I Decided to Blow Up on Twitter: 10K in 10 Steps

Yes, you can decide which social platforms you will grow.  Once you understand the strategy, it's all a function of time and resources.  This year, I decided to put more of an emphasis behind my Twitter account.  Here's a fool-proof list as to how you can grow a Twitter account, as quickly as your bandwidth allows.  I've used it successfully for several clients.  I figured, why not do it for myself?

1. The basics.  First, you need to set up a decent account.  Choose an engaging avi, customize your cover, write a pithy bio.  

2.  Choose a niche.  You can't be all over the place.  Build a brand, whether you are a person or a business.  Are you food-oriented? All about travel?  Perhaps you excel at humorous commentary on current events.  Whatever it is, you should be able to sum up your feed in a few short sentences.  People want to know what to expect when they click "follow."

3.  Post consistently.  On Twitter, you need to be posting about 4 times a day at a minimum.  Not all at once; space them out.  You can schedule them in advance.

4.  Post quality.  No typos or misspellings.  Use pictures, or better yet, video.  Make sure the posts are cohesive and focus around a common theme.  People choose to follow you because you serve up posts they like to look at.  Posting what people like is not selling out.  It's having a followers-first mentality.    

5.  Pin a post.  Be sure to pin your top or favorite post to the top of your feed.  This will give you a chance to make a good first impression and give your visitor a sense of what you're all about, rather than just showing the last thing you've posted.

6.  Use hashtags.  Make sure they are relevant.  This increases your reach organically.       

7.  Follow strategically.  Random follow-for-follow nonsense is worthless.  Follow people with accounts similar to yours.  If you are focused on providing beauty tips, follow beauty bloggers, cosmetics companies, beauty publications, etc.  Twitter will be able to categorize your account and will serve up your account as a suggestion for others interested in beauty to follow.

8.  Engage.  After you've followed great accounts, engage with them.  Reply, retweet when appropriate, like their posts.  You'll get known in the right circles this way, and tweeps will help you out with retweets, showing your posts to their audience.  

9.  Sponsor posts.  Twitter makes a lot of low-cost advertising options where you can get engagement for a few cents each.  Even personal accounts can take advantage of this, and should, if they want to speed up growth.  It's not cheating.  Buying followers is cheating.  Sponsoring your posts is putting your content in front of people outside of your current follower base to give them the chance to see it and like it.

10.  Promote mode.  Twitter has opened a beta program to the public that gently promotes your tweets in people's feeds.  It's $99 a month (only tier available at the moment), and the nice thing about this is that it is truly set it and forget it.  You get the benefits of automation without any of the fear of breaking a Twitter policy.  More on this later.