Whenever I create a new profile on a platform - as I did with Twitter over ten years ago - I go straight to who I already know that's on the platform, friends, acquaintances, etc. Then I'll look for notable folks who work in a space I'm interested in.
I also used to do things like follow-for-follow years ago on Twitter, but I found that I'd be following folks whose feeds I wasn't very interested in.
Now I get told often by folks I mentor: 'I've set up Twitter to network in tech but I have no followers.'
How did you get your first followers?
By following some close friends. For my products, I just followed people that seems related and interested in the product i made by searching around Twitter and follow them
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I joined about 8 years ago when tweeting felt like yelling into the void. Most of my first followers were friends and family.
Recently, I had a couple tweets go viral, and I've been more active in the community by replying to threads and adding to conversations. That's made the biggest difference in terms of engagement and follower growth.
@chazthetic thanks for talking about viral tweets: do you find you get a surge in followers after you do that? Do they stay?
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@abadesi Yeah, it was funny going back to my original posts years and years ago, and got absolutely zero engagement
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@abadesi Interestingly, you get fewer followers than you'd think when a tweet goes viral. I find I'll get the same results more consistently by tweeting regularly and contributing to conversations. I find it puts my name out there in front of people that may not have encountered my profile otherwise, plus it puts me in front of my tribe.
1. Follow people who share your interests. Once you follow a couple of people twitter does a good job of suggesting relevant handles.
2. Follow popular people.
3. Add meaningful and valuable comments to discussions about the shared interests.
4. Identify a pain point for the audience you want to reach out to. Then answer them.
5. Make lists of good accounts to follow in your area of interest.
6. Create threads of useful content.
Last two days I have been following these to create the initial followers for twitter account of my product https://twitter.com/learningpathsio The strategy seems to work as I have got around 50 new followers in 2 days. I will be doing this actively for the next 5 days. Let us see where I will land.
I also use our own extension http://bit.ly/highlights-extension to highlight important parts on article and then create a twitter thread from my highlights. Most of the people like it when you share highlights from their articles. If you are lucky and a popular account retweets it it can have a snowball effect. Waiting for one such stroke of luck.
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