Getting Your First 1,000 Twitter Followers! | Ep. 45

Ty Smith0:00

What is up guys, welcome to another episode of the crypto marketing show. I'm Ty Smith, with me is Liz. Today we are going to go into your first 1,000 Twitter followers. How to get them, tactics that work, tactics that don't work, how long it takes, things like that. So if you're a company that has a very nascent Twitter account, you're just getting started out, you're in the crypto world, you're trying to grow that presence, which you definitely should because Twitter is everything in crypto, this episode is for you.

Ty Smith0:21

All right, let's dive into it, Liz. So you obviously know a lot about this field. You're the head of social media here at Coinbound. You work with all of our clients, which, I'm always impressed with the results we're able to put out for them.

Liz0:29

That's good to know.

Ty Smith0:31

Some of our clients are huge and have really established accounts, some of them are just getting started out. I know we employ totally different strategies depending on where they're at. What are some tactics that you have found to work for companies that are just getting started out that aren't at 1,000 followers yet?

Liz1:08

Yeah, or 100,000. So, I would definitely recommend, I know that I probably sound like a broken record, but I always like to think of your Twitter account as a party, and you're always inviting people to a party, and you want that party to be really built out. So when you're really just beginning, it's so important to establish your voice, your tone, who's your audience, and then build content that really speaks to who's there, but also who you want to be there. And just know that that's the first step, because you can spend thousands and thousands of dollars on ads, influencers, but if you don't have anything to back up that spend, then you're just wasting money. And so I think it's really important for early accounts to establish their voice, establish content that works for them, really set some baseline data, and then grow from there and use it as a testing ground.

Liz2:09

Because once you do have, two to four weeks of content really built out, doing like one, two, maybe three tweets a day, engaging in conversations, retweeting people, retweeting articles, giving your opinion, depending, are you a brand or a personal brand, content can vary there, but those high-level things, get that down first. Then, throw some fuel on it. You can do ads, influencers, a variety of different tactics to really bring more audience in because you have that baseline now, and there's something for people to actually look at.

Ty Smith2:34

Yeah, definitely. I'm actually curious how important you feel content is that early, like if it's prioritized over things like follow-unfollow, which is like not necessarily the best strategy, but in the beginning when you have nothing, anything is good. Anything, people don't follow an account that has six followers.

Liz3:12

Yeah.

Ty Smith3:12

So it's always like everything in marketing, especially with Twitter and social media, is it's really tough in the beginning and then it gets really easy towards the end. Like we've noticed that with my account and with a lot of the clients where our jobs get easier as things progress because there's more of an audience, people we've keyed in the messaging, we've figured out what kind of copy and content works well. In the beginning, you don't know those things.

Liz3:25

Yeah, and that's why you have to use it as a testing ground. You're not going to get 10,000 followers right out the gate unless you're already, I do want to say, asterisk there, because you might already be like a known person or brand to a different digital community. So say you're really big on Reddit or really big in like a Telegram group, you can leverage that audience and pull them into Twitter. And I definitely recommend that for people who may be established elsewhere, or if you have a newsletter, other ways to really bring in an audience.

Liz4:13

And that way you have that social proof because the whole point at the end of the day for a brand or a person to have a Twitter account, I mean, for a lot of people, it's vanity, let's not beat around the bush, but it's for authority and for building your authority on the internet and having that social proof of being the person that you say you are or the company that you say you are, and having a place where you can build out your community and better engage with them. That's the whole point of Twitter and really any social media presence that a brand or personal brand would have, at least in my opinion.

Ty Smith5:02

Yeah, no, I agree with a lot of that. There's, I'd say probably about three main strategies that people tend to, in my experience, think of when they're just getting started out, and I'm curious to run these by you and hear your opinion on them. The first being follow-unfollow for early accounts. So we can explain what follow-unfollow is for people that don't know. It's literally going through Twitter, following people that you want to follow you back, hopefully they follow you back, maybe they don't, and then you unfollow them. It's not because you want to follow their content, it's just to get people to be aware that your account exists, hopefully they follow you. That's follow-unfollow. What do you think of that as an early tactic?

Liz5:26

So, I have seen it work. I don't love it. I think it's a little like disingenuous. You're just not there to engage, you're there to get followers. And so I think that if you really want to build an organically engaged audience, it is good to stay following them or follow people you actually want to have a conversation with and engage with. So, it's an "it depends" kind of situation. If you have an audience that you know you want to reach, actually engage with them and follow them because you want to follow them.

