How to build a Twitter Following for Your Startup

For startups and medium sized businesses, the key to success is marketing. Twitter is one of the most important platforms that is based on customer engagement.  Startups should invest in Twitter for their marketing strategy to reach a larger number of audience. 

Success in your twitter presence relies heavily on your profile and your strategy. In your profile, two main things need to be targeted: explanation of what your startup is about and a background that engages users emotionally.

You can get a quick start by learning from your competitors’ behaviour on Twitter. Followings are top 4 tips on how to build twitter followers and use them as your secret weapon to startup success. 

Barnacle Method – Follow top users and comment under their tweets

A Barnacle is a type of crustacean (crab, lobsters, etc) that can attach themselves to whales in order to find food particles in the water that flows around the whale as it swims. This is a good deal for the barnacle and can be a good deal for the whale as some have been known to use the barnacle for armour or as weapons even!

The Barnacle Method is a very effective method for startups to attract the attention of a larger audience. The basic rule of thumb is to find popular and relevant to your business tweets and comment creatively under the main post. You can gain popularity thanks to the more established users. It helps a large amount of people read your comments and learn more about you and your business.

One example of how to feed off top relevant posts are, if it is a negative post about your competitor that went viral, you can squeeze yourself in and offer a better product or feature to them and flow those upset customers to your route.

Tweet often

Twitter gives a great opportunity to startups to personalize their brand and share their stories. 

Audiences need to hear your story, make sure to tweet often and keep them short and simple. Lifetime of each tweet is less than an hour it went live to attract others attention. Tweeting several days reminds them of your presence.

Because you want users to promote your Twitter account in order to get more followers, it is important to make it easy for them to retweet your content and give you credit.  Make it easy by making your post about 100 characters or less with including @yourcomapny or #yourcomapny in your post. That way automatically during a retweet, your startup is mentioned.

Leverage a scheduling tool to save time

When it comes to the optimal time of day to Tweet to get followers, it all relies on your target demographic and the nature of your potential and current followers. If you’re targeting students, evenings and weekends are often the best times to tweet. To determine the optimum periods for your market, you should first spread out your tweets and identify the time periods when your quality followers engage the most. It’s important to leverage some scheduling tool that analyze the best time for you to tweet, rather than spending hours each day studying the behavior of your audience, 

Follow hashtags and comment and find users from them

You may use Twitter search to identify the relevant people in your sector by using keywords and hashtags. Hashtags can be used to indicate that your tweet is part of a bigger conversation about a specific subject or issue. Finding these specific industry related hashtags and joining those communities help you find the potential eager audiences about your startup. 

After following the relevant hashtags, you can find potential customers. Finding a high quality user is important for your retweet, rather than a bunch of low quality users that wont engage with your post. By following other relevant users on Twitter, and there’s a good chance they’ll follow you back. This helps you to find real and relevant customers that spread the word about your startup.