How to get your first 500 Twitter followers and become popular

Become famous on Twitter

As you might expect, most of the Twitter users want to find success so they will do anything they can to grow their number of followers. All these Twitter profiles hide real men and women following their own quest. Therefore we can just apply the same principles as in real life to grow our number of Twitter fans.

I suggest you to go ahead in the following sequence to reach your goal of having your first 500 Twitter followers.

You will see, the more followers you have and the easier it will be to have new ones. As people like popular persons, they will find you more easily as you will be in the list of many other people. Twitter tends also to promote your profile if you have many followers.

Success is the sum of small efforts, repeated day-in and day-out [tweetthis display_mode=”button_link”]Success is the sum of small efforts, repeated day-in and day-out – Robert Collier[/tweetthis]

Robert Collier

Optimize your profile

I assume that you have already a Twitter account and you want to promote it. The first

Dreamed Fortune quick card on Twitter

step is to make it beautiful. Remember that people judge others on appearances.

Most of them decide in seconds whether they are going to follow you. It is likely that they will not even click on your profile, they will just find you from your “quick card” like the one of Dreamed Fortune.

Branding strategy

Do you want to promote yourself as a person or do you prefer to highlight your brand? In the case of Dreamed Fortune, there is no real reason to highlight a person as I consider people decide to follow a cause, a global purpose of reaching financial independence. However it may change in the future as I don’t write things in stone.

We will discuss the choice of your brand name in another article.

If you choose to promote yourself as a physical person, it is also a respectable choice. Moreover, people like to see who they support.

Please note that you will find more men than women on Twitter. It is a fact. Thereby and knowing that the brain of a man is often located below the belt, if you promote yourself as a pretty young woman, you will get a lot more followers, shares and likes on your posts. You can do the test yourself: pick up a picture of such a wonderful woman on Google images and put it as your profile picture. I did the test and got 8 times more likes on a post compared to what I usually get.

It is a good strategy for growing your business without much effort. You will probably notice that most of the woman on Twitter are attractive. A lot of these profiles belong to a man, actually. Sorry to break your dreams.

Header photo

Choose a header photo that is appealing and related to your business. Ideally, it must make people dream. Or at least it makes them think. If you promote your brand, show your logo and maybe your slogan.

Profile photo

Your profile photo is also related to your branding strategy. Therefore, up to you to show the photo of you, a pretty woman, or an image that makes people dream like for the header photo. You can also choose to display your logo as you run a business.

Description

Optimize your Twitter bio. A good description is concise and appealing. Twitter will let you know when you exceed the characters restriction.

Use relevant keywords in your bio so you rank well in Twitter search. You can also attract local users by including your city name.

You can also choose the color theme of your profile. In general, the more you differentiate from your competitors, the better it is (your profile should still give aesthetic satisfaction).

Mention your website in the description and in the proper field.

Tweet helpful & valuable content

That’s not a surprise, you have to give added value if you want people to follow you. If you have a blog, it is a good start to write articles and then post them on Twitter. Each time you send a tweet, pay attention to the 140 characters limit and include useful hashtags.

Example of a tweet – “How to find your million dollar business idea”

Twitter hashtags are keywords used by people to find tweets related to your thematic. For example, if your business is about helping people become an entrepreneur, the hashtag #entrepreneur is a good idea. In general, don’t add more than 2 hashtags in a Tweet. You don’t like spam, other people either.

Choose your titles wisely and if you are not sure, ask a friend if he/she would click on your link with such a title. I will cover it later in a dedicated article as it is a really important subject. A good title can give you good success while a poor one will bring you nowhere.

You are not a machine so you cannot produce as many articles as you eat donuts. Therefore you can also send inspiring content to your audience that is easy to create. Go find the 100 most inspirational quotes for your business and you will be happy for a long time.

For example, here is a tweet I sent with an inspiring quote. People can like and “retweet” it so that even more people see the quote. The more people share your tweet, the more you increase the likelihood of having people following you.

Tweet quote example

[tweetthis display_mode=”button_link”]One day your life will flash before your eyes. Make sure it’s worth watching – Gerard Way[/tweetthis]

Use links in your tweets as they will get more retweets than those without.

Ask for retweets as you have 4 times more retweets when you include “Please retweet” in your tweet.

Include images with your tweets as tweets with images receive 18% more engagement than those without.

You can also retweet the tweets of other people you like so they will be visible on your profile. If you do so, these people will probably appreciate and maybe do the same for you. You first have to give before you get. Just adopt a philosophy of helping people and you will be in the right way.

As Forbes says,

Help others rather than just pushing your own stuff. Twitter is about helping, making connections and providing great content, not about selling your stuff. Become known as someone who puts the needs of others first, and your follower count will grow organically.

Don’t focus on yourself as you are less likely to get retweeted if your tweet has a self-reference.

Forbes gives also a good advice: “Pin an eye-catching tweet to the top of your stream. When people check out your profile, show them the best-of-the-best to entice them to follow you”.

When should you Tweet?

This subject could be handled in a long article as covered by several studies. In short, try to guess when your targeted audience is willing to surf on Twitter and read their timeline. In general, it is not a good idea to post at night when people sleep or during the day when they work.

Therefore, if you target employees it is a good idea to tweet during their lunch time (especially between 1PM and 3PM), or at the end of their business day and before they have dinner.

However, if you choose to tweet when these people are likely to read your tweet, it means that plenty of other content creators will probably do the same. Posting during rush hours may thus lead in your tweet to be lost in an ocean of tweets.

