With this in mind and how long I’ve been creating content (since 2017), I'm excited to drop tips & to share my knowledge with you guys.

Now, here’s the five strategies to increase twitter engagement:

• Having the right mindset to grow an account from 0 followers.
• Focus on building a community. 
• Creating valuable, engaging, shareable, educational content. 
• Creating a specific customer profile. 
• How & why to Show up every single day, especially when you’re in the growing phase. 

 If these are things that you struggle with, that you don't know how to do or that you want to get better at doing this article is going to help you a lot in terms of developing your marketing understanding within the Twitter world.

I just want to note that this episode is just snippets of what's in the Content Marketing Guide. If you haven't invested in it, I highly recommend it. Also, if you have not invested in the Email Marketing Guide, I highly recommend that as well.

And as always, if you love this free content and you want it to stay free forever, make sure that you donate to Touched By Ty’s Creator Fund, so that I can drop new content every single week for you guys and continue to invite experts to interview on my podcast.

Alright, now that we got those introductions out of the way, let's just go ahead and get into my first hacks. 

Tip #1: Having the right mindset to grow an account from 0 followers

Something that you have to understand is that when you first start out, no one knows who you are. No one knows anything about your business. No one knows anything about your intentions, your aspirations or anything like that. And a lot of the time they don't care because they don't know who you are.

So, you have to understand that in order for people to start caring about who you are, what you do, what you offer, your intentions and your aspirations as an individual and a business owner - You have to put yourself in a position for people to organically find you and get to know you. The key here is to engage with people organically every single day.

You can do this by:

• Adding value and commenting to create a dialogue
• Crack jokes in relevant comment sections
• Make relevant memes for comment sections
• Genuinely interact with accounts that your potential customers already love.

 If you can find a way to get those potential accounts to create a dialogue with you and start retweeting you onto their timeline, organically getting you your face your name in front of their audience, it will be significantly easier for you to grow. When you spam people and accounts instead, they will never show your content, your comments, or engage with you. They might even block you if you just go into their comments spamming instead of engaging.

 Something that you want to understand and keep in mind in the process of you doing this is to make sure that you save your energy to engage with accounts that your followers already love. Which means that you need to understand who your audience is & who your potential customers are. To fully grasp this, you need to build a customer profile. We'll go more over that in hack #4.

 Essentially, this is how you're going to organically grow - through engaging with people who are already where you want to be. These accounts spend time on Twitter and nine times out of 10 If you share comments and content in their comment section, they are going to retweet you, quote tweet you and be like “This is dope advice”, “Definitely listen to this”, “you all should follow this person” & “make sure you hit this person up”. They will also credit you & tell their followers how dope and amazing you are. 

You don't have to go in people's comment sections spamming, dropping links to your website, pictures of your products and stuff, when that's not the type of posts that it is. You need to learn to focus on the conversation at hand, then you will begin to organically get followers.

 I can't tell you have how many posts I commented on when I first started this journey in 2017. I was going viral in the comment sections daily and it got to the point people were like, “I see you under everybody's comment sections, you're always dropping gems, you always share advice, you always share knowledge, you always cracking jokes, and you got the best memes, I've got to follow you because I see you all the time. And I don't know why I'm not following you yet. But it makes perfect sense for me to now because everybody I love loves you. So I should love you too”. That's was literally the thought process behind people following me and how I got my first 600 followers in a couple of weeks.

 The second thing to consider when doing this is that you're going to be directly putting yourself where your audience is, which will make it 10 times easier for them to find you. These big accounts that you're going to be engaging with have already done the hard work of getting the followers, you literally get to piggyback on that just by adding extra value, and learning how to properly engage and create a dialogue.

And honestly that’s your goal, to create a dialogue in the comment section, wherever you can get the original creator to comment back and actually talk to you and retweet and share what you said. Or you can get their followers to do the same thing. But either way, your goal is to create a dialogue. So ask questions, expand on the subject, drop facts, drop statistics, & drop studies.

Even if you have to challenge what's being said, Don't be a a**hole. Be friendly, be respectful, be courteous and drop gems, you never know what those things will turn into and how many followers you actually get, just by being your authentic self and sharing content that matters.

Now, for Tip two, I'm going to tell you that once you do all those things of adding value in other people's comments section, you need to foster and focus on building a sense of community for the people who do decide to follow you.

Sidenote: I elaborate on developing a social media strategy and how to grow your following online via the Content Marketing Guide Download it HERE.

Tip #2: Create a sense of community

Now, you can't just ask people to buy from you without giving them a sense of community for doing so.

There are several ways that you can build a community. But there are also so many reasons why it's important:

1. Outside of just having the community, it helps you build trust & authority.
2. It makes people actually fall in love with your brand.
3. It's going to make it easier for people to give you feedback.
4. It's going to make it easier for you to get word of mouth referrals and to not have to feel like you're chasing sales all the time. Building that sense of community is going to compel people, so recommend you to their parents, their siblings, their friends, aunts, uncles, coworkers, even their kids, right. But in order to get to that point, you have to foster a community. And you have to make people feel like you care about them outside of just wanting their money like you actually want to see them succeed and be happy and healthy and thriving. Whether they buy your products or not.

You don't want to lead building a community with only trying to make money. You have to understand how to position how what you're doing is valuable to them, and not something that only you can benefit from. Building a sense of community lets people know that you want to build relationships that are mutually beneficial for everyone.

