We just crossed 100,000 followers on Twitter/X.
I’ve documented most of the journey online, but thought it would be helpful to drop everything in one helpful resource for you.
In general, my social media philosophy is quite simple: Be helpful.
I believe that if you’re helpful within a specific niche, over a long period of time, people will look to you as a go-to resource.
This results in people being more willing to follow, engage, and share your content (which allows you to tap into 2nd & 3rd degree networks).
You can also entertain and inspire people with your content, but the foundation should be built on helping people solve a specific problem.
As for tactics, here’s what worked for us (on X/Twitter):
Make it easy for your intended target audience to RT, Bookmark, and forward to their friends.
This is the best way to grow an audience.
Create great content that makes people want to share it with their network.
This allows you to tap into new audiences, which works like a funnel:
> You create a great piece of content
> Your audience shares it with their followers
> New people discover your account
> Some people click on your account
> A portion of those people follow (if the rest of your content is good)
> You now have a bigger base audience for future posts
> Repeat
Example below — 2.2k likes, 661 RTs, and 1.5k bookmarks.
Insane.
2) Community Questions
Engage your intended audience by asking genuine questions.
I see a lot of people do this wrong because they use this as a gimmick to drive short-term boosts in engagement.
When done right, each reply to your tweet adds value to the next person who views the post/replies.
Try to do this sparingly.
And do your best to respond to those who chime in — this helps drive an engagement flywheel within your posts:
> You post a question
> Someone replies
> You reply back
> Some of their followers see the post in their feed
> Some of them reply to your post
> You reply to them
> Repeat
Example below — 579 replies ‼️
3) Endless Community Management
Community Management is the holy grail when it comes to account growth (aside from great content).
You can only post so many times per day until you eventually become annoying and people are less likely to engage (or worse, unfollow you).
But you can reply and engage a ton.
I’ve spent at least a few hours every day for the past year and a half liking, replying, DM’ing, and in general, trying to build 1v1 relationships with people in the crypto space.
Do this consistently, and it begins to compound.
Literally thousands of interactions.
My goal with community management is to build superfans, one by one.
This is time consuming and kinda exhausting to do every day but very, very valuable in the long run.
4) Off-platform Promo
We tapped into our newsletter, podcast, and other social channels to bootstrap our initial audience on Twitter/X.
A simple “Hey, want helpful content on a daily basis, follow us here” goes a long way.
Include social links on your website, email signature, and anywhere else that might get people to click.
If you really want to get creative, you can start a content series that people can only find on Twitter/X. Then, promote it on LinkedIn, IG, Newsletter, or whichever distribution outlet you’ve already established.
This should work much better since it gives people a reason to leave the app that they’re currently in and go follow your account.
5) Tapping Into Existing Networks
This one seems like a no-brainer, but you’d be shocked at how many teams forget to do it.
It’s simple.
If you have people who work at your company (or even friends, advisors, investors, etc.) who have social audiences of their own, leverage them to drive traffic to your brand account.
The post below drove the final ~150 followers needed to hit 100k.
We also tapped into our internal employees’ audiences via RTs, social mentions, and post collabs.
6) Memes
Early on, I used memes from the brand account much more.
Over time, I shifted to encouraging our team members to share memes from their personal accounts, then have the brand account RT — which seemed to resonate much better.
In general, I think memes can be super valuable if they’re done well and aligned with your brand tenants.
If not, don’t force it.
Here’s an example of a simple meme we did early on:
7) My Framework
Everything above is built on top of my framework for building a Twitter/X audience.
A lot of this can be used across other social platforms.
Here’s the summary for those too lazy to click:
One final note before sharing final resources,
Though I’m a social team of 1, I couldn’t have grown the account without the rest of the team.
So many people helped out with content that funneled into our social strategy (i.e. Editorial, Comms, Engineering, etc.).
I see the social lead role as like an orchestrator, it’s our job to get everyone on the same page, guide individual people to leverage their own accounts, and align content with the interests of our audience.
You can find more advice for founders & marketers below:
Hope you enjoyed this edition.
If you did, share it with a friend or post it online.
I appreciate the support.
– Ish 🫡