How I Got 2000 Twitter Followers in 30 Days

For those of you new to the site, I declared that I would start doing “30 days of Twitter Marketing” for the month of April. On April 1st, I started out with about 75 followers and by April 30th, I was over 2000. Over the course of the month, I had a number of Twitter Marketing specific posts and gave you some status updates along the way. I’ll add links for these at the bottom of the page.  I think all are worth a read, but would suggest checking out the “avoid fake followers post” and the FAQ.

What I did to get 2000 Twitter Followers – The Blueprint

1. Identify who your target audience is.  For me, it’s writers.  If you’re an author, search for potential readers of your book.  The more specific you can find, the better.  For example, If you write romance, that’s a big category, so dig in!
   • OK:   Paranormal romance
   • Better: Contemporary Paranormal romance
   • Still better!: Contemporary Paranormal Romance Vampires
   • Best: Contemporary Paranormal Romance Vampires Seattle
2. Search for these people on Twitter.  You can use hashtags, followers of someone who writes similar books, or even your own intuition. Start by trying to find the most specific first, as these are most likely to be interested in reading your book!
3. Start Following! Follow about 200 people a day (more may make you look like a spammer).
4. Wait for people to follow you back.  Give them 3 to 5 days to follow you back.
5. Interact!  Be a real person.  DM people, post pictures, respond to tweets.  Don’t post constant “buy my book” tweets.  See my recommendation in this post: The Worst Thing an Author Can Do Using Social Media Marketing.
6. Unfollow! After 3 to 5 days unfollow 100-200 people that are not following you back. We’d like to keep following everyone

What I did to get 2000 Twitter Followers – TweetAdder

I did the above using only the Twitter.com website for the first week. You can see my results of week one  here.  The takeaway from that week is that it took about 30 to 45 minutes each day to follow and unfollow people on Twitter.  This isn’t too bad, but my time is valuable.  After Week 1, I purchased a copy of TweetAdder to help me do the following:

1.  Stops me from accidentally following and unfollowing the same people.  Following and unfollowing the same people over and over again is the fastest way to get your account banned on Twitter. It automatically keeps track of who I’ve followed using the tool and stops me from following and unfollowing the same people.
2. Keeps track of my “unfollow” list.  Since I wait 3 to 5 days to unfollow, it’s hard to know who I followed yesterday versus a week ago. TweetAdder takes the guesswork out of this by keeping track of when the tool first noticed I was following an account.  I just check a box that says show me people that haven’t followed me back in X days.  I can easily set this to 3 and start unfollowing them!
3. Allows me to build a “Follow later list” – my search for followers might get 3000 people.  Since I try to follow 100 to 200 people a day, I don’t have to redo my search every day.  The list is kept in TweetAdder, so I just open the tool each day and follow 100-200 people!
4. Saves me time. Probably should have led with this one 🙂  Even with the TweetAdder 4 Update, I can do all my follows and unfollows in about 2 minutes a day.  WAY better than 30 to 45!

It has many other features you can read about on the TweetAdder site, but it’s very easy to use and will save you a lot of time.  If you don’t have money for the product, that’s ok!  The tradeoff is your time. Update: I’ve published a video of how I use TweetAdder 4.  It’s still amazingly fast and saves me me hours of time.

What went well:

More proof that this really works! I had no problem building my Twitter list pretty quickly.  If you’re serious about building your Twitter audience, it’s easy to do and the above proves it!

What didn’t go well:

When you start running into Twitter’s “following limit of 2000” (Twitter stops you from following more until you have enough followers to justify it), it’s the most critical time to unfollow people that are not following you back.  Wouldn’t you know it, that’s exactly where I was when TweetAdder version 4 was released…I was having problems with the tool crashing and had to reset my account (which reset the number of days for the unfollow).  Long story short, headache that I’m still dealing with.  That being said, I was still able to get a good list of 2000 followers and keep moving forward with building a Twitter Audience 🙂 Update: I’ve published a video of how I use TweetAdder 4.  It’s still amazingly fast and saves me me hours of time.

So, that’s it!  I still have a few more Twitter marketing gems I’ll share over the coming months.  For the month of May, my focus will be on showing how to do some basic Facebook and Google+ marketing.

If you found this article useful, please comment below and/or click the “Like” button and share it on your favorite social marketing sites.

Twitter posts from this month:

• Killer Book Marketing’s 30 Days of Twitter
• Twitter Marketing for Authors: Getting More Twitter Followers
• Twitter Marketing for Authors: Automatically Grow your Account
• Twitter For Authors – Avoiding Fake Followers
• Twitter Marketing for Authors: Frequently Asked Questions
• Twitter Marketing For Authors: 1 Week of Adding Followers
• Twitter Marketing For Authors: Week 3 of Adding Followers
• Using Hootsuite to Schedule Posts on Twitter, Facebook, and Google Plus