How I Grew From 300 to 5k Followers on Twitter In Just 3 Weeks

Three weekly rounds, three targets, one winner in the end. Simple.

But before I go into the details, let me tell you that I am not a social media guru. I don’t know how to market stuff. I don’t have a sense of humor like @Trendulkar or @GabbbarSingh. To make things harder, @Crowdfire has some awesome people like @iSpiritualist, @KaziUrooj, @NischalShetty, @BuddhaSource who are pretty rad when it comes to #socialmedia, especially Twitter. But I decided that I wanted to win one way or another, and my strategy had one thing that I was good at — Code.

“GrowthHackers are a hybrid of Marketer and Coder.” — Andrew Chen, Entrepreneur

My Twitter stats before the competition:
Following: 635
Followers: 373

Round 1. Maximize your Follower Gain

Follower Gain (FG) = Followers – Unfollowers

Scoring:
FG > 100 = 2 point
100 < FG < 500 = 4 point
500 < FG < 3000 = 6 point
FG > 3000 = 8 point

Bottlenecks: This might seem simple — just keep following people and eventually you’ll start getting followbacks. True. But you have to maintain a certain following/follower ratio.

Eg: You can follow only 2000 users at first. It’s only after your follower count reaches a certain level that you are allowed to follow more people.

Strategy: The first thing I had to do was find people to follow but there are two big questions here:

1. How to find people who would followback?

1. How to make sure those people engage (favorite, retweet and mentions) with my tweets?

With some research and actual experimentation, I figured out the answers to these pressing questions:

1. Choose a niche interest for your Twitter profile.

1. Find out people who post interesting tweets and are active everyday on social media. This makes sure that these people are active and are likely to engage with you.

1. Find out people who have Follower to Following ratio between 1 and 2. These people are most likely to follow you back.

Solution: Following thousands of people manually is just wasteful when you have to kick some ass in a competition. That’s why I wrote this very simple script that you can run in the browser which will automatically follow people on Twitter. You just have to go to your competitor’s follower list,open Developer Tools for Chrome, paste this script and press ENTER.

a = setInterval(function () {
window.scrollTo(0,document.body.scrollHeight);

$(‘.not-following .user-actions-follow-button.js-follow-btn’).click();

}, 1000);

This will automatically follow all visible people on that page, scroll for you, load more people, follow them and so on. If you want to stop the script, just paste the following line and press ENTER.

clearInterval(a)

After this, I was all set for winning Round 1. The only thing you have to keep in mind while doing all this is: DO NOT FORGET TO CLEAN YOUR ACCOUNT (Try @Crowdfire’s Non Followers feature 😉 )

PRO TIP: Give some time for people to follow back. After that, unfollow everyone who does not follow you back, so that your Following to Follower ratio gets back to normal and you are not stopped by Twitter’s rate limits on your way to glory!

First Round @EagleEyeApp Stats:

Overall Followers Received for Round 1

Round 2: Maximize engagement per tweet

Engagement = ( Retweets + Favorites + Mentions ) / Number of tweets

Scoring:
Engagement < 1 = 1 point
1 < Engagement < 2 = 2 point
2 < Engagement < 3 = 3 point
3 < Engagement < 4= 4 point
4 < Engagement < 10 = 5 point
10 < Engagement = 10 point

Bottlenecks: This round was tricky. Not only you have to make sure you tweet less, you also to make sure you tweet quality stuff, at the right time and get more engagement (favorites/retweets).

Strategy: The first thing I had to do was find good content. Best source was Medium. I searched for interesting content related to marketing, social media, growth hacking.

The second thing that was important to get more engagement was to engage with other people on Twitter who shared the same niche interest that I did.

Solution: I used Buffer to schedule those tweets and track their performance. Based on the performance of each tweets, their reach/engagement/time of post, I rescheduled some of those tweets again during the course of the week.

PRO TIP: Important thing to do is, every time a new tweet is posted by Buffer, go to Twitter and Pin that particular tweet.

