How to grow your Twitter following – a guide to creating content, increasing engagement and reach

Why should you grow your Twitter followers? Twitter is not only an outlet for users to post their thoughts and feelings, but it is also a marketing tool to advertise your brand. By increasing your follower count, you are increasing the number of customers and viewers you can reach.

I’ve been running my Twitter for a while now, but I’d say it’s been since 2018 that I really started growing and have since reached nearly 14k followers. If you wanted to check out my account, you can do so here.

What is Twitter?

Twitter is an instant and fast-paced social media tool. It allows you to share a max of 280 characters and an image, video, gif or poll onto your timeline. The nature of Twitter is it is fast-moving, with over 330 million users there is constantly new content to bump up your timeline. For this reason, the content is short-lived and should be easy and concise to read.

Why should you use Twitter?

Twitter is not just a tool for sharing cute cat photos or having a rant. Twitter is an easy and fast marketing tool for your brand. Whether you’re a blogger, a business or just someone with a hobby, Twitter will have a corner for you. With such a huge audience, you can target your content using keywords and hashtags to find the right audience. This audience can become a following and this following can convert to clicks through to your website.

What should be in your Twitter bio?

Make sure to cover a few points about what you will be talking about e.g. include the word books or gaming. This means that when people search for accounts with this in the bio, yours is more likely to show up. It’s good to change around your bio and try out different things. But if you really want to grow, I would recommend utilising the full word count and showing people why they should follow you.

What content should you be posting to Twitter?

With such a short character limit, you really have to be able to get your message across easily and clearly. There are a few types of content I personally choose to post:

• Links to my blog
• Links to my YouTube videos
• A funny post
• Content creation tips
• Topical content
• Raising awareness for causes/topics
• Talking about hobbies

I would also suggest avoiding getting into arguments online as this could contribute negatively to your digital footprint.

How can you get followers on Twitter?

It might feel like you’re invisible when you first sign up to Twitter, battling to have your voice heard. But the best way to grow is to stick with it, maybe try and form a niche if it would help you create content. Follow other users that you think are relevant to you. Don’t just follow celebrities, follow other bloggers, other businesses, general users. Try and follow a mix of smaller and bigger accounts and you should slowly start to see an increase in your following.

Make sure to engage and reply to tweets on your timeline and your tweets will be shown to more people. It’s a slow game to play, but eventually, you will start to increase your growth and then you won’t stop! Engagement is probably a huge way to reach new accounts, whether you’re responding to other user’s tweets or RTing content you love. By doing this daily, you will see an improvement. Unlike Instagram where it’s easier to have a strategy for growth, with Twitter you really just need to be regularly present.

Running a giveaway when you reach a follower milestone is also a good way to boost your following. Have terms and conditions that say people must retweet and follow to enter and you’ll see a huge increase in followers! This sort of thing helps show your account to more people and gets you followers along the way.

How often should you post on Twitter?

As I said, Twitter is a fast-moving platform and new content is being posted all the time, so make sure you’re one of the people sharing it. I post three-four times a day as a minimum, I do this via a tool called Buffer which I use to help me find the best times to schedule my content. I tend to share a blog post/video promo post followed by just a fun/helpful tweet and I will go back and forth between the two.

There’s no right or wrong answer when it comes to posting quantity on Twitter, all I would say is to be consistent. Don’t let Twitter or your followers see you as inactive because they are more likely to unfollow you then and you risk your account being shut down for inactivity. If you can, send out one tweet a day to remind people you’re about.

Should you use hashtags on Twitter to improve reach?

Hashtags are more useful now when linked to specific events/campaigns, for example #WorldBookDay will be a central hub for all tweets talking about this event. However something like #books won’t get you too far as this is very wide and won’t hone in on a niche audience. In my opinion the purpose of hashtags on Twitter has changed, they are no longer used to increase reach, but to be part of a community.

We don’t contribute to a trending hashtag to try and gain followers, we do it to be part of a conversation. Therefore yes, use hashtags, but don’t litter them into every other word of your tweets. Use hashtags with a purpose and intent to see the best results. Hashtags will help you reach a wider audience when used correctly, but then so will keywords. If you’re talking about a popular topic you are more likely to have your content seen by more people through use of keywords and hashtags when used correctly.

How can Twitter Analytics help you?

I wrote an extensive guide to understanding Twitter analytics, which will go into  more detail than I will now. But yes, analytics can help you. They offer an easy overview of the content that is doing well and not so well on your timeline. You can easily glance at who your audience are, what their interests are and see what content they respond best to.

Using analytics over time will gradually help you to refine and perfect your Twitter content.

I hope this has been a helpful blog post and you take some tips away from it to help you grow on Twitter!

 

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