If you’ve clicked this you’re probably already skeptical, as if I’m going to give you some sort of magic formula with no add-ons or gotchas, well I am, although it’s not exactly a magic formula. By no add ons or gotchas what I mean is you won’t have to buy anything, including followers, you won’t have to sign up for someone dodgy, download anything or anything like that, all you’ll have to do is follow my instructions.
So, what makes me qualified to tell you how to gain 15,000 followers a month on Twitter? Well, I have over 230,000 (and growing every day) Twitter followers, and I’ve gained them by using these methods. I’ve also done work gaining followers for other people, and building followers for my own accounts and selling them. I’ve spent a lot of time figuring this out through trial and error and you’re getting it for free, I know, I’m awesome.
You may be wondering what the benefits of increasing your Twitter presence is, well it will give you more people to engage with and help you grow your business, it will help you to grow your brand and it will help make you look like an authority, celebrity, or even a celebrity authority, which I recently wrote some articles on how to become these. Anyway, let’s get down to it.
1) Choose a good username
What I mean by a good username is basically a normal one. Don’t have one with lots of numbers or random letters in, for example @8hr65ok. This may seem obvious but a lot of people just stick a load of letters and numbers in because they think everything’s taken, when it isn’t.
Try and include your name in it, or the name of your business. Don’t include swear words or anything inappropriate, because whilst some people may find it amusing, a lot will be put off. You can also make use of underscores, and words before your name so you get one with your name in, for example, for me I could use:
- @thesamball
- @samball1
- @sam_ball
- @itssamball
- @samball
- @_samball
The list goes on; you can also use the initial of your middle name. If you’re reading this and you do have an account with a username that isn’t that great, you don’t need to set up a new one, you can just change it in your settings.
2) Have a profile picture
If you don’t have a profile picture already, upload one. A lot of people, myself included, will not follow accounts which don’t have profile pictures (eggs). The reason for this is because firstly they look weird, and secondly they’re far more likely to be spam accounts, so you’ll be missing out on a lot of follows if you don’t have a profile picture.
3) Have a cover picture
A lot of people will upload a profile picture and then not a cover picture, I don’t know why you’d have one and not the other, but people do. You should do this for the same reasons as you should upload a profile picture, you could be mistaken for a spam account if you don’t. A blurry cover picture is just as bad by the way.
You should also try and have a cover picture that is nice to look at, or at the very least not unpleasant or weird to look at. Don’t have a picture of yourself (a picture with you in it is fine though), I’ve been there, I’ve done it, it creeps people out. If you really don’t have a clue what to put for it just upload a nice view or something like that, it will do the job just fine until you think of something else.
4) Have a bio
This is the final part of completing your profile. There are two benefits to a bio: Firstly, you don’t look like a spam account (whilst a lot of spam accounts do still have bios, most of the accounts that don’t generally tend to be spam, compared to a small proportion of accounts with a bio that are spam accounts. Secondly, it gives people a chance to see what you’re about, if you have an interesting bio, people will be more likely to follow you when they look at your profile, it also gives them something to talk to you about if they decide to tweet you.
Whilst you’re at it, you should put your location in too, even if it’s only your country, you’d be surprised how many people will engage with you over it. Your bio is your chance to sell yourself, so make the most of it. Put your website on your account too if you have one, I don’t think it makes a difference to the number of followers you get, but it certainly doesn’t decrease it so you’d be silly not to put it in.
5) Tweet regularly
You should do this for 3 reasons. So your followers can engage with you, and retweet you to their followers, so people don’t think you’re a spam account, and finally, so Twitter doesn’t think you’re a spam account. This is particularly true if you want to build a business account or you have a business you want to tweet lots. Tweeting links is fine but if you only tweet links it will put people off.
So make sure you do non-link tweets, it you can’t think of anything then just tweet good quotes. If you only tweet links and you’re following people quite aggressively (step 7) then Twitter will probably ban you pretty quickly, which isn’t good, so do lots of tweets and engage with your followers.
6) Follow people back
This may seem counter-intuitive, but it isn’t. You might think if you follow people back less people will follow you, because your ratio (of people you follow to people who follow you) won’t look good, and because then you have one less follow available to follow someone else, who could follow you back and get you another follow.
Firstly, nobody cares about your ratio, except you, so stop worrying about it. Secondly a lot of people who follow you may unfollow if you don’t follow them back, and if you do sometimes you’ll get more followers as a result, because if people can see you follow back then they’ll be more likely to follow you. Also, given that you’re going to be hoping for other people to follow you back, you should try and do it with them. Do unto others and all that.
7) Follow people
This is without a doubt the most important step. You can follow 1,000 people a day, and as long as your account isn’t brand new, you have a decent number of tweets (say 100ish), and you tweet regularly, you can follow all 1,000 a day without being banned by Twitter. This is without a doubt the easiest way to build your followers. For 10-15 minutes a day you can go up by up to 500 or 600 a day.
The best way to do this is to find an account of someone which is similar to yours (same industry, same interests, same age, something like that), which has lots of followers and follows lots of people. You won’t have to search for long before you come across one; you can search for them, keep an eye out on your timeline, or check keep checking your recent followers until one of them follows you.
The reasons you want them to be similar is because then their followers are likely to be interested in following you as well, so will be more likely to follow you, and the reason you want them to have a lot of followers and good ratio is then the majority of their followers will be people who ‘follow back’, so they’ll probably do it when you follow them.
If you don’t have a lot of followers you’re going to hit a follow limit before too long. As well as only being able to follow 1,000 a day, you can only follow up to 5,000 people; until you have 5,000 followers, then you can only follow 10% more than you have followers. One way round this is to buy followers, but it’s a waste of money in my opinion, because you can just get them for free, and they’re going to be real (bought followers will be fake). What I would suggest you do is find a few follow back accounts at first (they don’t have to be related to you) and follow and unfollow (even the ones who follow back) until you get past the 5,000 follow limit.
This may go against what I’ve said but it’s a necessary evil you may have to do in order to build up the slack required to grow your account properly. After this you can resume following back and following followers of similar accounts like I’ve said. If you’re thinking well why not just keep following and unfollowing and grow that way, a lot will unfollow you back, and you’re probably going to have more spam accounts as a proportion of your followers, simply because they’re more likely to remain. So you may end up with a lot of followers, but they’re all either inactive or fake. I really wouldn’t recommend it, only unfollow to get past the limit.
8) Unfollow non-followers
This is obvious, if you’re following someone who isn’t following you, you’re just wasting a follow that could be used following someone who might follow back. Unless someone has a lot of followers and you follow them for their tweets and don’t expect a follow back of them you should unfollow people who don’t follow you back. Don’t go through your followers list manually to do this, it takes ages and is pointless. Find an app or a website which lets you do this for free. I’d recommend manage flitter, just put it in on Google and sign up for it.
9) Trade shoutouts
Once you get a decent amount of followers, you can find people with a similar amount of followers and trade shoutouts or retweets, so you both gain each other’s followers. I’d recommend you don’t do this often though, as your followers won’t like it if you’re constantly spamming them. If you do it too much, you might have more followers but they’ll be inactive and of no use to you. Once in a while is fine though. Also, if you swap retweets, don’t retweet something you think your followers will consider spammy and not like.
10) ENGAGE WITH YOUR AUDIENCE
This is crucial. If you engage with your followers they will like you more, be less likely to unfollow you, more likely to retweet you, and more likely to recommended your account to someone else. There’s no point building your followers if you don’t want to engage with them, they’re just a number on a screen. If you engage with them you can build your brand and use them much better for whatever it is you wanted followers for in the first place. This is also a crucial part of establishing yourself as an authority, celebrity, or celebrity authority, so make sure you do.
If you follow these steps you can gain up to 15,000 followers a month, once you get past the follow limits. If you want to gain less followers, but followers of a higher quality, then don’t follow accounts without a profile picture, a cover picture, or a bio. Whilst you will miss out on some genuine people, you will be more likely to have more real people following you, although less will follow back, because spam accounts follow back more.
So if you just want to focus on building your account there’s no point being picky, if you already have a large number of followers or are building it more slowly, I’d recommend you do this and target followers that are more likely to be real. To conclude:
1) Choose a good username
2) Have a profile picture
3) Have a cover picture
4) Have a bio
5) Tweet regularly
6) Follow people back
7) Follow people
8) Unfollow non-followers
9) Trade shoutouts
10) ENGAGE WITH YOUR AUDIENCE
Happy Twittering.
-@thesamball
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