I just reached 2,000 followers! Woot!

On August 8, 2015, I began my Twitter journey with 426 Followers. If you have read my earlier posts, you know that this number represents my total lack of effort at actually forming a Twitter “presence”. I had this bright idea to sit back and see how many new Twitter followers I would gain NATURALLY – no actual promotion or pleading or paying attention on my end.

Yeah, that didn’t work.

By March 30, 2016, my Follower count had increased to 669. That’s less than 300 new followers in eight months…no bueno! This was taking too long. I decided to stir things up a bit. It was time to research and test out some Twitter strategies and see if they make a difference. (Answer: they do.)

So I started researching how to build an audience and keep them engaged. I’ve been testing out some of the tools available and learning new ways to engage with my current followers, while increasing visibility of my profile to attract new Twits.

Strategy #1. Follow Your Followers.
Strategy #2: Using an Account Manager.
Strategy #3: Make Some Twiends.

So now that I have a decent number of Followers, it’s time for Strategy #4: Understanding Lists.

Twitter Lists are useful, helpful, and effective for managing and optimizing your Twitter experience. A Twitter List is simply a way of categorizing people you “follow” on Twitter into specific groups, making it easier to find tweets from the users that are important to you, in a streamlined manner. Viewing a List will show you a stream of Tweets from only the accounts on that list.

Two very important things to know:
1. You don’t have to be following a user in order to add him or her to a list.
2. Tweets from your lists do not show up in your primary feed.

If you find Twitter accounts that you are interested in reading from time to time, but you don’t want to see every single tweet in your primary stream, you can put them into a List and read those tweets when the time is right for you.

Creating a Twitter list is fairly simple. Simply go to https://twitter.com//lists, and then on “create new list.” Twitter lists can be public (visible to everyone and searchable on Google) and private (visible only to you). You can create your own lists or subscribe to lists created by others. You can have up to 1,000 Twitter lists and each list can be up to 5,000 users long. You do not have to be following a user to add them to a list.

So here’s the breakdown:

Lists are good. You can use Lists to get organized, follow relevant & influential people in your industry, recommend cool accounts and engage with others. Lists are useful for organizing your Twitter streams based on your interests, and they are definitely worth trying if you want to streamline your account.

I NEED SOME HELP NOW PEOPLE.

Now that I’ve covered Account Managers, Twiends, and Twitter Lists, what else is out there that can help grow my audience or streamline my account? Please let me know in the Comments!

I guess it’s time to hit the books and find some new strategies to increase my Twitter presence … next post will be when I hit 3000!