Liz6:19

But a lot of people do have metric goals and are held to those, especially at larger companies or something, you have to hit those KPIs. So if you do have to hit those KPIs, follow-unfollow is great. But at that point, I would just say you might as well bot the account and go from there, because at least then for the follow-unfollow, you have some level of engagement, even if it's not entirely real. You have something and you can build off of that. What's the saying, "fake it till you make it"? And I know a lot of accounts that have faked it until they made it, and then they are legitimate. It's a really interesting thing in this digital sphere.

Ty Smith7:09

Yeah, because that does work a lot for influencers. And this is a little bit of a tangent from the original thing, but it's a funny shift I've seen mentally when the faking it becomes the making it.

Liz7:16

Yeah.

Ty Smith7:17

I don't know, just an interesting thing. All right, but you touched on the other one that I wanted, well, one of the other ones I wanted to discuss, which was botting the account. Because, like I said, no one wants to follow an account that has like zero followers. So a lot of people, they want to take, I don't even know if I'd call it a shortcut, I would say buying followers or bots is a shortcut in theory, but when you're just getting started out, I could almost say like, "All right, maybe." What do you think of that?

Liz7:33

Again, it's really tough. Like if you have a full-blown strategy to be able to translate that into real engaged followers, in this day and age, maybe go for it, especially again, if you have to meet certain metrics in a certain timeline, it might really help you because psychologically, people do engage with what's popular. And so if you go and look at a page that has 10,000 followers, there's something in your mind that's automatically going to trust that and be like, "Hey, this looks legit. 10,000 people follow them." But if you're more savvy in that area and you start going through and seeing that nothing has any engagement, it's like, where are these 10,000 followers? Are they actually aligned with this content, and are they even really there?

Liz8:29

And so I think that if you're going to do that, have a strategy to better engage people who you do really want there, especially because Twitter is sometimes used as a funnel. And if someone's KPIs also are, Twitter isn't their main goal to build off of, they want to use that for conversions, you're not going to see any conversions from Twitter. So it's like, why would you even spend the resources there? It could easily be moved somewhere else. And so I just think that if there's a plan and you especially want conversions out of it, it's really important to take the time to build a legitimate, genuine following.

Liz9:19

And if that starts with some fake followers to boost your numbers to begin with, maybe go for it. I don't know in the Twitter algorithm how that also affects you. I know like for Instagram, it can really ding your account, so also just be aware of that. And that Twitter does go through and clean up bots, so like sometimes you will see huge accounts that just overnight lose thousands of followers, and it's because they were all fake. And so, I think it's a really fine line. I've seen people have great success with it and be able to really transition that audience into something that's real, but also know that while you do that, you're going to stay really stagnant because you're going to have this huge turnover and churn of that fake audience leaving and your real audience coming in. And so say you have like 1,000 fake followers and you're trying to pull in new followers, you're going to stay probably pretty stagnant at that 1,000 until you fully churn the fake followers out and have real engagement.

Ty Smith10:25

Yeah, it's something I would never recommend unless you're really just starting out, and even then, I probably wouldn't. But a lot of people like to take that shortcut because they, their social media manager maybe isn't totally experienced and they just, they're being measured on followers as the KPI to their success and they take a shortcut.

Liz10:38

Exactly. And again, followers is an important metric, but metrics on Twitter only go so far. Like you're not going to go up forever. It's just like watching something like Bitcoin. Like you're going to have great months where you see things really, really excel, and then you're going to see slow months. Maybe you don't have as much to announce, maybe there's not as much news coming out to engage with. It's not just a constant upward trend. You're always going to see some level of fluctuation. I think that's actually really important to note, too, because some people are just like, "Oh, it's only up from here." And I don't know anything in life where it's only up from here. I mean, maybe the general trend, if you look at Bitcoin, you zoom out over the past however many years, it is a general upward trend.

Liz11:34

But in the time it takes to really establish a new account, establish content that works, and establish a genuinely engaged audience, that's why finding the audience, like establishing that voice early on is really important because then you have the messaging down, you have the people that you're speaking to down, and you can really streamline that process. Because with follow-unfollow, I've seen a lot of people just like spray and pray. And that's okay if you don't have like a super defined product or audience yet, but then I also would just recommend them not doing Twitter and probably focusing on their product.

