Ben
Ben is a lifelong Nintendo fan who likes to build websites, and make video games. He buys way too much Lego.
How I Increased Daily Twitter Followers by 300% in 10 minutes
I’m not by nature a particularly jealous person, but seeing other people get loads and loads of Twitter followers I can’t help but be a little envious. It’s human nature – we all want to be more popular or more successful than we are. That said, I am also rather introverted and this makes growing my followers a lot harder than it could be. So what I want to do is increase my Twitter followers without seeming like I am promoting myself.
I’ve experimented with all sorts of methods for increasing my Twitter follower count, and when I did what I am going to explain below I wasn’t expecting any sort of success but it really worked, and is so simple. It all boils down to one very simple thing.
The Problem?
Most people on Twitter link their profiles to the homepage of their website, but that doesn’t give a good idea of who you are or what you talk about. Twitter is a social medium and so the jump from personal account to faceless website can be quite jarring.
The solution? A Twitter landing page.
A Twitter landing page is a stand alone page on your website written specifically for Twitter users. It welcomes the user to your site, and tells them the type of things you talk about on Twitter. It keeps things personal, whilst selling the positives behind following you. You should treat it as if you’re selling a product (yourself) and upsell the benefits you will bring to the potential follower.
Anatomy of a Twitter Landing Page
When I was creating my Twitter landing page I searched for a tutorials on the subject and found a series of opinion pieces on the best things to do. I then distilled this down to the structure I have listed below.
- Pick a nice clean url – http://yourWebsite.com/twitter/ is ideal.
- Start with a short description of who you are and what you do (I did 2/3 sentences)
- Add some proof of your knowledge and skills – I listed some of the more well known projects I have been involved with over the years.
- Explain what you talk about on Twitter (1 paragraph is plenty)
- Show some examples of writing that is relevant to your chosen subject. This is mostly for bloggers, not everyone will need it, but I wanted to show some of my top posts to show that I’m not all hot air
- Link to your Twitter account liberally. There needs to be some nice strong text saying ‘follow me’. Calls to action can work wonders 🙂
Remember to keep everything relevant to you, and what you do. Like any sales page it’s all about benefits. You need to show how people will benefit by following your Twitter account.
Don’t forget to change your Twitter profile to link to your Twitter landing page instead of your blog homepage
300%?
As you can see in the graph above there was a spike on around August the 2nd where the followers jumped from 1 – 2 a day, up to 4 – 5 a day. In numbers this isn’t a huge jump, but the consistency shows that it definitely changed positively and if I did more to sell myself I am sure it would have climbed even more. Note that this change involved simply adding a new page to my website.
10 Minutes?
Yep – super quick. The whole process between idea and execution took no longer than 10 minutes. I could probably spend some more time on the landing page, making it look more attractive, and adding bigger calls to action, but in terms of getting something done, there’s nothing better than ‘just doing it’ and then seeing if it works. I can’t bear to spend loads of time on a project to see it fail, so 10 minutes was plenty of time for a proof of concept. Since it has worked so well I can now spend more time tweaking and improving it.
I often though about doing this but was not sure what to write about myself. Landing Pages are Really important to get massive social networking followers.Thanks for the Tips on how to go about creating a twitter landing page I will not forget to retweet.
How about displaying a more intrusive “follow me” link if the user comes from Twitter?
if (strpos($_SERVER['HTTP_REFERRER'], 'twitter.com') !== false) {
// show follow me button
}
Never tried it before as I’ve never put any effort into blogging, but could be quite an interesting experiment.
That’s an interesting idea but I don’t know whether it would be good or not – I don’t like aggressive promotions, although I do totally understand that they can be quite effective – even if I don’t like them myself 🙂
Nice tips Ben, the reason I have been following you because of tim thumb and other wordpress thing 🙂 good work and it was very effective.
Another tip is trying to put beautiful girl picture on twitter avatar.. It’ll work 🙂 lol..
lol – nice tip 🙂
But it makes you look like a spambot to many serious twitter users
I was expecting this post to be about how to join one of those “you follow me and I follow you” lists.
I’ve never thought of a landing page before. But if it only takes 10 minutes to set up then it must surely be worth a quick go. I’ll give it a month and see what happens. 🙂
I can’t see why those sorts of posts would work – they could potentially create large numbers but people won’t actually be interested in what you’re saying. If you make it clear what you do and why then your audience will be a lot more targetted and a lot more likely to listen to, and be interested in, the things you say.
I don’t think that will work.
And you’re basing this on what? It clearly does, I’ve even shown the proof in the graph above. Not sure how you can argue with that?
If you make it clear what you do and why then your audience will be a lot more targetted and a lot more likely to listen toªª
Thanks for the tip. I will try to implement it.
But the question is aren’t you already famous and with wpadvent it will really shoot up.
Like to know how much more you got after wpadvent.
I’m anything but famous 🙂
Another possible reason for getting more followers is the fact you “promote” Twitter by including it as a field one can fill out in this here comment form. I like that *a lot*! People who may find a post by you via a search engine, besides seeing the normal “follow me” icons, they may also notice the Twitter icons next to the comments’ authors’ names as well.
I think I’m going to do some tweaking and see if I can add this feature to a few themes.
Hey Vince – glad you like the Twitter feature. I wrote about how I added it to my site here: http://www.binarymoon.co.uk/2010/05/integrate-twitters-wordpress-comments/
Hey Ben, I found this to be excellent advice which I’m going to put to use. I crossed the 2000 follower mark but it seems that I’ve hit a wall and cant seem to get past it right now. Your graph pretty much proves your point so thanks for the tip.