How I Grow My Twitter Followers Quickly

As of this writing, my personal twitter account @briancastell has 917 followers. Two and a half weeks ago I had 793. Spectacular? Not at all. I’ve been (stupidly) neglecting my own account while managing the social media implementation for my clients religiously. Now that I’m finally ready to share what I’ve learned, I have no followers to spread it to! So, I got to thinking… “I know I need to grow my followers, how can I do that extremely fast?” Trust me, it was extremely easy with only about ten minutes of actual work. Take a look at how I did it so you can grow twitter followers fast too…

Tweet Adder

I took a stroll through popular opinion, ran through doubt, and stumbled into Tweet-Adder-Land Boy is it a shell of it’s former self. What was once a popular program beloved by Twitter power users for its ability to run in the background and silently follow your targeted accounts (and unfollow those who didn’t return the favor) is now useless – for my purposes at least. They had to nix those features. On the contrary, I suppose if you want to power-search Twitter for certain types of users and/or tweet automatically from an RSS feed I guess it would be perfect, albeit overpriced for those features alone. What was once “set and forget” is now *click*, *click*, *click*, etc forever… Tweet Adder was out. The idea of following your target market en masse and then possibly unfollowing those who were an “unproductive” follow was the point. I was just trying to make it easier… 🙂

Operation Grow Twitter Followers Fast

First

I had to answer the questions: “Who do I follow? What target am I aiming for?” Well, I provide small business marketing so the first thing I did was search “small business” and follow the most popular accounts covering the topic. Their daily tweets content provide me a valuable resource to retweet from on the small business topic – but that’s not the ultimate goal. Their followers are.

I increased the odds that people would find me interesting by finding and sharing useful content.

Anyone following that popular small business account, just like me, wants to be plugged into the “small business” online conversation…

Second

I would follow dozens of those followers of the bigger accounts. I set out to follow a few dozen people every few days or so and then see if I could get a respectable number to follow back. Beside those that would automatically follow me back, I increased the odds that people would find me interesting by finding and sharing useful content.

Third

I upgraded my Buffer account to “Awesome” (P.S. how awesome is that name?) set a schedule, and filled it with useful web articles for my target market. Any web articles I came across that pertained to entrepreneurs or small business, I added to my buffer.

As an aside, I’ll even drop my secret sauce in here, DAILY is an awesome source of content from the team at Buffer. It allows you to find daily curated articles on a variety of topics like marketing, entrepreneurship, inspiration, etc. To be honest, I’ve been leaning on Daily a bit as it’s so easy to find great content.

The only drawback I can find is that it’s hand-curated which means there isn’t a vast pool of content yet. I’m sure that will improve with time. The Result? Well, I did mass followings a few times over the past month. Here’s what my follower/following rate looks like: @BrianCastell Follow/Unfollow Graph Each peak is a day during which I followed up to 80 people (some days I followed 30 or so for example). If you notice, I only did this about six times and I started on July 27th. In about 19 days I grew my following organically over 15%. I followed about 60 people each time on average. It takes a little over a minute to follow sixty people. In total, I spent about ten minutes during the past two and a half weeks actually “working” on this.

I followed 389 people over this time period and received 124 followers. That converts to about 32% follow-back rate. Those that don’t add value to my twitter feed or don’t follow back are being slowly weeded out and unfollowed as they tweet and appear on my twitterfeed.

Note: I can use this data and follow-back rate to project how many people I’ll have to follow to get to a certain follower level. For example, if this rate holds, to get an additional 1000 followers I’ll have to follow another 3,000 people over time. An added bonus is that as my followers increase and my content is retweeted and favorited, it will grow faster on its own.

Conclusion

That’s it! If you want to grow your followers get out there and search for popular accounts within your target market then follow those accounts. Next follow their followers. These are easily grouped target customers ripe for the picking. It’s a time-honored tactic that works.