How to get more Twitter followers in 2017
In my Ultimate Guide to Free Traffic from Twitter I showed you how to get more Twitter followers for free in just a few minutes a day. Since then, I’ve been trying out something that reduces this to zero minutes per day!
Social Quant is a new tool that helps you get more followers automatically. You just setup your account, which only takes a couple of minutes, and then leave it to run. That’s it, you’re done — Social Quant will then go off and find & add new targeted Twitter followers all on it’s own.
That’s what they claim anyway. But is it any good? I put it to the test on one of my accounts to find out…
How I grew my Twitter followers by 36% (with no work)
Social Quant has a free 14 day trial which I used to test it. To make the test accurate, I ceased all other activities to grow my Twitter following, and just used Social Quant during this period.
My Twitter followers increased by 36%, from 3,273 to 4,670 in 14 days.
I gained 1,397 new followers, and my total time spent to achieve this was almost zero!
This is roughly the same rate of increase (100 followers per day) as I can get using the manual methods covered in my article, BUT I don’t have to do anything myself.
OK, so 10 minutes per day using the manual method isn’t much, but it is a bit of a chore to do every day. And, unlike me, Social Quant never forgets to do it or takes a day off.
It’s this relentless day in, day out growth that really produces the results over time, unlike doing it manually, which for me at least, can be a little haphazard.
Out of 14 days, I would probably only get around to doing on about 7 of them. And let’s be honest, it’s boring!
Followers are more engaged
So I certainly got plenty of new followers from Social Quant, with virtually zero effort. But what about the quality?
There’s no point in adding new followers just for the sake of it, they need to be the right followers. Good quality, relevant, targeted followers.
Untargeted followers are completely worthless, so adding lots of these would be a waste of time, and potentially harmful as well.
How do you assess the quality of your followers? Engagement of course. This is the number of times people click on, retweet, favourite, comment on, and generally interact with your tweets. It’s a measure of how receptive your audience is to your tweets.
My followers increased by 35%. Were these new followers more engaged, or less engaged than my original followers?
Well I can’t measure engagement by these new followers specifically, but what I can tell you is that my total engagement went UP across the board. Not massively, but significantly.
That tells me that my new followers had better engagement than my original followers. Given that my new followers only account for 29.9% of my total followers, and therefore have less weight in the sample, they are potentially quite a bit better in terms of engagement than the originals.
So yes, the quality was there too.
And how much did this cost me? Nothing at all. This was all done within the free trial at zero cost. You could leave it there and just say ‘thank you very much Social Quant’ and be very happy indeed.
Or for a small monthly fee you can carry on adding more and more high-quality, targeted followers to your Twitter account at an alarming rate. With virtually no work.
What is Social Quant?
Social Quant is an automated service for getting more Twitter followers that are interested in what you tweet. Getting more Twitter followers who are relevant to your brand will mean more engagement, more retweets and more traffic to your website.
Social Quant free trial
Setting up Social Quant is remarkably quick and easy. All you do is create a free trial account with your Twitter details and answer a couple of simple yes/no questions about who you want to connect with.
(Note: Make sure you have prepared your Twitter profile correctly beforehand, as there’s no point in attracting all these new followers only to lose them because your profile sucks.)
There is a also a free Guide to help you get the most out of Social Quant. I recommend you download and read it before you start. Click here to get the Implementation Guide that accompanies this article.
Once you’ve done this, all you have to do is to enter a few keywords that are relevant to your audience, and that’s it — there’s nothing else to do!
Hopefully you already know a few keywords that are relevant to your business, so this isn’t going to take too much head scratching.
If you are struggling to find keywords that apply to your audience/market, there is a helpful video that will give you a few ideas, such as your competitors, product names, brand names, well-known people in your market, industry events, local keywords, etc.
(It’s only keywords that you are being asked for, not #hashtags or @twitternames — just plain English words).
It couldn’t be much easier really. It should only take a couple of minutes, and you can add and remove keywords later on, so it’s not critical that you’re 100% perfect in your keyword selection at the outset.
Social Quant will follow people on your behalf, and if they don’t follow you back after a certain period, it will unfollow them. To make sure SQ doesn’t unfollow people you want to keep, you can create a private list called ‘keepers’, and it won’t unfollow them.
What happens next?
For the next few hours, nothing very much. Nothing that you can see, anyway. You will get an email from Social Quant telling you that your account is being processed, but while they are working on it you can’t see anything on Social Quant — it’s all happening in the background. In fact you can’t even login to your account at this point, it’s not there yet.
After a few hours, you will get another email telling you what will happen next and what to expect. In this email they answer their most frequently asked question “Can I follow or unfollow Twitter accounts on my own?”