Ty Smith12:23

Yeah. What do you think about giveaways? Because we did a whole episode a long time ago on if giveaways, specifically Twitter giveaways, if they work. What do you think? I know we don't really do any of that. I don't think we've done that ever. What do you think of that? But I know a lot of accounts that do.

Liz12:36

I think giveaways work. Again, you have to have a retention plan, because if you're bringing that amount of people in for something that they can legitimately win, that's huge. People love winning stuff, especially when it's money. And so, if you're going to bring people in with that, I say go for it as long as you're covering yourself from a legal standpoint. But just have a retention plan in place. Like how are you going to foster that audience that's coming in? How are you going to measure that? How are you going to engage with them? What's your follow-up? What's your follow-through?

Ty Smith13:25

Yeah, and that's what we said about a lot of things with social media marketing.

Liz13:27

Oh, totally. Yeah. Retention to me is so undervalued. There's so many people who are like, they claim they're growth marketers, and that's great to grow, but like are you retaining that growth? Like I said, you can have 100,000 followers. I can buy a million followers today. I can just have a million followers. But if I need actual conversions, if I need actual like something from that, it's not going to happen.

Ty Smith14:12

Do you think, this is again one of those tangents, but you've piqued my crypto marketing curiosity. Do you think if you were to buy, let's say 100,000 followers on Twitter, and they stayed around, the bots in this case, around for three months, and then Twitter scrapped all of them, do you think you would have acquired a lot of real users in that time from just looking like a big account?

Liz14:30

If you have something to back it up, yeah. Let's assume you had good content or decent enough content. Yeah. People follow trends. People like what's popular.

Ty Smith14:37

Interesting.

Liz14:37

There's a reason for that, on Instagram actually, there is a study out there, it's older, but it is about people will like a photo that actually has so many likes because other people like it. I've literally heard people say that they don't know what they like anymore, and they just like things because other people like it on the internet. Like there really are people who have that mindset. And so, if you want to play into that mindset, sure, but like just know what kind of personality might be behind that mindset.

Ty Smith15:28

Yeah. One more thing, ads. So, paid acquisition for Twitter accounts just starting out, do you think that's wise?

Liz15:34

Yes, again, if you have something to back it up.

Ty Smith15:37

Yeah, everything at the end of the day, yeah, everything at the end of the day boils down to do you have... There's a lot of ways that we're discussing as far as how to get more followers, but there's a follow button, there's also an unfollow button. So unless you have good content, people are not going to stick around. Interesting. Yeah, I mean, we've found great success with paid advertising on Twitter. I think it's, I think it's an underrated strategy that people don't seem to discuss a lot, but to acquire, because Twitter lets you optimize, the Twitter PPC suite lets you optimize for follows. You can pay per follower. And you can get pretty targeted followers for, that's what I do like about paid acquisition for Twitter, is that yes, you're paying to get followers, but the follow, like the content that you're promoting is your content. So they're not just following you because they see a paid ad. In general, people actually tend to not like seeing paid ads, but if you have good content and the content in the copy of the ad that you're promoting is good, they will, they will follow you and they will stick around. Which is why I like it.

Liz16:43

Yeah, and then you just have to make sure that the content that you use to bring them in, which I think we honestly did this really, really well, the content that you use to bring people in, just make sure that the content that you're putting out consistently speaks to that, because that's why they came in. That's why they're there in the first place. And so if you, it almost speaks to the clickbait thing. If you bring people in with one headline, but serve them up something else, it's like, "I'm going to give you a cheeseburger," but then you give them like beyond meat or something. It's like, "Ah, that's not really what I wanted."

Ty Smith17:30

Yeah, it's like advertising a hamburger and only selling french fries in the restaurant. Like it's similar, I guess, but it's not the same thing.

Liz17:34

Yeah, and so, funnels these days are, people really complicate them. There's so many like niche areas and so many very defined audiences, and to be able to speak to them and pull them in and know the type of content that they like or want to see, like you're essentially mirroring them, which I know some people say like maybe that's not a good thing, but I think it is. You're literally just mirroring your content to what that follower that you want likes.

Ty Smith18:20

I'm going to, so that's all the growth tactics I wanted to touch on. There's one more question I wanted to go over, and it's a little bit of a shitty one, and that's something that we get asked a lot, which is how long does it take to get your first 1,000 followers?

Liz18:27

24 hours. No. It happened right now while we were still talking. No, we laugh because, for those that don't know, with anyone like anything marketing, it's like the answer is always "it depends."

