1. Focus your posts on one topic.
How new followers happen:
A person who doesn’t know you discovers something you posted and checks out your profile to see what else you’ve posted.
The more similar your other posts are to the one that first caught their attention, the more likely they are to follow you.
This means…
The more disconnected your recent posts are from the one they discovered, the less likely they are to follow you.
Which means…
If your last four posts are about building a business, what you had for lunch, why the Bears suck, and how underrated MC Hammer is, the person who discovered you through the business post is unlikely to follow you.
Because no one follows someone when they’re only interested in 25% of their posts.
You’re welcome to post about whatever you want, but…
Know that the more varied your topics, the tougher it will be to attract followers.
2. Reply as often (or more often) than you post.
You can’t get someone to follow you until they’re aware you exist.
And if you have a small following, that awareness is tough to come by because you don’t have a large enough audience to spread your content to many new people.
So posting alone is rarely enough to grow your following.
Instead, go where the people are.
Reply to the posts of others who have larger followings and whose followings are likely to be interested in what you have to say.
But a HUGE caveat here:
Your replies need to provide value.
They need to make the people who see them curious enough to go to your profile and see what else you have to say.
(Once they get there they’ll see lots more on that topic because you followed my advice from item 1 in this list, RIGHT?)
If you’re not sure how or what to reply with, my Twitter Reply Challenge is a great place to start.
3. Use your newsletter to drive to your social posts.
Everyone uses their social channels to promote their newsletter, but hardly anyone does the opposite.
That’s a missed opportunity.
If you publish a newsletter you should regularly include links to your individual social posts.
This does a bunch of good things for you.
First, it makes your newsletter subscribers aware of your social accounts and more likely to follow you.
Second, the attention you drive to the social posts is essentially a way to circumvent the social algorithms and drive a bunch of people to see your social posts who otherwise may not have seen them in their feed.
When they see them, they’re more likely to engage with them which will then boost them in the algorithm and help your posts get exposed to more people.
And the more people see your posts, the more followers you’ll get.
Unless your posts suck.
But that’s an issue for another time.
Third, watch this: