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Abadesi

How did you get your first Twitter followers?

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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?

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Charles Forster
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.
Abadesi
@chazthetic lol @ yelling into the void
Abadesi
@chazthetic thanks for talking about viral tweets: do you find you get a surge in followers after you do that? Do they stay?
Charles Forster
@abadesi Yeah, it was funny going back to my original posts years and years ago, and got absolutely zero engagement
Charles Forster
@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.
Rauno Metsa
Launched MakeHub on Product Hunt and got my 200 followers :) number hasn't grown very much since then, haha!
Abadesi
@raunometsa are you working on any tactics to grow it?
Ryan Hoover
The best way to make friends on Twitter is to share something useful and participate thoughtfully in a discussion. Early in my Twitter career (or whatever it's called) I would share interesting articles with an accompanying thought/questions/idea and tag the author. This helped create conversation and became the beginning of a real relationship over several months/years.
Matt Henderson 🚀
In high school during calculus class I would follow everyone I could, then after a few days unfollowed everyone who didn't follow me back. Got 30k engaged followers in 3 months. Didn't use twitter for a few years––when I came back I mass unfollowed everyone and started over, but still kept ~20k of those followers
Matthias Hagemann
@juhaszhenderson This won’t work anymore as Twitter has drastically reduced the hourly follow rates. But your strategy was the perfect way to grow a legit audience (also created several 5k-10k follower accounts that way).
Abadesi
@juhaszhenderson wow that is incredible growth!!
Yash Bhardwaj
I found a quora answer called "What are the funniest tweets you have seen" and put my best stuff there. It did surprisingly well and had like 15k upvotes. I got like 1k-2k followers from there.
Abadesi
@yash that's so smart! which tweet performed best?
Laura
I can't remember on Twitter, since it's been years and I don't actually have followers there. But both on Product Hunt and Linkedin it's been about connecting with people I know and contributing any insight I might have, respectfully, where it's asked.
Davis Baer
I tweet about growing my startup, and have grown to over 2400 followers. I try to keep tweets unique and adding some sort of value, rather than just random thoughts. I have found that tweets with screenshots usually perform well. https://twitter.com/daviswbaer
Abadesi
@daviswbaer Thanks for sharing, yes visual images do well. Do you use gifs, too?
Nikolay Siabrenko
I created a Twitter bot which liked specific tweets by hashtags and got my first 300 followers in this way :) After it, I started launching projects on PH and got ~150 new followers.
Paroma Indilo
i am by no means an expert. We started by replying to relevant discussions and posting industry insights and linking to releavnt news articles. At the beginning it felt like a battle for every single user, we are now seeing followers organically find us.
Hanan
I always got the first followers from my close friends, even if it was my product profile or they didn't know about my product.
Ryzal Yusoff 🇬🇧🇲🇾
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
Abiola
Started with friends and immediate network, and then started to following interesting people/funny people at first. These were the days of #nowfollowing (when it wasn't cringe), but then the combination of having a strong bio, appealing profile pic for your target audience and interacting with people so they follow you back is a winning formula. Of course, having relevant tweets for what you're trying to grow/do
Abadesi
@abxola yes interacting is key!
Michael
#MGWV
Gokul NK
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.