Liz18:36

It really is. If you're a brand new project, no established audience, barely have a website, which like, I mean, we've seen all, like I've seen every level of, established account, very much not established account, doesn't even have a Twitter account. You know, we've seen a lot of that, and if you're really new, you got to set the realistic expectation that it's going to take time. I mean, it can take anywhere from, it can take a few months to really get going, because you don't have a defined audience, you might not even have analytics on your website built up.

Liz19:26

And that's when it's really important to focus on the messaging, focus on who your audience is, and then how to engage with them. I think it's important to start getting some kind of content up, and that's where you can talk more about your product features, launches that are coming up, really build that social proof out while you're defining, testing, and figuring out who you're going to speak to.

Liz19:42

Now, if you're more established and you have other routes of marketing, so some people may have like an affiliate program or referral program, or maybe they have already an established Telegram or Reddit, something, you can use that traffic to drive them over to Twitter, and they're probably going to be really excited. And like, okay, so here's the perfect example. If you have an audience elsewhere and want them to come to Twitter, you can use a contest and drive them there. And that would be, that would be great. That's a really good way to do cross-channel promotion, because it's very, very difficult to do cross-channel promotion once people are already in a certain platform. It's very tough to get them to leave. And so any kind of incentive you can drive to get them over to the next place you want them in, that's going to be great because you already have spokespeople for you. You already have people that are going to share that content that you've already now established. And so like, build out your audience, get your voice down, get your messaging down, get up like a month's worth of content, and then drive that audience over with like a really big contest or some level of incentive.

Liz21:14

And then, have the retention plan that you're going to follow up with like some really cool announcement, really cool news, really cool partnership, or really cool influencer that can get them really excited, and then they'll share that because those are your biggest brand ambassadors, those are your biggest advocates. And so like, make them feel loved. It's a community. Make them feel engaged and welcomed and like they're getting something special out of being there, because they're going to talk about you 10 times over, and that's going to exceed any kind of ad spend that you would do.

Ty Smith21:35

Yeah, there's a saying in personal finance, which is "the first $100,000 that you make is the hardest," and then it becomes a little bit easier. I feel like that is extremely accurate to Twitter in that the first 1,000 followers that you get are by far the hardest, the second 1,000 is a little bit easier, and so on and so on. Morning Brew, who is, you know, one of those millennial media companies, if you're not familiar with them, you're probably not on Twitter.

Liz22:17

Yeah, it'd be hard not to be familiar with them.

Ty Smith22:18

Yeah, I mean, they crush it on social media, they really do. But they, they tweeted something and it was the progression of number of followers that they had. So to get to their first 10,000 followers, they said it took them four years. These numbers aren't exact. I don't remember the exact numbers, but it was something like that. The first 10,000 was, I think they said four years. 50,000 took them a year after that. Getting to 100,000 took them six months. Like it almost halved every time they doubled the, like it got halved as difficult every time. So, I think in the beginning, you have to be really scrappy to get your first 1,000. I think there's a lot of tactics that we covered that are good for, for building that. It all ends up boiling down to having an account that's worth following, and then you employ these tactics, not, not vice versa. But I think we did a really good job covering how to get your first 1,000 followers. So on that note, let's wrap this one up. Follow us on Twitter. I'm @TyDanielSmith. I'm about to cross 10,000 followers thanks to Liz's help. Hopefully by the time we publish this, I'll have crossed it.

Liz23:23

We didn't even have to do a contest.

Ty Smith23:24

No, we didn't even have to do, we actually didn't do like any of these things that we discussed. We did some paid acquisition, but that's about it, and good content.

Liz23:28

We can get, once we actually hit 10,000, we should do a "How I Hit 10,000" episode.

Ty Smith23:31

Yeah, I'm going to send you a bottle of champagne, also.

Liz23:33

Awesome.

Ty Smith23:34

Yeah, follow us on Twitter. I'm @TyDanielSmith, Liz is @... what is it? @that... I'm going to, there's one, one of these days, Liz, I'm going to get it right. One of these days.

Liz23:39

One day, one day. Oh, and instead of a bottle of champagne, just send me some Bitcoin. I'll prefer that, honestly.

Ty Smith23:45

Okay, I'll do that. I'll do that. A little bit easier, too.

Liz23:46

That's busy, at least.

Ty Smith24:12

That's busy, okay. All right, please remember to rate, review, and recommend this podcast, and subscribe on YouTube. That's it, guys. Thanks.

Liz24:17

Bye.