How I More Than Doubled My Number of New Twitter Followers In One Week

Twitter Secret Sauce: Be Consistent. Listen. Engage.

[Updated 5-26-20: SumAll is no longer available. I recommend using Twitter analytics to track stats. You can also check out Brand24 and Cyfe. And I’m currently at 78K followers, all organic!]

I’m doing an experiment. In the past week I’ve been spending time (a few minutes here and there) surfing Twitter looking for cool people and businesses to follow. I don’t do this enough on my personal profile because honestly I just don’t have the time. I do get plenty of new followers every day. People find me because I put myself out there. And I do follow most back. My time is spent focusing my efforts on tweeting consistently, which is time consuming. I also listen to conversations, which is incredibly important. And I engage with people, which is absolutely necessary if you want to gain new followers.

If you do these three things every day on Twitter, you will get amazing results:

Consistency. Listening. Engaging.

 The secret sauce to Twitter success is consistency, listening and engaging. click to tweet

At the time of this experiment, I tracked my weekly Twitter stats using SumAll. It had a cool feature that would post a tweet each week showing your stats. See below. I more than doubled the number of new followers in the week following my experiment! I did this organically, meaning I did not pay for followers using Twitter Ads. The increase was due to me spending extra time surfing Twitter looking for interesting people to follow.

The screenshot below shows I received 238 new followers this week. Last week I got 105 new followers and the week before that it was 82. I average about 100 new Twitter followers each week.

My Twitter stats
My experiment was to see how many new followers I could get if I took a few minutes each day to seek out people to follow. Boy did it work! I did not expect my numbers to double.

When I coach my clients on Twitter, I always stress the importance of taking time to follow people. It’s the easiest way to grow your account and gain new followers. Of course not everyone will follow you back. But regardless, it is something you should do regularly each week.

To revise my secret sauce to Twitter success: it’s consistency, listening, engaging and following.

I’m also excited to announce that today I hit 30,000 followers on Twitter. What an accomplishment! I organically grew my Twitter following to something very substantial since opening my account in 2008.

Madalyn Sklar Twitter

Here’s a more current screenshot of my Twitter account. I’m at 78K followers, all organic.

Madalyn Sklar #TwitterSmarter

Conclusion

Spend time following cool, interesting people and businesses. Tweet consistently. Listen to conversations. Engage with people. That is Twitter success!