How to get more Twitter followers by optimizing your profile

Part 5: How to create the best Twitter profile bio

Welcome! This 9-part blog series explores the best ways to gain Twitter followers by optimizing your profile, from banner to pinned tweet, using real Twitter account examples to illustrate the concepts.

In part 5, we'll focus on why you should optimize your Twitter bio.

Let’s start with some Twitterverse theory and then let’s dig into some examples 🤓

The basics

Your profile components can be categorized into three levels of exposure:

High exposure: these components are visible everywhere you show up on Twitter - on your profile, but also in the timelines, replies, sidebar widgets, and search results.
Medium exposure: these components are visible on your profile, but also in the search results, some of the sidebar widgets, and whenever users hover over your name or profile picture to get more details.
Low exposure: these components are only visible on your profile.

The bio has a medium level of exposure.

It’s worth noting that Twitter will not authorize using some specific symbols and/or emojis in your bio. For example, the ”🔒” emoji is not allowed.

Meat and potatoes

Your bio is the meat and potatoes of your profile. If there’s one thing to optimize on your profile page… this is it! It’s exactly why Birdy offers bio A/B testing as part of its free plan. I want everyone to be able to receive massive value from Birdy 😎

There are four major questions you absolutely need to answer about yourself in your bio for a potential profile visitor to feel confident about following you.

Who are you? What are you about? Where can they find more information about you? Are you a good person to follow? Your bio should clarify all of this in a few characters only. If you fail at doing that, chances are you’ll have a hard time gaining some followers.

To create an effective Twitter bio, it’s important to be crystal clear and leave no room for interpretation. Be relevant and show how you can help them achieve their goals.

Unapologetically yourself

You need to be 100%, utterly unapologetically yourself in your bio and allow people to self-select themselves out of your audience.

You want a highly curated and filtered audience that will engage with your content. Try to find your ideal follower, and actively work to make sure people who are not interested are not following you.

This may sound counterintuitive, but the quality of followers you have is infinitely more important than the number of followers you get. Crafting a profile that attracts quality followers is what we’re after.

Credibility. Authority. Expertise.

People will only follow you if they think you have credibility, so make sure you establish that in your bio. Convey your expertise or what you’re known for. Once you have a reasonable audience, you don’t need to be as strict in adding value with your bio because your credibility will be established by the large number of followers you have.

The bio archetypes

Although the lines between them quickly become blurry, there are different archetypes/patterns of bios that we can identify.

The Storyteller: Storytelling is one of the most powerful ways to relate to people and grab their attention. This type of bio is one that tells the story of one’s journey with all the trials and tribulations.
The Person On A Mission: People love following someone that’s on a mission and vulnerable enough to share about the whole process transparently.
The List Of Accomplishments: It’s obvious why this approach would work. Accomplishments signal that you have some kind of expertise or credibility and people are definitely attracted to that in a world where there is so much noise.
The Social Proof Person: Similarly to the list of accomplishments person, the social proof person relies on a list of accolades and testimonials to display credibility and cut through the noise.
The Comedian: The comedian knows how to convey value in a humorous way. People like people that don’t take themselves too seriously.

Oftentimes, bios will use a mix of those archetypes at various degrees. See the examples below for great bios that embrace some of those archetypes.

Avoid

Regardless of which style you choose, make sure to avoid political opinions, discussing controversial affiliations, or straight-up lying in your bio.

It’s just not worth having debates on personal preferences and opinions on Twitter. Instead, focus on your content and the value you can provide.

Some examples

One of the most common approaches to state credibility is to simply list your achievements. Here, Simon is simply listing his businesses and the channels where he is offering more valuable content, namely his Youtube channel and his newsletter.

Then there is the “Storyteller” archetype, which Dago embodies well here. His story of building a startup with his wife is very relatable. He also ends his bio with something that his target audience (which is mainly comprised of indie makers and solopreneurs) would definitely find impressive!

Another approach is to directly state your value proposition. It makes it very explicit what value you are expected to get from Matteo’s content right when you land on his profile. He then supplements this with his current business, which also adds to his authority in this subject.

But at some point, if you audience is large enough, you can be much more relaxed in your attempts to convey high-value signals. Your bio could be a funny, yet intriguing one-liner like Daniel. The amount of followers he has already conveys all the authority and credibility he needs to attract more followers once they enter his funnel.

Make data-driven decisions

You now have a bunch of tips to optimize your Twitter profile. A bunch of experiments you could make. But how can you know if a change you did was truly effective? You don’t just want to be randomly changing stuff on your profile and hope for the best. You need data.

This is where Birdy comes in 😎 Birdy is a tool I created to specifically optimize your Twitter profile. It uses a technique called “A/B testing” under the hood. Create two profile versions and let Birdy determine which one converts more visitors into followers.

This is the component that people really like to A/B test. It's actually a feature that's completely free on Birdy! Try it out.

Now on to Part 6: How to make the best use of the Twitter profile location field where we explore the fifth profile component, the profile location field.

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