If you can, it is better to tweet at various times, during and outside rush hours. You will then better understand the habits of your audience as you will be able to track the number of likes and retweets you get for each tweet you send on Twitter.

Tweet on the weekends as people have more time to read your articles and relax. According to Dan Zarrella’s research reported by Forbes, “brands get 17% more engagement on the weekends than during the week”.

Don’t spam people, tweet only 3 to 4 times maximum a day and try to post regularly to increase your engagement and visibility, thereby increasing your popularity.

I recommend you to tweet the same content multiple times as “Moz estimates the lifespan of a tweet at around 18 minutes”. How many of your followers do you think are actually behind their screen on Twitter in those 18 minutes? Nearly none of them. Therefore, increase the visibility of your tweet by posting over the course of a day or two, within reason.

Follow people

If you follow people, most of them will follow you back. It is a basic concept of Human reciprocity. Of course some people will not do it. In such a case, wait at least a week before considering if you want to keep following them. Indeed, they may publish interesting tweets you don’t want to miss as it is useful to gather information and business ideas. People don’t stay constantly in front of their screen so give them time to follow you back.

At the end you want to keep a proper ratio between the people you follow and your followers. If you follow let’s say 2000 people and only 10 Twitter users follow you back, the perception of people will be probably bad when visiting your profile. Otherwise you would have more followers compared to the number of people you follow.

You want also to build an audience which will probably be interested in your offer. Therefore, think about your future potential clients. Are they likely to be interested in entrepreneurship? Or are they above all crazy about playing rugby? How old are they and what is their gender?

Once you have identified your ideal target, you have to find these little monsters with five legs. It’s super simple with the Twitter hashtags, really. Think about some keywords that define your business. In the search box at the top right corner of your Twitter account, enter a keyword. Let’s assume you want to catch crazy horse lovers, so enter the hashtag #horselovers (Twitter helps you to find existing hashtags while typing). Twitter redirects you to a page full of horses fans who post pictures and texts about horses. All these people use the hashtag #horselovers when sending tweets so people can easily find them with the hashtag.

Horse lovers

Display the pop-up text on mouse-over of the name of the tweet sender as you can see in the associated screenshot.

Horse lovers – followers

You see the number of followers of this account. You got your horses fans! Do like Pokemon hunters, follow them all. Joking aside, follow only the people who are likely to become your clients in the future and pay attention to some profiles that are only advertising for a shop or the ones only adults should see if you understand what I mean. You must pay attention to your reputation to have a successful branding strategy.

You can redo the processus with other Twitter accounts but I suggest you to try incrementally. If you have only a few followers on your own account, it is better to add a few dozen of people and then wait. Thereby they will start following you and you will have more followers for your next hunting round, so people will be even more likely to follow you.

Think about yourself. If someone with only 10 followers starts following you, do you think you will consider this person as really valuable? Probably not, because this person is not popular yet. Therefore you have to be increasingly popular each time you do a hunting operation.

Follow the valuable Twitter accounts that already follow you. Otherwise some of them may remove you from their list of people they follow.

Clean your profile

Assume that you follow 600 people and you have only 100 followers. This is not a good ratio, isn’t it? Personally, I try not to follow two times more people than the number of people who follow me. Ideally, it is good to follow a few hundred more people max to avoid reaching the 2:1 theoretical limit. I let you judge what is good for yourself.

However, be aware of Twitter’s rules. If you decide to clean your profile massively by removing the people who don’t follow you just before following a lot of new Twitter accounts, you will most probably break Twitter’s rules. As a matter of fact, Twitter will block your account and you will have to enter personal information (phone number) in order to unblock it. If it happens, take this as a warning. You don’t want a permanent ban.

The Twitter rules are available here. In the “Spam” section, Twitter mentions:

We strive to protect people on Twitter from technical abuse and spam. Any accounts engaging in the activities specified below may be temporarily locked or subject to permanent suspension. […]

you may not use the Twitter service for the purpose of spamming anyone. What constitutes “spamming” will evolve as we respond to new tricks and tactics by spammers. Some of the factors that we take into account when determining what conduct is considered to be spamming are:

if you have followed and/or unfollowed large amounts of accounts in a short time period, particularly by automated means (aggressive following or follower churn);

if you repeatedly follow and unfollow people, whether to build followers or to garner more attention for your profile; […]

Therefore, be careful when you decide to clean your profile. Do it wisely, ideally gradually over several days.

Automatic tools

There are many automatic tools available for Twitter that intend to ease your administrative tasks. For example, you can link your Wordpress website to Twitter and schedule your publications on the social network.

There are many other tools available directly on Twitter. You can send automatically a message to a new follower to thank this person. You can also send them a message about your products and services. Other people decide to thank publicly their followers directly on their timeline.

I don’t recommend the automatic “thank you” message as it is obvious for their followers that these are automated messages. They lose their meaning. What’s the point of being thanked by a robot? It’s just spam. People want sincere interactions, authentic and personalized messages.

Use also the Tweet this WordPress plugin to motivate people to share your favorite quotes or content to Twitter, expanding your reach and attracting potentially new followers.

Conclusion

If you follow these advice you will most probably get your first 500 followers within your first month of dedicated work. The time you spend on building your audience and the added value you give will define how long you have to wait before reaching your first 500 fans.

If you have to remember only one advice, it is to regularly tweet a variety of helpful and relevant content to give added value to people. I know it’s not rocket science but it’s simple and even without a budget you can find success with this simple rule.

Believe me, sooner than you think you will consider getting your first 1000 followers.

And in life, always remember the words of Walt Disney: