Lessons learned from chasing after 1000 followers on Twitter
On my path to becoming a content creator, I decided to give it a try and build a Twitter account. It should help me build my personal brand as a professional.
To validate if I can give some value I set a goal to reach 1000 followers in 1 year.
I watched some video courses, followed “twitter gurus”, tried tools and implemented strategies shared by growth hackers. I learned a lot during that experience.
In this topic, I want to share some observations from my path.
tweeting every day works but you have to comment even more
I have read this uncountable number of times – discipline is the biggest growth hack. Therefore it is important to tweet every single day to have results. I even tried to use a tool that queued tweets for me in advance for a whole week so I could write them in a single sitting.
It looks like the sentence tells the truth. Tweeting every single day for a few weeks causes “the algorithm” starts to like you. Commonly, people with massive followings come back after a long break and their tweets are seen by just a handful of people.
For example, my Twitter friend with 40k followers had a break and returned after a few weeks. Then he complained that despite the 40k follower count his tweets were seen by just 200-400 of them. He was out of the mercy of “the algorithm”.
So from my current experience, it seems that tweeting regularly is needed to be considered a valuable user by the platform.
It is also needed to be considered interesting by the users – but looks like it is not the clue here. Interesting content with irregular posting dates will be omitted by lots of users just because “the algorithm” decides who sees what.
Tweeting regularly on a timeline is not enough though. Without followers, you’re writing to the void. Nobody reads that but you still have to do it to gain first followers 🤷.
real results are from commenting
Tweeting rarely goes outside of my timeline. Maybe I had too few followers. So, I had to implement other ways of growing.
My usual growth strategy is to respond to other people's tweets. I see the best results when I respond to people with small accounts who posted some questions.
I have filters on TweetDeck that show me all the tweets with for example “reactjs” keyword or “front-end”, “typescript”, “react native” etc. I read those tweets and if I have something meaningful to add I just hit “reply”.
Helping people that way usually turns into a conversation. If I am helpful enough they often enter my profile out of curiosity. Then they see that my profile is described with a “Follow me to learn Frontend & React Native” sentence. They also see my cover image where those technologies are mentioned (I show it in the section below).
With that strategy, I have this nice feeling that I helped somebody with my experience or knowledge. Having a new follower who recognizes me as a helpful guy is just nice addition to that.
“helpful answers strategy” funnel
The funnel of a new follower in my case usually looks like this (or I imagine it is like this): read my reply -> check on my profile -> check my latest tweets -> decides if follow.
That is why I need to have some tweets on my timeline. With empty timeline nobody would follow me – there is why “tweeting into the void” makes sense.
having an optimized profile helps a lot
I think that what helps me is my profile optimization. I try to present it as a mono-thematic – frontend technologies-focused profile.
I decided to do that as I try not to follow people who write about everything that happens in their life. I’m not interested in that so I assume others would not be interested in such spam from my side either.
That said, posting some off-topic from time to time helps to show that I’m not a bot 😆.
Having an optimized profile converted like crazy when I hit my first viral tweet. I describe that at the end of the post.
Here is what my profile looks like right now:
my first viral tweet helped me a lot
I had this one tweet during my “career” that hit 450k+ views, 27k engagements, and 79 comments.
That was a surprise as I spend like 20 seconds writing it – I just passed the news with a screenshot.
That single tweet itself gave me around 300 followers. That was a huge milestone for someone with 650 followers and a goal to reach 1000 😄.
986 people from that tweet entered my profile -> ~300 decided to follow. This is a huge conversion rate I would say.
I think that the optimized profile + the tweet in “my niche” make such a great result.
twitter consumes a lot of time
Lately, I’m less active on Twitter as it requires a lot of attention. When I was trying to reach that 1000 followers I was spending half of my Saturday preparing “quality content” for my account.
I was trying to author nice tips and interesting topics with custom images, in-depth thoughts and my experiences.
The issue with that idealistic approach is that it is very hard and probably ends unnoticed. I discovered that a social network platform is not the best place to put such content. It had few views, one person clicked the “like” button and after one day it vanished in tons of other creators' content.
Right now, I’m in a “responsive” mode. I reply and I post only when I encounter something interesting or insightful to share. I don’t forcefully prepare content upfront. I decided to focus more on my other activities.
about my goal
Did I reach my goal of 1000 followers in 1 year? Nope.
I reached around 950 followers and had multiple interesting conversations. I also wasn’t active for the whole year – there were months when I wasn’t very active and there were months when I was hyperactive (according to my standards).
Do I regret that time? Nope.
I learned a lot. I improved my writing and make some nice connections. I learned a bit about “the internet” and how social networks work. I satisfied my curiosity. In my opinion, it was worth it.
The conclusion is that Twitter wants the user to be very active – such behaviour is promoted. If you expect to just share and forget there will be no success on Twitter.
👉 Check out my Twitter profile.