Starting out on Twitter can be overwhelming, everyone wants to grow an audience but knowing where to begin can be difficult.
Here’s a simple 14-step approach that’ll lay the foundations to take you from Twitter zero to Twitter hero.
1. Write a Killer Twitter Bio
Think of your Twitter bio as a personal landing page. It should include:
- Social proof (your experience, brands you’ve worked with and your achievements)
- Your personal value proposition
- Why should people follow you?
- What will they learn or what can you give them?
- A link: what is your ‘call to action’ i.e. what do you want them to do next (apart from following you) do you want to drive them towards a blog, website or book an appointment with you?
2. Focus Your Engagement On One Niche
Just like when starting a business, it is important when growing an audience on Twitter to focus on one specific ‘niche’ to tweet about. The less focused your account is, the harder it will be to grow.
Find the one thing that you know most about and talk about it. Think about ‘niches within niches’ e.g. instead of tweeting about ‘sports’ you could tweet about ‘Bringing football sabermetrics to the masses’.
If you look at all of the biggest Twitter accounts (aside from celebrities coming from elsewhere) they almost always use this approach.
3. Find More Accounts In Your Niche To Engage With By Using Twitter Lists
Twitter Lists are a vastly under-used tool. People make Lists for all sorts of people: marketing influencers, golfers or gardeners.
From there you can find way more people to engage with and if you follow the List you can keep your main timeline nice and clean.
Twitter isn’t great at helping you find them though, Google is better, so try searching this on Google:
site:twitter.com/i/lists “YOUR NICHE”
and see who you can find for your niche.
4. Pin Like A Pro
Your pinned tweet is an extension of your bio but with many more characters to play with.
It is also the first tweet anyone reads when they check a new profile and decide whether they want to follow it or not, so you’ve got to make the most of it. Here are a few tips:
- Share what you’re working on, your life’s journey and add to it regularly with updates
- Expand your bio by giving examples of your top-performing tweets so your audience knows what they can expect when following you
- Pin any recent ‘giveaways’ (more on this later) you have put out
- Keep it fresh, either update your pinned tweet regularly by adding to it or change it up every few months
5. Leverage The Reach Of Larger Accounts
One of the best ways to increase your tweet visibility is to reply to larger accounts. A quick thoughtful reply to a relevant (i.e. in your niche) larger account can bring many new followers your way. The key is to:
- Make sure they are aligned with your niche
- Make your reply useful, even better if you can write it in such a way that it can stand alone (i.e. be read without having to read the original tweet)
- Be quick! Replying a few days later means you won’t get anywhere near the same visibility and impressions. If there are specific larger accounts you want to reply to you can set up tweet notifications in Twitter so you will be alerted when they tweet and you can add your wisdom
Try it out and use the Twitter analytics tools to see your impressions spike.
6. Make Your Replies Valuable
Engaging on Twitter isn’t about hitting your targets by replying “Congrats” everywhere (this isn’t LinkedIn). Find tweets you can reply to with your own value, thoughts, and perspectives.
Ask questions about their viewpoint or add further detail or ideas yourself. Take a leaf from improv comedy and use the: “Yes, and…” approach – whenever someone has an idea or thought, think about how you can add to it.
Try to silence that nagging voice in your head that says you have nothing to add, you would be surprised how much you can add to a conversation just because of your unique life experiences.
P.S. You can still congratulate people.
7. Support Your Audience
Twitter at its best can be an extremely supportive community and there are some really small things you can do to ‘do your bit’.
The act of a retweet can mean little to you but the world to someone else. Every time you retweet you are vastly improving the visibility of their content, and you’ll find it also gets reciprocated pretty quickly.
You can take it to the next level with Quote tweets. Not only will this help you hit your engagement goals for the day but it will show your audience a little about who you are, and what made you want to retweet the content. Did you like their idea? What about it?
8. Twitter Is About Giving (And Not Expecting Anything Back In Return)
Your mindset when tweeting and replying should be to share your self and knowledge with your audience and to try and help them.
One of the best ways you can do this is through ‘giveaways’. These should be used sparingly (max 1 per month) but they can be dynamite when they work.
Your giveaway could be a service e.g. review a CV, website or give a growth idea or it could be a product in itself e.g. an Airtable database of your favourite restaurants, a Notion template or document sharing a little of your knowledge in how to do something you’re really good at.
When you tweet a giveaway in order to improve reach, ask people to comment with a word and then follow you so you can DM them the product, it’s a small thing they can do to reciprocate for the value you provide. However, consider doing regular follower audits to keep your community relevant.
9. Add Images To Your Tweets
Adding images to your tweets can be powerful for a couple of reasons:
- Your tweets will take up more of your followers’ timeline as they scroll making your tweet more visible/attractive to them (think about what catches your eye first in a newspaper – image then text usually)
- They can help explain or expand upon a message you are trying to convey, useful when you are restricted to 280 characters!
10. Make Authentic Friends Through Direct Messages
You’d be surprised just how responsive people can be to a thoughtful DM, even if they have thousands of followers, maybe consider:
- Don’t just say ‘Hi’, flirt with them or sell them something
- Telling them why you follow them, thanking them for following you or asking a question about something they tweeted recently
- Ask them what they are working on, why they followed you or sharing something with them they might find interesting
- Be responsive and don’t ignore them if they respond
11. Schedule Your Tweets So You Can Focus On Engaging And Replying
Having to create content every day is hard, like, really hard, especially when you are trying to fit it around everything else in life.
Creating your tweet content in one session at the start of the week and scheduling it (either using software like Typefully or Tweetdeck or just for free using Twitter) allows you to focus on the thing you can’t do ahead of time – engaging with others on Twitter through replies
12. Take Back Control Of The Algorithm
If you want to focus on engaging with your audience primarily and are sick of seeing ‘recommended’ content from Twitter then look no further.
Go to the Twitter search and paste this in:
filter:follows -filter:replies
Then click on ‘Latest’
You will now only see original tweets from your followers so you can focus on speaking with your audience directly.
13. Use Keyboard Shortcuts To Boost Your Productivity
If you are on a desktop trying to hit your ambitious engagement goals for the day then every little helps, try out these shortcuts to speed through your timeline:
- j = next Tweet
- k = previous Tweet
- l = like
- r = reply
- cmd-enter or ctrl-enter = send Tweet
You’ll be hitting your reply goals in no time at all.
14. Build Your Engagement Habit
Like with any social media platform, building an audience takes time, effort and consistency.
Twitter is no different, you have to be prepared to be tweeting and replying for months on end before you start to see the results of your effort compound.
When you are trying to grow an audience, replying is one of the most effective methods, because, when you don’t have a following, not many people see your tweets, whereas replies leverage other accounts’ audiences for visibility.
To build an engagement habit you’ll stick to, use a tool like tweetstreak, where you can set your engagement goals and then be held accountable to them through DMs and gamification, it’ll ensure you continue tweeting long after others have given up.
[Recommended reading: 18 Tips To Get More Followers On Twitter]
[Main photo: Alamy; other images are from their respective websites and/or social platforms or articles]
I am one of the co-founders of tweetstreak, a Twitter tool that uses gamified accountability to help you build the engagement habits that will grow your audience.