The answer is yes, you can absolutely follow or unfollow a handful of accounts on your own. However, you want to avoid following or unfollowing a large number of accounts or using other automated tools to do so.
As they point out — that’s what they are doing for you!
Sometime in the next 24 hours you will receive another email, with a link to your Social Quant Dashboard, and this is how you access your account — there is no login as such, just an encrypted link to your own personal dashboard.
Avoid irrelevant followers with negative keywords
At this point you can review your keywords, and make changes if you wish. You can also add negative keywords, that will stop Social Quant going after the wrong people. For example, if you are a marketing agency, you might be targeting the keyword “marketing”, but this might bring up recruitment agents listing marketing jobs, so you could add “jobs” or “marketing jobs” as negative keywords, to avoid these irrelevant terms.
Tip: If you want to find out what irrelevant keywords might be triggered by the ones you’re using, and therefore that you may want to add as negative keywords, WordStream have a free negative keyword tool that will help you find them.
You can also add a whitelist of people that you want to follow anyway, even if they don’t follow you back. This is quite important, as what Social Quant will do is to follow relevant people for you, in the hope that they will follow you back, and then in a few days, unfollow them if they haven’t.
To stop Social Quant from unfollowing people that you want to keep, just create a list in your Twitter account called ‘keepers’ (this can be public or private, as you wish) and just add them to this list.
The unfollowing is essential as Twitter has limits on how many people you can follow, depending upon how many followers you have yourself. Social Quant needs to be able to flush out the non-followers so you don’t hit the limit and grind to a halt. This ‘Must Follow’ feature stops Social Quant from inadvertently unfollowing people that don’t follow you, who you DO want to follow.
Your full dashboard, with statistics, won’t be ready for another three days yet, as Social Quant needs some time to analyse your data, and to see what works. But after a day or so, you will start to see new followers appearing. If you’ve used the right keywords, and your Twitter Profile is in good shape, then you could start to see quite a deluge of new followers.
You won’t really know where they are coming from (other than that they came from Social Quant), but they are coming…
When your Social Quant Dashboard is ready in three days time, you will see where these followers came from.
Optimising your keywords
For each of your keywords, you’ll be able to see how effective they were at getting new followers. Your Dashboard shows a Conversion Rate for each keyword — how many people followed you from that keyword.
You’ll probably find that some of your keywords converted well, and some didn’t. Ideally you’re looking for a conversion rate of 10% or more.
The good converters will give you an idea of what is working well, and will hopefully prompt you to think of some more keywords along similar lines that you can add.
The bad converters are holding you back. There’s no point in following people that are less likely to follow you back, and a low conversion rate is a sign that these people may not be that relevant to you anyway.
So remove all the keywords that convert at less than 10%, and let Social Quant concentrate on the keywords that work. Try to think of others similar to the good ones, and also Social Quant will come up with some suggestions for you to try as well.
A useful feature is the ability to ‘back-trace’ a user to a keyword, so if you find new followers who are a particularly good fit for you, you can enter their @twittername and see which keyword it was that brought them.
All you have to do now, is to review your stats periodically and make sure that you delete any keywords that aren’t performing. Add and test any new ones that you think of, and weed out the non-performers.
That’s it — there’s nothing more you have to do. And that’s sort of the point of Social Quant really.
How much does Social Quant cost?
After the free trial finishes, Social Quant is priced at $50 per month for a single user, with special deals for agencies and multiple users. From time to time they have special offers and promotions, and they sometimes do a special deal when your free trial ends, it’s just a question of what is available at that time.
Is Social Quant safe?
Can Social Quant do you any harm? No I don’t believe so. The only thing you need to watch out for is to make sure you whitelist any people you are following that you want to keep, otherwise Social Quant may delete them if they don’t follow you back.
Conclusion & Summary
Social Quant certainly delivered what it promised. It grew my Twitter following by 36% (1,397 new followers) in 14 days, with virtually no work on my part, and the quality of the followers it added was excellent. My overall engagement went up, suggesting that the engagement of my new Social Quant followers was better than the original, and certainly not worse.
All of that was achieved with the 14 day free trial at zero cost, and you could happily leave it there if you want.
Or if you are pleased with the results, you can continue to grow your Twitter followers in this way at a small monthly cost. Whether you do that or not is up to you, but I certainly recommend that you take the free trial and then decide. Personally, I’m continuing with the paid service as it’s working so well.
You’ll need this free Guide to help you get the most out of Social Quant. I recommend you download and read it before you start.
As always, any questions, please contact me or leave a comment below.