No excuses. Twitter basics that the big accounts get right.

Are you doing all you can to make sure you are setup for Twitter success?

"Success is where preparation and opportunity meet." - Bobby Unser

The opportunity part is out of your control, let's focus on what we can control.

Here’s a checklist of the things you need to do in order to gain a healthy following.

Quick note: Let's be honest, you may be thinking, “why am I taking advice from a profile that has only 24  followers (at the time of writing this) ?”  - This is completely understandable but it doesn’t hurt to make sure and reaffirm that your on the right track with the points made in this blog. Planny has just begun its journey (1 month at the time of writing) to getting more followers and is currently putting into practice the tips in this blog and hopefully, you will too.

These tips are curated from established profiles from Twitter and also from the web.

1. Your Brand
This is the most important  aspect, make sure you stay consistent and true to who you are.

• Figured out what content you will provide
• Know your audience
• Have a USP (Unique Selling Point)

2. Profile optimisation

Make the most of someone viewing your page for the first time. First impressions are everything.

• Use a striking profile picture (400px x 400px) and cover photo (1500px x 1500px)  that represents you well.
• Search optimised your bio, using hashtags and keywords related to your niche and the content you provide - this will help you show up in search results. Spice it up with different fonts and emojis.
• Sell yourself to your audience in your bio, mention your USP and be specific.
• Link to any websites that you want to direct traffic to in your bio

3. Find & Follow

Provide value to new prospective followers under content from these larger accounts, simply to get more eyes on you, key to gaining followers in the early stages.   You need to aim for at least 20 medium-sized accounts and engage with them every day for at  least a couple of months Find people that are :

• In the same niche
• Active account with good engagement (comments, likes and retweets) on tweets

Make sure that your 'following to : follower' ratio is healthy, eventually, you’ll want to lower the number of accounts you follow and increase your followers, doing this will boost your image and lead  more people to follow you.

4. Content

Most important thing don’t compromise on your content, this why people follow you!

• Post for around 3-6 tweets a day [2 personal tweets, 3 educational / value-providing, 1 self-promotional] ( Schedule your tweets to be more consistent and make life easier)
• Keep tweets short and visually appealing
• Plan to include Image and video content
• Plant to make 2-3 threads a week more depending on what niche  you  are in ( E.g information heavy content)
• Used active words - Verbs that will make the user stop scrolling.

Once you start applying these, regularly test and improve your process.

Use analytics to see what tweets were received well and focus on re-releasing/ creating more content like it.

Lookout for those larger profiles that engage back with you and double-down on interacting with them, cut those that don’t. We want to keep the following numbers as low as possible while increasing our followers.

Start applying these tips with Planny today for free (no strings attached)  and give yourself the best chance to win at the Twitter game.  'Sign up to  Planny today!'