Digital Marketing

How To Grow On Twitter

Matt Wolfe

30 Sep 2021 • 10 min read

My recent rabbit-hole sent me into the depths of trying to understand Twitter.

Lately, I've found myself spending more and more time there.

Of all the social media platforms, Twitter has been my favorite.

The more I use it, the more I start to grasp the potential.

In this issue, I'll be sharing some of the lessons I've been learning around Twitter.

Please keep in mind that I'm just learning this stuff. Some of what I write might not pan out to be successful. I'm writing this to better solidify the concepts in my own mind and to share the journey as I go.

Let's dig in...

Here's What You'll Find In This Week's Edition:

Why Twitter? Why now?
Organic Twitter Growth
Paid Twitter Growth
Other Interesting Things On My Radar

Why Twitter? Why now?

Over several months, I've carefully curated who I follow on Twitter so that only the people that give me the most value make it onto my timeline.

This careful curation has led me to having an insanely valuable Twitter feed. I can login while sitting on the toilet for 5-minutes and have my mind blown multiple times.

Saying all of that, I haven't been super active myself. When I write a tweet to my 5,000+ followers, I'm lucky if I get 2 likes on it (and usually one of them is my co-host, Joe).

Even if you take away the traffic element and assume nobody clicks any links, people are getting massive attention on Twitter.

If you've listened to our podcast recently, you've likely heard us talk about how we're in the business of arbitraging attention. We create attention and then allow brands to buy that attention off of us for more than it costs us to generate it.

That's the game we play.

Over the past several months, we've been putting all of our focus into growing attention on YouTube. In our opinion, it's one of the most valuable places that you can build attention.

However, it's been a grind. It's been so slow to grow our YouTube channel.

It's still our plan to grow on YouTube but we're actually seeing Twitter as a bit of a "backdoor" to that growth. If we grow on Twitter, it shouldn't be too difficult to point followers over to YouTube to grab them as subscribers as well.

Even if it doesn't grow our YouTube channel, Twitter growth still makes sense for our goals. We want brands to pay us to get in front of our audience. If both Joe and I have large followings, Twitter can easily become part of the bundle of places that we can raise awareness when we reach out to brands.

You can make a hell of a lot more money from sponsors selling them a package that contains a podcast, YouTube channel, email list and 100k+ Twitter followers than you can from charging them $20 per 1,000 downloads on your podcast!

Therefore, Twitter is super exciting to us right now. We can drive traffic, build attention, and leverage that attention into brand deals... And, if all goes according to plan, we'll be growing our YouTube channel in the process.

Organic Twitter Growth

When I talk about organic growth, I mean that I'm not using ads or paid methods to grow the account. However, I am using a couple of paid tools that make managing my Twitter a little bit easier.

Tool #1: LinkTree

LinkTree builds a very basic page with links to other social media profiles as well as the ability to add more links back to your site(s).

LinkTree has a free version that will work perfectly fine for 90% of people. I personally went with the Pro because it gives you much more control over the look of the page.

With LinkTree, you can put a single link in your bio on places like Twitter and Instagram. When people click this single link, they access a page where you can put many more links.

Here's what mine looks like:

Tool #2 Hypefury

With Hypefury, you pick times throughout the day that you want tweets to go live. You can then queue up multiple tweets and they'll drip out at your preselected times.

You can also craft "tweet storms" or "threads" with Hypefury, which are a series of multiple tweets strung together. I'll get more into those in a moment.

This is just scratching the surface of what this tool does. I'm very new to it and still finding features. I just needed an easy way to preschedule multiple tweets.

Cultivating growth and engagement

I watched 10 in-depth videos today around the topic of Twitter. I'm going to round-up the most commonly given advice and then share the links to where you can watch the videos if you'd like the nuanced details.

Focus on only a few topics - If you really want to cultivate an engaged following, you need to post fairly niche content. People will follow you for what you talk about. Pick three topics and try to tweet about content related to those three topics. This makes it very clear to others on Twitter what value they will receive when they follow you. For me, it's "Systems, side-hustles, and content marketing." I can riff about those all day.
Tweet multiple times per day - Almost every video I watched recommended tweeting at least five times per day. This is where Hypefury comes in. I can get in there in the morning and write out five tweets to drip out throughout the day. A scheduling tool is key to keeping up with a consistent posting schedule.
Create a "Tweet Storm" AKA a Twitter thread about once per week. This is a series of multiple tweets strung together. You can take a small article, break it up into multiple 240-character posts, and load them all into Twitter. Your Twitter thread should always end with a call-to-action to like and share the first post in the thread. This style of post does really well right now.
Leverage lists to follow specific niche topics - You can create lists and follow specific people inside of lists. For example, I have a list of people that tweet a lot about NFTs. Whenever I find someone new that's tweeting on the topic, I add them to the list. Then, when I want to study up on NFTs, I open that list on Twitter and start scrolling my tailored feed of only NFT content. This is a great way to keep your finger on the pulse in multiple niche communities.
Interact with others on Twitter - Like, comment, and retweet content that you enjoy. When you comment, add actual value. Don't just write "nice tweet." Comment with something that adds to the conversation. The common wisdom is to interact with people that have a lot more followers than you do. Your comments are a lot more likely to get seen if they're commented on a post with a lot more interaction. I personally don't worry too much about the reach of who I'm commenting too. I think it's just a good habit to comment on stuff that you find value in, regardless of clout.
Use your bio and header image to call out who you're talking to - When people click on your profile, they can quickly see if you're someone that sounds interesting or not.

