With over 1 billion registered and 386 million active users, Twitter is one of the most popular social media platforms that can be truly beneficial for your business marketing worldwide.
Twitter can boost your brand awareness, allow you to communicate with the right customers, and build trust with them. And most importantly grow your brand’s expertise within the industry.
Amongst the most popular countries, Twitter is heavily used in the United States, Japan, and United Kingdom.
However, the real question is. How do you grow your Twitter followers with the least amount spent on paid promotion?
In today’s article, we’ll cover all you need about Twitter marketing, its benefits, the most popular growth strategies, and what are the top 12 proven ways how to grow your Twitter account?
Why should you grow your Twitter following?
Growing your Twitter account opens up new markets and allows you to reach larger audiences worldwide. With two-way communication, your brand can deliver an incredible customer experience and be available when they need you the most.
On Twitter, your brand can communicate the brand’s personality and convey the character.
Lastly, Twitter allows you to gather important feedback information over your brand that helps you to improve the products and services you sell.
Further Reading: How To Create A Twitter Account In 5 Easy Steps
How to best grow your Twitter organically?
Paying for your Twitter follower is easy, though the question is, how long you can last like that? That’s why it’s important to learn first how to grow your followers organically, before paying for the traffic later.
First of all, focus on your main profile.
Update your profile and header photos. Add a short 160-character description introducing your brand, what you do and why people should follow you.
Second, connect your Twitter account to other websites.
Join different social media platforms and share your Twitter handle. Though, be careful and avoid being too spammy. Be helpful first, answer people’s questions in the comments, and only then suggest following you for more similar content.
Furthermore, promote your Twitter account on your business newsletters or through email signatures.
If you come across similar profiles on Twitter, like, comment and retweet if you found that helpful. That will boost your followers organically too.
Then consider pinning your main pillar posts.
Those are the most interesting and engaging posts. They will appear on top of your profile and attract more eyeballs over time.
Further Reading: How to Pin a Tweet on Twitter: Everything You Need to Know
Lastly, always keep an eye on your competition and what they are doing to increase the number of followers.
Once you get an idea of what works for them, take that as an inspiration and apply it to your brand.
12 Proven ways to get more Twitter followers
Once we understood the importance of growing your Twitter account and discussed some of the strategies to grow your account organically. It’s time to go through the top 12 proven ways how to grow your Twitter followers.
1. Post high-quality relevant content
Nevertheless that most people come to Twitter to start a discussion, many of them are here to read the latest news or skim over the topics of their interest. As the result, to gain more followers, post content that your audience likes the most and avoid covering a broad range of different topics. For example, if you’re posting over Marketing and Sales, avoid tweeting over Sports or Health.
Consider posting product tutorials, upcoming events, discounts, or different reviews. If you’re not sure what to post go through your Twitter account analytics. This data will help you to have a better overview of what content gets the most engagement and where you should double down your energy.
2. Posting visual content
Despite that text-based content works the best on Twitter, posting visually appealing images can capture your audience’s attention too.
When you post aesthetically pleasing images you strengthen your brand awareness and make it more memorable. And if you run out of branded images and need a quick refill you can always find plenty of royalty-free stock images that work well in different scenarios.
Lastly, if you have the luxury to hire a dedicated designer that creates custom image covers the next level would be to create custom illustrations next to your tweets that instantly represent your brand and convey the message.
3. Consistent posting
A regular posting pattern can increase your audience’s engagement. Hence, plan your content creation well in advance and develop an editorial calendar. A calendar that marks each day you have to post and what type of content goes that day.
And don’t forget to post during the holidays. Try to come up with something different and original than usual.
To brainstorm different tweet ideas and plan all your content in one place use the Organic Tweets starter kit from Twitter. Best practice shows that posting 1 to 2 times a day works the best, but not more than 3 to 5 times.
Further Reading: Why Evergreen Tweets are Critical to Twitter Marketing Success
4. Post & interact
Countless other businesses do another common mistake. Once they set up their editorial calendar and post regularly, they forget to stay engaged with their audience for the first few hours.
And it’s important to be available at least for the 1st hour after posting and engage with your audience. Help them to answer their questions and be there when they need the most.
Another point to consider is following other interesting and successful brands within the same industry. Spend some time retweeting other posts.
If you wish that other people following a particular brand would notice your content, use shoutouts. As the result, mentioned brands might reply back and people following them will notice your tweets.
Lastly, track your brand mentions and reply back to the comments. That will boost your engagement and your audience will see that you’re a brand that cares.
5. Optimize your Twitter profile
What is one single difference between the brands that stand out and the ones that fall far behind on Twitter?
First and foremost they all have a strong Twitter profile that is original and unique to their brand.
As a result, invest time to optimize your business profile, and skipping this step can weaken your overall experience.
Upload your profile and cover images. Observe if your brand is clearly visible and images aren’t too distracting. Think over your color palette and make sure that it stays consistent along with your profile. If your primary brand color is green, make sure that there is some green in your profile, cover, and other posted images.
In a short bio description, Include more information about your brand, website, location, contact details, and what you do. And don’t forget to include your most important keywords. They will make your brand more searchable and will help to better index your brand on search engines.
Further Reading: 14 Twitter Bio Ideas to Attract More Followers
6. Schedule your Tweets
Similar to other social media platforms, posting time on Twitter matters too. Just think for a second, if you tweet when no one is around, you’re doomed to have low engagement rates.
In addition, you can achieve the highest engagement rates posting on Tuesdays, Wednesdays, Thursdays, and Fridays. Talking about post timing, posting somewhere between 8 to 10 am. or 6 to 9 pm. works the best.
Another interesting fact is that B2B content performs the best during business hours. On the flip side, B2C content gets the most engagement during the weekends. For the best insights visit Twitter analytics to see what works the best in your case.
Further Reading: The 22 Best Twitter Schedulers to Ramp Up Your Twitter Marketing
7. Host & engage in Twitter Chats
In short, Twitter Chats are live conversations hosted on Twitter during a specific time with a specific hashtag to discuss a specific topic. It’s important to mention that if you don’t include a specified hashtag, other participants won’t see your message.
Twitter Chats are similar to chat rooms but can help you to reach broader audiences. To get the most of them, like and retweet the replies. Or start a discussion yourself by asking a question with a specified hashtag.
8. Followers campaigns
Growing your Twitter followers organically can be time and energy-consuming. If your budget allows, boost your account through a follower’s campaign.
Promote your Twitter account and effectively grow your followers through a set budget within the specified time frame. The best part of that is that you only pay once the individuals follow your brand. See what works for your case, experiment with different settings such as demographics and keywords.
However, keep in mind that running these campaigns your objective is to increase followers rather than to sell. And the latter option won’t work while running this type of ads.
9. Tweet discounts & special codes
Everyone loves free stuff, right?!
Therefore, consider running free giveaways to increase your follower’s base and boost your engagement rates. Think over simple rules your audience have to do to win valuable prizes and see how your follower’s base is increasing.
If you don’t have enough time to organize contests, then sharing limited discount codes might be a better option. For example, you might want to sell out jeans line from the previous season. Giveaway 100 of promo code with 25% off for each person retweeting the post and this way increase your brand awareness when friends of your followers will hear over your brand.
Further Reading: Twitter Giveaways: Benefits, Rules, Ideas, and How to Run Them Successfully
10. Promote tweets for more reach
If you have an extra budget, consider occasionally promoting your tweets. The tactic here is relatively simple. Boost your posts and reach similar audiences of people interested in the content you create.
However, when promoting your content make sure that you uncheck the box “also target followers”. This way you won’t waste money on showing ads to people that are already following your brand.
11. Tag brands
Maybe you already have in mind which brand you would like to collaborate with, but don’t know the right way to approach them.
Consider tagging them within your tweets, and they might notice you. You can also try retweeting their content or just simply DM them and who knows they might sign up for future collaboration with your brand.
12. Do guest blogging
You might think, how guest blogging can contribute to growing your Twitter followers?
Well, if you occasionally contribute to guest blogging about a particular topic, let’s say Marketing. You have a chance to include your Twitter accounts within the author’s bio. This way promoting your Twitter account.
As the result, people reading your article might consider following your brand for more content on a similar topic. However, bear in mind that this isn’t a fast way to grow your account and results come slowly to those who contribute consistently and play a long-term game.
Conclusion
To summarize, growing your Twitter account can be a time-consuming process. However, it’s a social media platform worth taking the time with hundreds of millions of active users and number one social media platform in countries such as the United States, Japan, and the United Kingdom.
Growing your Twitter followers is beneficial because it opens new markets to larger groups of people worldwide and allows you to effectively communicate your brand message.
As the result, there are 2 main methods you can grow your Twitter account. First, pay for your traffic, promote your posts and run Twitter follower campaigns.
On the other hand, take a different route and grow your followers organically, which is slightly slower, but free of cost.
The most popular methods to keep in mind are:
- Post high-quality, relevant content consistently
- Post-text-based & visual type content
- Interact with your audience
- Participate in Twitter Chats
- Optimize your Twitter profile
- Collaborate with other brands and share your handle on other sites
- Throw special discounts and offers
Lastly, growing your Twitter followers won’t happen overnight, and it will require great planning and being consistent in delivering high-quality work, which is worth sharing.
What is your most favorite method to grow Twitter followers?
Author Bio
Paulius Setkus is a seasoned digital marketer and the founder of LemonHook agency. He covers topics about content marketing, conversion optimization, and SEO.
Hero photo by Edgar Moran on Unsplash
Your recommendations to actively engage with others on Twitter is spot on. By initiating and participating in coversations, retweeting valuable content, and responding to mentions and comments, we can establish ourselves as active and engaged member of the twitter community. this not only increases our visibility but also helps build genuine connections with others users who may become our followers.
Couldn’t agree with you more Priyanshu!