Yannick Veys is the co-founder and CMO of Hypefury, a Twitter growth tool. In this episode Yannick shares the strategy behind growing a new account for your product, including tweet content, strategy, engagement and how to leverage Twitter marketing tools properly.
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🖐️ Note: These are not direct quotations from Yannick. Please listen to the audio/video if you want to hear his exact words, otherwise enjoy my summarized version.
What should people really expect from Twitter?
What you should expect out of Twitter really depends on your business. Unfortunately, a lot of businesses just simply publish and use a lot of push marketing on the platform.
You need to think of it like you are running a brand bank. You need to fill the bank first before you can engage in some pitches for your own stuff.
People are on Twitter for two reasons; to have a good time and to learn something.
Don’t just advertise your content, teach people things or help them have fun, and lead them back to your product. Somewhere between these two points is the sweet spot.
🪴 How do you start growing a Twitter account?
When you’re starting out and have under 500 followers, your organic discoverability is going to be very low. Twitter is not like Tiktok where you can go viral even if you don’t have an audience.
So if you’re starting from zero:
You may want to advertise a little bit to start getting some followers.
Engage with other people in your niche. People will see your name and profile when you engage, so if you are adding value then people will visit your account.
Don't post more than once or twice per day, while you have a small following.
Finally, start building in public. Show people what you are doing. For example, imagine if you were a videographer, then you would show people how you’re setting up shots, what equipment you’re using, and how you’re planning your shoots.
This type of content builds interest and trust in your service. If somebody was looking for a videographer, then they’re probably going to be interested in working with this particular person.
Showing people what you do attracts people to your brand.
How much should you engage with other accounts versus post?
If you have a small audience, such as below 500 followers, you probably don’t want to post more than once or twice per day. He needs to be spending at least 30 minutes per day engaging with people on Twitter.
How much you want to engage with people ultimately depends on how much time you want to invest in the channel. It could be hours at a time if this is a really important channel for you.
Once you have 500 to 1000 followers, you’ll start to get engagement and be able to grow a little organically.
With bigger accounts, there are different strategies on how much they should post. Some like to post three or four times per day, and others like to try and overwhelm the algorithm by posting 20 times a day, for example.
The main thing to keep in mind here is that you have to be creating high-quality content.
What kinds of tweets do well?
In general, there are no winner or loser categories of tweets. And what types of tweets work well changes over time.
Wordsmith tweets can be good. These are tweets that are just so good by themselves that they are enough to get people to like and engage with them.
Teaching tweets.
Provocative or black and white also works.
Should you use outbound links?
Generally, tweets with a link tend to perform worse than tweets without links.
The reason is unclear whether or not it’s the algorithm, or literally, the clicks are lowering the engagement on the tweets because people are not commenting or liking them.
If you want to use links, you can create tweet threads and include a bookend tweet that links out to some other content. They still perform well sometimes, but generally, it is better not to focus on linking out so much.
How do you pitch your product?
Firstly, you need to create tweets or content that people will enjoy and engage with. Then, you can auto-comment your own plug at the end of these posts.
I’m not saying that you never do dedicated sales tweets other than the bookend tweets, though. Normally, we don’t do that many sales tweets because they don’t get that much engagement.
For the bookend tweets, you can make them trigger after a certain threshold. For example, you can make them so that they fire after a certain amount of engagement on a post, and on a certain percentage of all posts. You can set it to 10% or any percent that you like.
For Hypeury, we are quite lucky because you can see the brand name when people post using the application. So when people and tweets go viral, because we are the brand name in the tweet at the bottom, people can discover us. Then, people associate the success of the thread with us and we see branded search spikes.
What are some methods to grow your following?
One technique to make use of automation is to do a freebie or give away a campaign.
For example, in our case, we made a Twitter trends PDF and created a tweet offering to give people the book for free if they commented the keyword “trends”.
This helps get some engagement going and for anyone who comments the keyword, you can use a setting in Hypefury to automatically send them a direct message with the link to the resource.
Using this technique we were able to get about 200 to 500 followers from a single tweet.
How should you measure your Twitter growth?
There are three ways to measure your Twitter growth.
First, analyze your tweets to see what type of content gets the most engagement.
Next, also analyze which tweets get the most amount of profile visits. This is key in getting people to follow you because you need them to view your profile.
Finally, measure the follower rate from your profile visits.
What are some trends you’re seeing?
Generally, visual content is pretty underserved on most social media platforms like Twitter and LinkedIn. That means there is an opportunity to use pictures and video.
A good example of this is all Dagobert who uses memes almost exclusively to grow his brand. They usually go viral too.
Startup founders believe that the next feature idea will change everything 😅 pic.twitter.com/vMWkGHtXJb June 7, 2022
As an example of how you could do more visual content, you could visualize concepts from books into a mini infographic and use that as visual content.
Ben: I hope if you like this article that you can send some thanks to Yannick in the comments below, or on Twitter. I was very appreciative to get such an overview of how the Twitter game works from a real expert.
If you’re looking to take action on this advice, definitely check out Hypefury because they have a really good e-mail sequence that explains what you should be doing and how to use the tool.
Grow your Twitter account from scratch | Yannick Veys, Hypefury