That's about it on the organic side... I was actually looking for more paid growth tactics when I started down this rabbit-hole but kept coming across the organic strategies as well. I figured that a paid strategy will only be more effective if you have the organic side and the foundation built...

Here are the videos about organic that I found most valuable:

Paid Twitter Growth

When it comes to paid growth strategies, there are really only three that I came across and, out of the three, I would only comfortably experiment with one of them.

Weird Scammy Growth Hack

The first video I found was called "How To Get 1000 Real Twitter Followers In 10 Minutes."

They suggested using a service called socialbooster.me, which would send you 250 "real people" followers for just $6. So if you wanted 1,000 followers, you could do it in a matter of minutes for about $24.

There's 2 problems with this...

It seems shady as hell. How are these real followers but they happen almost instantly after paying? Are there real humans standing by, earning pennies in exchange for following me? I don't get it. It seems shady. That's enough to not mess with it.
Even if it was legit, there's no targeting. I'm not going to be getting followers that are interested in systems, side-hustles, or content marketing. Sure, my follower number will look better... but my engagement will stay the same. I'm not in this game for vanity. I want results.

I'm not even going to link to the video. If you copy and paste the title I mentioned above into YouTube, I'm sure you'll find it... Although the entire contents of that video is broken down in my description above.

Running Contests To Grow Your Account

This strategy didn't seem shady. It actually seems pretty smart for the right people.

I watched a video called "How I Grew My Twitter to 20k Followers with NEW TWITTER GROWTH STRATEGIES."

This video breaks down using contests and a tool called Grid Gaming.

Basically, you'd create a contest with Grid Gaming. Let's say you want to giveaway $50 to a random person that follows you on Twitter. You give Grid Gaming something like $100. They keep a cut for them and the rest goes towards the contest. They then use their network to spread the word about the contest, people follow you and retweet a post to enter, they pick a winner after the predetermined time, and your contest is over and, ideally, you have a bunch of new followers.

Cool idea!

The big problem is targeting... Everyone wants to win $50. So you're likely just getting a ton of new followers that only want $50. They don't actually care about what you tweet about. Again, if you want the vanity metrics of a big following, go for it. It will likely give you a big boost. Just don't expect a ton of engagement from this new following.

Running Twitter Ads

Twitter ads was what I was really interested in today.

Twitter ads are awesome for growing a following on Twitter because they actually have it as an objective. You can specifically create campaigns with the sole purpose of growing your Twitter following.

You can also get super targeted with who sees your ad. You can show it to people who are like the followers of another account, you can show it to people with a broad interest in a topic, you can show it to people who recently tweeted about a topic, and you can even show it to people who recently interacted with one of your tweets but doesn't follow you yet.

You can get it in front of the people most likely to want the type of content that you post.

One of the videos I watched claimed that you can get followers for as little as $0.07 each. I set my ads up today with a $10/day budget so I don't have a lot of data yet. My actual numbers are closer to $1.00 per follower so far. I imagine that will optimize and get lower as Twitter collects more data on the types of people more likely to follow me.

Here are the 2 creatives that I'm split-testing right now:

I'm going to let this campaign run for a bit and then I'll report my results in a video.

I'm excited to see how it goes and will give you the full update of the results in a few weeks.

Here are the videos I watched about Twitter Ads (they're all pretty basic if you have any ad-buying experience):

What Else Is On My Radar

The implications of NFTs on gaming - I don't know much about this world at all yet. Joe and I were having a conversation with our good friend, Josh Bartlett, yesterday and we got to talking. There are some crazy things in the works in the gaming space. Mining crypto by playing games, battling other people to win their crypto from them, in-game items with real-world value that can be transferred among games, all powered by blockchain and smart-contract technology. I don't have much to say here yet but you can bet it'll be a future rabbit-hole of mine. This interview with Joel Comm is a great place to start though.
Real estate for passive cashflow - My wife and I own our home. Like many homeowners who have had their house for a while, we have a good amount of equity built up. We'd like to leverage some of our existing equity to purchase another property so that we can rent it out for cashflow. This thread by Taylor Welch does a good job explaining the plan. I also recently stumbled across this video, which was a helpful explanation as well. I know very little about this topic but it is something my wife and I are currently exploring and working to better understand.

That's it for this week. I know it's a lot of Twitter talk and that may not interest you at all. But it's the rabbit-hole I went down this week and I'm excited to play it out and see what sort of engagement I can create.

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