I launched The Personal Growth Channel into the Twitter world late last year, and have added over 4,000 followers in two months.
To people who already have hundreds of thousands of followers, adding a couple thousand a month might not be that big of a deal, but to anyone who has ever struggled through getting a new account started, you know how hard that is.
I should point out that there is no huge marketing team here at The Personal Growth Channel. There is one person, me. Actually, there are a few, if you count guest posts from time to time.
This started out as a personal blog a little over a year ago to share what I've learned over the last 4 decades, but I quickly realized there are a huge number of people writing about their experiences, many of them more qualified than me in certain areas. If I was to make a real difference, then this needed to grow outside of me sharing my experiences. I needed to include both people who would like to learn, and those who have already become experts in a field and are now able to mentor others.
That was when I turned to Twitter. With more than 317 million active users at the time of this article, where better to find others who might be interested in growing and helping others grow?
It turns out, I had finally found the right venue. Here are the 5 steps that I used to add 4,000 followers in less than two months.
1. Set the Mission and Vision
If you want a lot of people to follow you, then you should probably get clear about where you are going. For me, once I had come to the realization that I needed to include others rather than only sharing my experiences, the mission and the vision of The Personal Growth Channel became obvious.
Our mission is to help each other grow in our personal and professional lives. My vision is to connect everyone who is interested in personal growth and development together with these communities.
2. Share Great Content
While I hoped that others would start sharing great content with our community once we got going, I knew that to get things started I needed to take the first step in doing that. I had a large number of articles that I had already written to contribute, but I also went looking for articles and motivational pieces from others.
Over the past year, I've refined this process quite a bit. When I first started with social media, I automated things using IFTTT so there were things being sent out automatically from sources I thought were good. Smart of me, right? I could now fill up all my social channels with articles without lifting a finger! Wow, what a mess! Links without proper pictures, advertisements, I was embarrassed to look at my own feed!!!
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| Robots are cool, but can make mistakes… |
Now I actually look at each piece I send out. I still use IFTTT to gather top rated articles from a wide variety of sources, but those go into Pocket for my review. Luckily I read extremely fast, so it is not a huge time consumer, I spend maybe half an hour a day doing that. I stick the ones that pass my inspection into Buffer to be sent out later, so I am not flooding my followers with a stack of articles all at once and have a chance to review them one last time before they go out.
It is a very fine line to walk between flooding your followers with information to the point it is annoying and not sending out enough content to keep people engaged, that's something that I'm still working on refining. I think I am close to the right balance at this point after tweaking that a lot.
3. Involve Others
It is easy to say involve others, but how do you do that? It's the same on Twitter as anywhere else, if you want something to happen, take the first step! Retweet and like their content, follow them, and reach out to them via direct message or mention them in a tweet if you have something specific to say. Unless you are already a celebrity, people will not just find you! At least in the beginning, you will have to take the first step.
Putting your own content out has a lot of value, but if you really want to involve others then you need to show them that you appreciate their content as well. I try to engage with my followers as much as possible, often following people who I think would be interested in our mission first, then liking and retweeting their stuff if I think it is good. I now have a huge twitter feed, so obviously I can't look at everyone's content, but I do try to do this often. This step is key, do not miss it!
4. Be Consistent
I have not missed a day tweeting in the last two months. I tweet several times a day information that I believe will be helpful to our community. Does that mean I'm always on? No, as I mentioned before I batch process things by using a few tools such as Buffer to queue things up.
Believe it or not, I do have a real job as well as kids that demand my time. I do go online a few times a day to respond to mentions and messages, but no, I'm not always on even though the tools I use consistently keep new content in front of my followers which makes it look like I am online all the time. Consistency is necessary if you are going to build a following.
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| Slow and steady wins the race |
5. Be Responsive
I try to personally answer as many mentions and messages as I possibly can. If I've missed your message, I sincerely apologize. I now get hundreds of messages every day and I can only imagine that will get worse. The key here though is that if you want someone to interact with you, then you need to be responsive, especially in the beginning when you only have a handful of followers.
I hope this look behind the scenes of The Personal Growth Channel has been helpful or at least interesting for you. If you are trying to grow your own social following, I hope this article helped give you some ideas. It's a tough road but is possible with persistence!
If you are not already a part of our community and agree that the mission of helping each other grow in our personal and professional lives is a good one, you need to join us! Sign up for our email newsletter to make sure you don't miss anything major and then follow us on your favorite social media using the links on this site!