Next up was getting more engagement. So I searched for tweets based on a variety of hashtags like #growthhacking, #socialmedia, #smm, #marketing, #seo and #blogging. At any point of time, these hashtags are always your best bet. As always I created a script that would favorite all the tweets on the search result page, scroll for more, favorite, scroll for more, and so on.

a = setInterval(function () {
window.scrollTo(0,document.body.scrollHeight);

$('.js-actionButton.js-actionFavorite:visible').click();

}, 1000)

After favoriting approximately 1000 tweets, you would be rate-limited by Twitter. So don’t spend all your favorites on one hashtag; distribute your favorites among different hashtags. If you want to stop the script, just paste the following code and press ENTER.

clearInterval(a)

PRO TIP: Another interesting trick that I used was based on the logic that you add someone to a list, the person gets a notification that someone added them to a list and checks out your profile. Now there is a 50–50 chance that they will favorite your pinned tweet. I can’t be sure of the conversion from this, but it’s an interesting idea and worth a shot.

Obviously, I won’t be leaving you alone with so much to figure; so here’s a tool I used to crack this round: list-copy. What you have to do is find people who have super awesome lists of Growth Hackers, Social Media Gurus, etc. Now just go to the above site and copy their list. How awesome is that!

Second Round @EagleEyeApp Stats:

Engagement (RT, Mention, Fav) w.r.t Tweets

Round 3: Maximize engagement per follower

Engagement Score = ( Retweets + Favorites + Mentions ) * 100 / Total Number of Followers

Scoring:
1 < Engagement Score < 10 = 1 point
10 < Engagement Score < 20 = 2 point
20 < Engagement Score < 30 = 3 point
30 < Engagement Score < 40 = 4 point
.
.
.
Engagement Score > 150 = 8 point

Bottlenecks: This was like the toughest round of all or so I thought at first. I would not just have to tweet like crazy but would also need insane engagement to even think of winning! But then while chatting with my friend @VanhishikhaB, I got a strategy in mind. Eureka!

Strategy: To make sure that I absolutely win this round, I had to get a score of 8, that is my engagement had to be greater than 150. I had around 3200 followers around that time. Assuming that I grow to 5000 followers by the end of the round, and if I get 1 Retweet and 1 favorite on each of my tweets, I would have to post roughly:

(150 Engagement score * 5000 Followers) / (100 * 2 Engagement) = 3750 Tweets

Now, take a breath and think about that for a moment. 3750 EFFING TWEETS IN 7 DAYS! That is almost 535 tweets daily. Now there was no way I could *manually* search and post those many tweets. BUT, if I could put together a list of interesting social media accounts that tweet original stuff and piggyback on their tweets and post them to my account, I could still win this!

Solution: I researched and found that there is something called as theTwitter Streaming API that lets you listen to events which tell you when a user has posted a tweet. So I wrote a script that would do just this. It would wait for a tweet from the accounts of my choice, then it would tweet the same text from my account. Now using this script does require some programming knowledge as it written in nodejs.

For those who are familiar with it can checkout the code here. For those who aren’t, check the note at the bottom of this blog post. 😉

Third Round @EagleEyeApp Stats:

Engagement (RT, Mention, Fav) w.r.t Followers and Tweet

My Twitter stats after the competition:
Following: 4.7k
Followers: 5.2k

Needless to say, I literally ruled #CTPL.

TL;DR: there are a few points that I’d like to make:

1. Don’t follow blindly and expect a followback. Think, choose your target and follow wisely.

1. No one likes inactive accounts. People will unfollow you if they see that you are inactive (A lot of people use @Crowdfire’s Inactive Following tool to figure that out 😉 ) That is the reason you should post quality tweets and stay active.

1. Post content that people have started expecting from your account. Do not tweet about a myriad of subjects. No one likes that.

1. Use TakeOff, which recently launched scheduling for Twitter, or Buffer to queue good content.

Happy #GrowthHacking!

Note: I understand that a lot of people who are reading this are probably not good at programming. Hit me up on Twitter or email and I’ll help you set it up

PS: Thanks to @prisharma25, @iSpiritualist and @VanhishikhaB for helping with the edits.

(This post first appeared here)

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First Published on: Apr 29, 2015