How I grew a Twitter/X account to 20,000 followers & 41M impressions in 60 days
Since I’ve been away from work for the past few months, I’ve taken on a few personal projects. One of those, is a challenge I gave myself to grow a Twitter/X account from scratch. It’s something I’ve always been interested in doing, but never had the time to focus on. So on September 10th, 2023, I resurrected a dormant X account that had about 200 followers, rolled up my sleeves & got to work.
The plan
I set up some goals and a strategy before getting started. After I decided on a niche and audience I was going to go after, I broke my plan up into phases with goals that were lofty so that I could push myself.
Here are the goals & metrics I set for myself
Days 0-20: Monetize my account: Meet the X monetization requirements
500 or more followers
5M views across all posts
Days 20-40: Grow my followers: Create content people want in order to increase my audience
10,000 or more followers
Days 40-60: Go viral: Create content that is highly shareable in order to expand my audience
At least 1 post with 1M+ impressions, 100+ Reposts, 1000+ likes, 100+ comments.
At least 15,000 followers
I’ll get into each phase of my plan and show you my progress.
1. Monetize my account
Success metrics
500 or more followers
5M views across all posts
This phase was the hardest and required the most work. I spent at least 3-4 hours a day on X.
I did 3 things
I made sure my profile photo and bio were compelling & created 5 posts, so that when people visited my profile they’d know what I was about.
I commented on look-alike posts (posts from accounts similar to mine) that had large audiences (50k+ followers). These comments got me noticed and led to followers.
I engaged (liked, commented, re-posted) and followed accounts in my target audience that had 200-2,000 followers. Small enough accounts to notice me in order to increase my chances of people following me.
While I did these activities, I also created my own content. I measured what content resonated by looking at the engagement (likes, comments, re-posts) and I doubled down on content that worked. This led to a nice increase in followers.
I hit the success metrics (500+ followers, 5M impressions) of this phase in 26 days.
Week 1 - I barely posted any content and just followed accounts and engaged with content I saw on my timeline. Towards the end of the week I started increasing content production.
Week 2 - I increased my content production to about 10 posts a day.
Week 3 - By the start of this week I had 1,500 followers, so my content was resonating and being amplified by people re-posting it. You can see the impressions starting to trend higher in the chart below.
Week 4 - I had amassed about 4,700 followers and a few of my posts were getting a high amount of impressions, with two posts going over 1M impressions alone. I had received 5.4M impressions on my posts in 26 days.
Impressions from 09.10.23 - 10.05.23
2. Grow my audience
Success metrics
10,000 or more followers
Everything got easier in this phase since I had a larger audience to distribute my content to. I was very methodical and built myself a content plan and schedule. I’d have 5-7 posts ready to go for the following day, in addition to ideas that I came up with in the middle of the day. I would post daily and at a cadence. I set myself calendar reminders so that I would stick to at least 15 posts a day.
I did 1 thing
I refined my voice and optimized for the most shareable content possible. I did this by posting a lot of content. I started to standardize some of my posts and obsessively tracked the posts that would get shared the most. The more people shared my content, the more exposure I got and the more followers I amassed.
It’s too bad X analytics doesn’t let you see your audience trends over time, but I hit 10,000 followers by week 6 & was averaging 1.1M impressions a week on my content.
I hit the success metric of this phase (10,000 followers) by the end of week 6 (41 days in).
Impressions from 10.6.23 - 10.20.23
3. Go viral
Success metrics
At least 1 post with 1M+ impressions, 1,000+ likes, 100+ comments.
At least 15,000 followers
I was obsessed with creating content that would be widely shared. I followed trends, news and memes across a wide variety of audiences to find unique content that had a chance at going viral.
I did 1 thing
I kept digging deep into my creativity and utilized the real time nature of X in order to create a few pieces of content that were very timely & hit a nerve with my audience. The creativity paid off and several posts I created reached 1M+ impressions. It felt very rewarding and led to an avalanche of followers. I even got written up in blogs and some news stories.
I hit the success metric of this phase (15,000+ followers, 1 post with 1M+ impressions) by week 7 (52 days in).
I had 4 highly viral posts Oct 23, 24 & 25th which led to a large increase in audience size.
Impressions from 10.21.23 - 10.31.23
By November 6 (59 days in), I reached 20,000 followers and have been averaging a steady 300,000-500,000 impressions a day on my content.
Midway through November 2023 my account hit an inflection point and it has been growing at healthy pace. Here are my last 7 days on X
If you are interested in growing a Twitter / X account and want more details feel free to reach out!