

    Thank you for this information! I never thought about the retention threads have. I'll try that out!

  8. 1

    Agreed. I like to think of it as valuing other people’s time as you would your own. Although if someone doesn’t value their own time, I wouldn’t expect that person to value anyone else’s.

    1. 1

      I think you've hit the nail of the head. For me that's the essential trait of a good writer.

  9. 1

    Question: did you use their (Twitter's) $99/mo promotion?

    1. 2

      Nope. I read that apparently it gets you around 30 extra followers a month.

      I did spend £50 on Twitter ads though. Returned about 20 followers :|

      1. 1

        Got it. Thanks for the info, Harry!

  10. 1

    I've admired what you've been doing the past couple months and definitely am a little jealous haha. I've been working on my account for 2 years and it's just now almost to 700 followers haha.

    1. 1

      Thank you. I think its easy for me because the whole premise of my business is giving out free value.

      If I was trying to get people to follow a twitter account and then sell them a 30 / mo subscription it would definitely be harder.

  11. 1

    I don't see many business tweets in my feed, but your marketing threads always pop up! You have relevant content condensed really well in Twitter threads, and you're amazing at story-telling. Keep it up!

    1. 1

      Awesome Praise! Thank you Le :)

  12. 1

    "Would Walter White cook it is the question you should ask yourself!" is my favourite bit of your advice! :-) :-)

    I'm curious: Has the increase in Twitter followers led to an increase in traffic for your website?

    1. 1

      haha! thank you!

      Oh yeah, massively! Twitter drove 5k users to the website in this month so far :)

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