Get more targeted Twitter (now X) followers & keep them happy: the routine that works

Are you eager to start building an audience on X (formerly Twitter) but not 100% sure about the steps that are involved? This blog post is for you.

X can produce amazingly effective marketing results for a relatively low cost for your business by distributing and amplifying your marketing message.

Perhaps you may think that running a grade-A X account meanings having a dedicated team and a large marketing budget, which is a common barrier to many people getting started. There are plenty of ways to grow an influencing X account with a small budget and a smart routine.

In this post, we want to show you the best tips available to you on how to manage your X activities using only a few tried and true tools that will maximize results for you, even if you only have 1) a few hours a week to do X marketing and 2) only a small budget.

What we will show you is that  *targeted* following and follower growth can be accomplished by understanding the principles of attracting and maintaining followers, and getting very efficient at it on your own with the help of a few tools.

Key routine 1: continuous targeted follower growth

Bootstrapping to an audience 

If you haven’t already, we recommend the first thing you do should be growing your follower base to beyond the 1000 mark.

Why? take a look at this graph – vast majority of X users have under 1000 followers. Having a following above that threshold puts you above the crowd – a powerful way to signal that you are a source of authority.

However, X is all about growing a community of people that share common interests – blindly following people or have people who aren’t your ideal audience over the long term leads to wasted time and energy.

Growing a targeted audience by presumed similarities of followers: the quick and effective method

Use Crowdfire’s handy “Copy Follower”  to find like-minded people to add to your following

What this function does is allowing you to target X users that are followers of someone else that you feel is similar to you. Following people that have a proven interest in something that you are providing gives you a higher probability of being noticed.

It is analogous to saying “I see that you like vegetarian cuisines, perhaps you’d be interested in my salad recipes?”

For example, if I am a pop band, and I’d like to find more people who might enjoy my music, I might copyfollow @KatyPerry (insert pop star of your choice)

If I am a journalist, I might copyfollow fellow journalist that cover the same areas, with the assumption that they likely enjoy the same type of content.

If I am interested in liberal politics, I might follow the followers of @BillMaher

Growing a targeted audience by geography:

Use Fedica’s Hashtag & Keyword Exploration tool to find like minded people near you to add to your X audience.

What this function does is allowing you to find out who has recently talked about a certain keyword, and adds a layer of segmentation by neatly maps them by geographical location.  

If you enjoy science and want to find interesting conversations from people that also enjoy science, you can track the keyword “Neil deGrasse Tyson” and zoom in the map (to the US, for example) to see the people within that criteria by clicking “Who are they“. You can add them to your audience or a X list for future engagements.

Growing a targeted audience by reciprocation and follow-back:

As you grow your follower base, the number of people following you will reach a point where it becomes difficult to follow them back on native X.

Fedica sorts through the people who follow you, and recommend people you should follow back under the “Suggested Account to follow back” function. This function works best if you have a moderate to high level of new followers per day, since it uses smart filtering to recommend the most valuable followers to you (while filtering out the spammy accounts).

Key routine 2: Retain your audience and attract new ones by publishing content that they get value from

Content Curation

Consistently well curated content is the key to keeping an audience happy and engaged. Quality matters more than quantity here – even a few interesting and relevant content per week will keep your audience from unfollowing you.

Fedica’s intelligent publishing dashboard makes it very easy to curate topics for your X feed by suggesting what’s trending and what your audience is engaging with.

Owned vs Mixed Content

Don’t forget the mix between curated content (produced by others) and native content (produced by you) is a key optimization metric!

A good rule of thumb is to keep it 2/3 and 1/3: fill your audience’s feed with 2/3 interest, relevant and fresh content that they are interested and 1/3 with your own content (which should also be relevant and focus on being helpful)’

Scheduling

Scheduling your tweets ahead of time, and (sparingly) re-purpose your best performing content.

Buffer is a content planning and publishing tool with an intuitive UI. Spend a few minutes each day in the morning to plan out the content for the day and set it on auto-pilot!

A few tips:

• Use Buffer to space out your content between 30min to 1 hour
• Pay attention to mix of curated and native content ; also the mix between entertainment / utility-focused content!

Key routine 3: make amplifying your message a natural part of your content

This routine is all about maximizing the chance that what you post on X will be shared by people by finding people who will likely share your content.

When you are tweeting a hashtag, mention users that are influencers AND tweeting about the same hashtag to increase your chance of being retweeted to a greater audience

For example, let’s say you have a piece of content about yoga under the hashtag #SayYesToYoga.

Using Fedica’s hashtag & keyword report, you can immediately identify the biggest influencers that are also talking about #SayYesToYoga that you can @mention – giving you an opportunity to engage them for retweets that will amplify your audience many folds.

Key routine 4:  A/B test your tweets to continuously improve your content

Many different factors can affect the effectiveness of your content, including and not limited to :

• When you send it
• How a tweet is worded
• What type of image is used

A/B testing is about experimenting – holding certain variables constant while experimenting with others to see what works

Use Fedica’s Tweet Reach & Impression to test which version of your content is working the best.

Here we have an example of two tweets that we want to optimize. The image is identical and the wording is slightly changed. Version A significantly outperformed version B

Version A: 56,000 reach (in Australia and Indonesia) vs Version B: 52,000 reach ( in the UK and Indonesia)

Bonus point: Did you notice that a fan retweeted the same tweet multiple times? Engaging your advocate is a key part of routine 3 (amplification)

Version A of the tweet:  

The tweet impact & reach report tells us what the reach was, and where the engagement occurred

Wrap-up

Use the right tools and focus on the right combination of activities we discussed in this post to grow a large and engaged following:

• target the audience you want

• curate stuff they show an interest in

• follow people back

• create content that naturally get amplified

• continuously test what type of content performs

This effective framework, combined with consistent and optimized publishing habits and a little dash of persistence can yield great marketing results for teams big and small.