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“The secret of success is to do the common thing uncommonly well.”

— John D. Rockefeller Jr.

Twitter is one of the biggest social media platforms that can contribute to your organic reach. This is one platform that I think EVERY business should be taking advantage of. By using hashtags in your tweets, your post could be seen by hundreds or thousands of people searching on Twitter.

However, if you are just starting out, you’ve likely noticed that not many people are interacting with what you have to say, and it can be rather difficult to grow your followers.

Let me tell you this right now,

If you are a new business and you’re in the beginning stages of using Twitter for your business, you ARE NOT going to go from 0 followers to 100k followers overnight.

Although you won’t achieve this sought-after “overnight success,” all hope is not lost. You can grow a large following on Twitter if you utilize it correctly.

In this post we are going to cover how to grow your followers and how to get more engagement from the Twitter-Sphere. If you follow these steps, you might not be the next big social media influencer, but you will grow an audience of engaged individuals who care what you have to say.

Full Disclosure: Some of the paid tools listed below are affiliate links. This means if you choose to purchase anything through the links provided, I will receive a small commission. This comes at no additional cost to you.

Consistency is Key

This is just something that I wanted to touch on before we dive right into exactly how to grow your followers and increase your engagement.

If you have read any other articles about growing a business or growing a following on social media, you’ve probably seen that word, consistency. This is true not only for Twitter, but for Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, blog posts, ect. The more consistent you are, the more likely people are going to see your content, and the more likely people will stay if they like your content.

Consistency doesn’t necessarily mean that you should be putting out posts every other minute (this will actually hurt you). By being consistent, you are just ensuring that you aren’t going days without posting something. Create a social media schedule that you can follow and stick to. Hootsuite and Buffer are great for this. In the past, I’ve also utilized Trello for managing my social media accounts and planning out my posts in advance.

Stick to a consistent schedule and the followers we gain from the next strategies will be more likely to stick around. If you are having trouble staying on top of consistently sharing content to your social media accounts, I highly recommend using Hootsuite to bulk upload your posts for the week. I have seen amazing results from this!

Grow Your Followers and Increase Engagement

If you’re on Twitter, it can be hard to get the word out about your business without any followers to share your business with. Even worse, you have tons of followers, but no one interacts with your posts or acknowledges that you exist! I’m going to fix this. Well, YOU’RE going to fix this, but I’m going to show you how.

With these strategies listed below, you don’t need to spend hours per day for results to happen. Having said that, these strategies will require some hands-on work. Just remember, the more you put in, the more you’ll get out.

So let’s dive right into the strategies!

Following Others in Your Industry

One of the first ways I started to grow my followers on Twitter was by following others in my niche. I already had an idea of influential people in my industry and started out by following them. Pick a few influencers in your niche to follow. If you aren’t quite sure who to follow yet, use Twitter’s search function. This will be your best friend while trying to grow your followers!

Twitter Search for "Marketing." Looking for people to follow to grow your followers.
When you are just beginning, start by finding people in your industry to follow.

Search for keywords in your industry and click on the “People Tab.” Look for accounts that look more like people and less like business/company accounts. You will get much more feedback from individuals than corporations at the beginning.

If these people have thousands of followers, don’t expect too many of them to follow you back right away. We are more looking at what these people are sharing and who is following them.

You already know that people are connecting with what the influencers are sharing, so this will give you a good idea of the types of content you can share from your own account. I would pick around 5-10 influencers to follow at first.

Once you are following these people, do a little bit of research into who is following them. Take a look at the influencer’s tweets and see who is interacting with your influencers tweets the most. These are the people that you want to engage with. You want to find the people that are most active on these accounts because you know they are most likely to engage with others’ (and your) tweets. If you can find several people that have 1,000 followers or less, comment on their tweets, like some of their tweets, and follow them. Try to strike up some real conversation. Generally, these people who have less followers will be more likely to follow you back.

Another method you can use for finding people to follow is by using the search function in Twitter. Since my primary topic is blogging and online business, I used the search tab and put in various keywords around my industry. I look for people who are tweeting about similar topics to my own, and take notice of those that don’t have an extremely large following. Just like before, we are going to engage with these people and begin following them. You should start to pick up a few follow-backs from these people that you are engaging with.

Use Hashtags

Many social media networks like Facebook, and more recently Instagram, have starting to throttle back the organic reach of users’ posts. Twitter is still a great platform for generating organic reach through the use of hashtags.

If you go back to the Twitter search function you can type in “#YourKeyword” and Twitter will actually show you an estimate of how many people are currently using that specific hashtag. Try using these hashtags in your next tweets that you send from your account. If other people are searching for this hashtag or topic, there is a good chance that some will find your tweets.

Twitter Search "#Blog" Look at results showing a few hundred tweets in the last hour.
Search for hashtags that have been recently used, but aren’t used too much. Incorporate these into your posts.

