How to get more Twitter followers by optimizing your profile
Part 9: The Twitter profile extras
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.
- Why you should optimize your Twitter profile
- How to create the best Twitter profile banner
- How to create the best Twitter profile picture
- How to create the best Twitter profile name
- How to create the best Twitter profile bio
- How to make the best use of the Twitter profile location field
- How to make the best use of the Twitter profile website field
- Which tweet should you pin on your Twitter profile?
- The Twitter profile extras
In this final installment of our series, we'll explore some of the Twitter profile extras.
Let’s start with some Twitterverse theory and then let’s dig into some examples 🤓
Followings
Let’s talk about the number of people you are following. While there’s no magic number, having thousands of followings, but having only hundreds of followrs may seem a bit suspicious to some people. It might indicate that you’re taking part in follow-to-follow schemes even if genuenly not what you’re doing.
It’s generally best to have a low followings/followers ratio. Having 100K followers and following 3K followers is different than having 500 followers and following 3K people.
It’s also not recommended to go to the other extreme and follow almost no one. A good rule of thumb is that you should simply look like you care about who’s on your timeline and whose content you’re consuming.
Your @handle
Your Twitter handle a.k.a. your username is visible to everyone on Twitter. Ideally, you should use your real name.
If your name is not available, you can start to be creative with your handle. If you have a pseudonym that people already know you by, you can use that instead as it can serve as a conversation starter and make your profile more memorable. Having a pseudonym as your handle is less problematic than having a pseudonym as your name.
Content is ultimately king
While your profile can help make a good first impression, it’s your timeline that will ultimately keep visitors engaged and interested in your profile, so be sure to share interesting and relevant stuff. Be an intersting person!
Some examples
Arvid is following a massive amount of people. His followings/followers ratio is ~15%, but it used to be as high as ~25% when he had fewer followers. I don’t recommend having such a high ratio, but Arvid has his reasons to take this approach and pulled it off!
You don’t want to come across as the type of person that’s playing the follow-for-follow scheme.
Perhaps a more reasonable approach is to be selective about who you follow. You should look like you care about who’s on your timeline and whose content you’re consuming. Here, Dagobert has a followings/followers ratio of 0.7%.
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.
The end
I hope this guide was super valuable! If you think it was, please consider sharing it with your audience on Twitter 💜
Cheers!
-Max