How I grew my Twitter audience to 16,000 in 8 months

Let me share some thoughts about how I grew my Twitter audience from 1,000 to 16,000 in about 8 months. There are no magic pills. What I was able to achieve is a steady growth that eventually turned out in 16,000 followers.

How I grew my Twitter audience to 16,000 in 8 months

No items found.

Let me share some thoughts about how I grew my Twitter audience from 1,000 to 16,000 in about 8 months.

Before we begin: I don’t think that it’s an outstanding result. I saw people who grew from 0 to 16,000 way faster.Yet, we all have different paths, and this is my personal experience.

There are no magic pills. What I was able to achieve is a steady growth that eventually turned out in 16,000 followers.

So let's break it down step by step.

Starting conditions

In the beginning, I had ~1K followers.

This is the organic number of followers. I got most of them from the Indie Hackers community. The thing is that when you start to engage with the community you can occasionally drop your twitter link and slowly get new followers.

A nice opportunity to get to know new people (and thus new followers) is to participate in "Let's hack Twitter" posts there. As well as being active on Twitter.

What you should realize is this:When you don't have many followers, it's not reasonable to try to tweet a lot and hope your tweets will go viral.

There is a chance your tweets go viral, but the probability is very low. When you don't have a lot of followers, there's not a lot of people who will see your tweets.

So if the number of followers is low, the better approach is to participate in discussions, engage with others, and get followers from external sources (Reddit/IH/HN).

A nice post on those communities can bring you a few hundred followers at once!

Another approach is to launch a small product on Product Hunt. It should be good enough to get to the top, but not very complex so that you don't spend months building it. If you get traction on PH, you can also get a decent number of followers.

After you got 1-2K followers

Now, when you get your first 1-2K, you can switch to spending more time posting high-quality content.

By this time, if you tweet every (!) day, and the content won't be some random motivational BS, then you'll have organic growth ~10 followers/day. At least.

Randomly if your tweets are very good or exceptional, they can get viral.

This way you can get 1-2k followers in a day.

This is what actually happens very rarely, but when it does, you get a significant increase.

My path

  • First 1000: Organic/IH/Engagement

  • 1000 - 2000: When I sold my product I wrote a good store over here and got some traction on Twitter

  • 2000 - 3000: Organic (tweeting daily)

  • 3000 - 5000: Viral tweet

  • 5000 - 7000: Viral tweet + organic

  • 7000 - 12 000: Organic + shoutouts/engagement + tweeting daily

  • 12,000 - 13,500: Viral tweet

  • 13,500 - 16,000: Organic growth

Somewhere in the list above, I made 2 PH launches. One for a newsletter, another one for a free book. This brought me around 1,000 followers.

When I had around 6,000 followers, I considered 30-40 followers / day as a good result.

But after I crossed the 13,000 milestone, my tweets started getting very good engagement.NOT every tweet, only valuable ones (UI/UX tips). So right now I get 100-200 followers per day.

How I grew my Twitter audience to 16,000 in 8 months