The key to this strategy is to find hashtags that are not overly popular, but are still getting used. If you are choosing hashtags that are getting tweeted thousands of times within the last hour, chances are your tweet will get lost in the sea of thousands and won’t be seen by many. Choose hashtags that are not as popular to increase your chances of being found.

Another important note to make, is to be sure you are not overdoing it with the hashtags. Typically 2-3 hashtags in a single tweet is all you’ll need. If you flood your post with nothing but hashtags, most will just skip right over your posts. Be smart about which hashtags you use, and make sure they fit with the post.

Initiate the Engagement with your Followers

By this point, you should have started to gather some followers of your own and you should be following several people by now. Now it is time to interact with these people.

Engage with the content that appears in your feed. Be genuine and show you care about what they are sharing. This will show that you are invested in others and not just selfishly looking to grow your own following. If you are following several people that have not yet followed you back, this engagement may influence people to finally give you a follow-back.

It is important that you don’t stop engaging with people once they have followed you back. If you neglect your followers and they don’t feel that you are providing any value, there is a high probability they could unfollow you. The key here isn’t just to grow your followers, but to grow a following of people who care what you have to say and value your input. This is how you will keep engaged followers for life.

SEMrush

Engage with People you Don’t Follow

This next strategy is by far my favorite and has been the most successful for growing my own followers on Twitter. Engaging with random people that you have no current connection with.

The best way to do this is by utilizing that search function that we mentioned earlier. However, this time, we are going to be focusing on hashtags and keywords that are getting used many times within the last hour.

Twitter Search of "#digitalmarketing" showing 720 tweets in the last hour.
Search for hashtags and keywords that have been used a lot in the last hour.

Choose a specific topic within your niche and try searching for various hashtags and keywords that have been used a lot recently. Scroll through the tweets and find content you can engage with. You can follow these people if you choose, but at this point, our main concern is just commenting, liking, and retweeting other people’s posts. There are several different things you can try when commenting on other’s tweets that have worked well for me:

  1. Ask a Question: Ask for more information about what was tweeted. Most people like to feel that they are helping others and will be delighted to answer your questions.
  2. Show that their tweet provided value to you: Like mentioned before, people like to know they are providing value and helping others. Provide some motivational reinforcement to show that you agree with what the person is sharing or that you’ve gotten some value out of what they are sharing.
  3. Solve someone’s problem or question: Answer a question someone is asking. If you don’t know the answer right away, do a quick Google search. In most cases I have been able to find answers to people’s problems in a few short minutes. This not only provides value to the person, but also shows that you care about helping others.

By engaging with more people, asking questions, and providing value, more people will start seeing your tweets (beyond just who is following you) and will likely start to follow you. I have noticed that by commenting on what others are sharing, I may not get that specific person to follow me right away, but their followers and others who see their tweets will end up following me.

Take Action Now!: The Next Steps

All the strategies listed above are great ways to start growing your following and all have been working for me. The next step is to put these strategies to action.

I put together a brief action plan below, and if you take this action, I guarantee you will start to see more engagement and grow your followers!

If you are new on Twitter, the first step is obviously to start following people. You don’t need to follow hundreds of people. Just follow anywhere between 20-50 people that you can relate to and would have no problem interacting with.

Next, it is time to engage with people you don’t yet follow. This is the most important step. Set aside 20-30 minutes to engage with at least 10-15 people each day. Search for hashtags and keywords that have gotten a lot of engagement in the last hour or are trending.

Click on “Latest” so you can engage with people who are currently on Twitter, or have just recently posted regarding your topic.

Search for hashtag keyword #digitalmarketingday and click latest. Comment on these to grow your followers.
After finding your keyword, click “Latest” to see the most recent tweets using your keyword

If you don’t have 20-30 minutes at any given time during the day, just strive to comment on 10-15 posts each day during the week (Monday-Friday). These should be comments on posts of people that you DO NOT FOLLOW YET. Here, you are trying to grow your followers and get your posts in front of more people.

That is it! Just be diligent. If you comment on only 10-15 posts each day, YOU WILL grow your followers, and will start to see a considerable increase in your engagement on Twitter. If you have the time to spend, you can always comment on more than 15 tweets, but 10-15 is the minimum.

Did you Try the Strategies Listed Above?

Share your results in the comments below! How many followers did you have before you started and what are you at now?

I’d love to hear how this worked for you! (don’t forget, you can always tweet at me and let me know how everything went! If you tweet and let me know that you read this article, I will follow-back 🙂 )

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I am an entrepreneur and adventure enthusiast, looking to break free from the Nine-Five grind. I'll show you what has worked and is currently working for me, as well as what hasn't worked so well.

2 Comments

  1. Sabrina Bullock

    This is great! Thank you. It has helped me learn so much about twitter. I’m still pretty new to it and still trying to figure things out.

    • Nick

      Glad to help! Keep me updated on your progress. I’ve quite a bit of success with this so I’d love to hear how this works for you!

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