Twitter Growth Hack – Social Media Marketing

By Posted on 6 min read 2347 views

About six months ago I wrote a Twitter Growth Plan which outlined my approach for increasing my Twitter following within social media marketing.

At the time I started with 269 Followers and I was Following 340 people.

Today I want to outline how I’ve adapted this strategy over the previous months, the problems I found and how I envisage it going forwards.

Currently I have 2452 Followers and am Following 178 people. Let’s just take a quick look at these stats:

FollowersFollowing
Original269340
Current2452178

This represents an increase in Followers of 911% and a decrease in Following of 48%.

Over six months I have managed to hugely increase my following whilst reducing those I follow just to the thought leaders that I really want to watch.

So I’m pretty pleased with the results.

Now while it’s possible to put this approach into effect manually, it would take a lot of time. In order to get this done in just a few minutes a day I use a tool called ManageFlitter.

If you want to implement this then I strongly recommend that you use this tool.

The Problems I’ve Faced

During the natural growth of my Twitter account I’ve come across a number of issues that I’ve needed to find a way to resolve. These are:

  1. Spam Followers
  2. Following Ratios
  3. Twitter Feed Content

Spam Followers

These are accounts which are usually automated to build followings and provide very little relevant content. They clog up your feeds, reduce your influence and increase the spam probability of your account.

In a word you don’t want them, and getting rid of them is one of the first steps.

Following Ratios

When you start following people on Twitter you are only allowed to follow a certain amount per day. To start with this should be around 150 otherwise Twitter will start rejecting your follows.

As your account gains more traction you can, very slowly, start to increase this. How Twitter work out how many your account can follow is unknown, but over the last six months I have seen that it is linked to the number of people following you, the ratio of Followers to people you are Following, Influence and Spam Probability.

Twitter Feed Content

You want your Followers to be able to check out your Twitter Wall and see awesome content. Of course you’re going to be Tweeting awesome content, but the more people you follow then the more content that’s going to appear on your wall.

And the problem is…

A lot of the content from people you’re going to follow is automated and/or crap. Which means you really don’t want to be sharing it with your Followers.

What we can take from these three issues that need solving is that we want to remove any spam followers, only follow those people who we really want to follow and keep the content on our feed clean.

The Twitter Growth Hack Solution

There is only one quick way to grow your following on Twitter… Follow other people. There’s a reciprocity on the platform that when you follow someone they follow you back, and we can use that to grow.

Of course there are other ways, your content will hopefully be shared and this will bring people to you and you can link from your blog, email your mailing list etc…

However while your content may be shared, you won’t be getting enough shares to make a difference until you’ve got a high number of followers. I’m only just starting to see our tweets getting retweeted and favorited on a regular basis and we’re still talking low numbers.

From talking to others it seems that critical mass seems to be about 5000 followers. After this point you should start to see significantly more retweets and favorites. However as I haven’t reached that number of followers yet I can’t tell you for sure but I will update you when I do.

Login to ManageFlitter and connect your Twitter account. I recommend that you get the credits which means that the ManageFlitter team will manually process your actions for you.

Click on Manage > Unfollow and you will come to the Unfollow page.

Screen Shot 2015-11-09 at 09.37.44

Click on the Everyone You Follow link and you will see a list of everybody that you Follow. If you can’t see anybody make sure that the Display settings at the top of the page aren’t hiding anybody.

Screen Shot 2015-11-09 at 09.39.05

Make sure that Batch Select is turned on:

Screen Shot 2015-11-09 at 09.39.38

Go through the list of everyone you Follow and click the Checkbox next to the names of the people who you actually want to read the content from. These should be the thought leaders in your niche and the people whose content you enjoy reading.

When you’ve done this press the Never Unfollow Selected button:

Screen Shot 2015-11-09 at 09.40.16

This will add all of these people to a list and will Never Unfollow them. In the future when you Follow someone whose content you really want to follow, make sure that you add them to this Never Unfollow list.

Next you want to go to the Fake (Spam) > Fake Followers page:

Screen Shot 2015-11-09 at 09.40.57

When you’re on this page you should change your Display Settings to:

Screen Shot 2015-11-09 at 09.41.38

Then press the Select All button, this will check every account on the page, and then press the Never Follow button. Once you’ve done this press Select All again and press the Block button.

Screen Shot 2015-11-09 at 09.42.23

That will remove all the Fake Followers you have and make sure that you never follow them in the future.

Next you want to go back to the Everyone You Follow list, but this time change the Display Settings to:

Screen Shot 2015-11-09 at 09.42.56

Now Select All again and then choose the Never Follow button, press the Select All button again and choose the Unfollow button:

Screen Shot 2015-11-09 at 09.43.50

This will start to Unfollow everyone who isn’t in your Unfollow list. Now change your Display Settings to the same as below:

Screen Shot 2015-11-09 at 09.44.20

We need to prevent those we’ve saved to process later from being filtered out for the next step. Once you’ve done this press Select All again and then press the Mute button:

Screen Shot 2015-11-09 at 09.44.48

This will mean that everyone whose content you don’t actually want to follow and share with your Followers will be prevented from displaying on your feed. This keeps your feed clean and relevant to your audience rather than being filled with junk from Followers who are just auto-posting or posting non-relevant content for your audience to their account.

Although you shouldn’t follow these people again as you’ve added them to your Never Follow list, if you do they will be muted and their content won’t display on your feed.

Now that you’ve finished Unfollowing people you can go to the Manage > Follow page from the top menu bar.

Choose Copy Following and then enter the name of one of the people in your Never Unfollow lists. Select Up to 1000 (ordering – fast) and press Show Following like below.

Screen Shot 2015-11-09 at 09.45.45

ManageFlitter will go out and pull back 1000 people that are following the person you entered. We choose these people because we know that anybody following this person are going to be interested in the content you are sharing as well.

Press Select All and then click the Follow button.

Screen Shot 2015-11-09 at 09.46.25

Now that we’ve added everyone to be Blocked, Unfollowed, Muted and Followed we need to start ManageFlitter processing them.

To do this go back to Manage > Process on the main menu.

Screen Shot 2015-11-09 at 09.46.58

Press the button which says Send Waiting Actions To Remote Management. And… that’s it!

You should do this a few times each week and you will start to see large growth on your Twitter following.

Of course, it doesn’t finish there because now you’ve got to generate high quality content for your Followers. But if you start creating that content you will very quickly soon to see your Twitter community thrive!

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