Now, here are seven things that I personally have done to foster a sense of community:

1. I've created a company hashtags, which will be #Touchedbyty and #themarketingbully.
2. I've created a free group chats with over 100 members in it And I'm getting ready to launch a paid group chat where those 100 people, they can decide if they want to sign up and get even further value and insight and one on one help with me just by paying that monthly subscription at a low price.
3. I blog and drop new content almost every single week.
4. I created a podcast that has also allowed me to create additional value in a new medium.
5. I do weekly Twitter spaces. Doing weekly Twitter Spaces has made my followers feel like they can come to me and ask me questions more often, get my advice, DM me more, email me questions and reach out to me. It makes them feel like I'm a lot more accessible to them, because now I appear to be. Before I started doing these weekly Twitter spaces, people would always feel like I was too expensive to work with, or they didn't know how we respond or they didn't know if I will respond to their DMS. But now since they get to interact with me live, they get to hear how enthusiastic I am when I'm talking to them, we laugh together, I crack jokes with them and they see my friendly demeanor, it builds and fosters that sense of community because they can see how down to earth and how authentic I am with them. And that's what you want to build with your community. I love the weekly Twitter spaces because it's audio based. And I don't feel like people are going to be focused on how I look, they're going to be focused on the knowledge and the gems I'm going to drop them. And any every time I do a weekly Twitter space I have anywhere from 50 to 80 LIVE listeners, I make sales every single time, receive praise on my content and receive donations. But I don't lead with sales, I lead with fostering that sense of community.
6. I created a community moniker. Now I just started doing this at the beginning of December, which has been a game changer. Now I refer to my audience as “business besties”. If you are on my email list then you already know this nine times out of 10, I open emails with “Hey, business besties” - Then I get into the email and the nitty gritty. Because that is the sense of community, I want them to feel like we are best friends. We're doing this business thing together, I am here for you, I'm a resource for you & that's what you want to get to.
7. Now, the last thing that I do to really foster that sense of community is I regularly include my audience in the content creation process, meaning that I survey them, I ask them questions, I give them a list of upcoming topics. Then I let them choose what they want the podcast, blog and weekly twitter spaces to be about. And believe it or not, they actually answer my surveys, they respond back and they engage with me. They also tell the other business besties about the surveys to make sure that I'm actually creating content that they want. This does two things for me.
   1. Number one, it keeps my audience engaged & It lets them know what's up and coming.
   2. Two, it makes them feel like they are in control of the content that I am sharing. They have they have a sense of control over the brand that they are donating money to and buying books and products and stuff from it doesn't make them feel like they are just a bystander to my brand. It makes them feel like they are a part of it. And they have a say so and that this is a business family because that's what this is I can't run and build my brand on my own.

I do these things collectively because I need them to market promote and share my content. But the only way to really do that is to make sure that they understand that I value them and I value their community and the sense of security that they provide me financially so that I can create content for them full time.

So when I say foster a sense of community, I mean you need to really sit down and think about:

1. how can I make them feel included?
2. How can I make them feel heard?
3. How can I make them understand that I care about their problems? And that I want to give them the best experience possible?
4. How can I get them to show up and talk to me?

The only way to really do that is to create the space for them, whether that's going to be free group chats, going live weekly podcast and blog, in a company newsletter, or a quarterly in person event.  Whatever it is that you have to do to create that sense of community, that's what you need to do. Because that's what's going to take your brand to the next level. It's also going to stop you from feeling like you have to market your brand all the time. They will start marketing your brand for you & tagging you in stuff to get you referrals.

I don't even have to tag my brand in posts that are about products or services that I offer because my followers do it for me. Every time somebody asks for a black owned mug company, somebody tags me in it. Every time somebody asks for a black owned print company, somebody tags me in it. When people ask for help with marketing and content creation, people tag me in it. When people ask for graphic designers and professional artists, they tag me in it, I don't have to tag myself in these things. And nine times out of 10, I close that deal, because it's other people referring me and saying how dope it how awesome I am because of all the previous value that I have given to them.

And that's the point that you want to be it on social media, you want to be to a point to where you don't have to market yourself all the time, and allow other people to do it for you. But the only way to do that is to build that sense of community. So, with that being said let’s move into hack #3, which is going to be creating valuable, educational, resourceful, shareable content. 

Sidenote: I elaborate on developing a social media strategy and how to grow your following online via the Content Marketing Guide Download it HERE.

Tip #3: Create valuable, educational, resourceful, shareable content

You need to be willing to drop gems consistently, even for the most simple things. What's simple to you is not going to be simple to people who don't work in your industry, run your business & don't understand everything that goes on behind the scenes. You just need to make sure that the gems and the tips you drop are relevant to you, your brand and everything that you offer.

There are plenty of things that I think are very simple because I work in digital marketing. For example, I thought that creating freebies and setting up automatic downloads, landing pages and capturing leads was simple. But one day I shared a tweet that said “this is how I create freebies”, then I shared a very simple 12 step process that I go through”.

The response was overwhelmingly positive and everybody was like, “wow, this is dope”. The post had over 200 likes and 50+ shares. It led to making a tutorial video that got over 1500 views, 100+  likes and 30+ shares in less than 24 hours. It also compelled people to reach out to me asking if I will help them set theirs up. And now people are requesting this as a service to offer to them and their brand to help them understand how to give back value and what that process looks like for them. You never know what you think is simple, is actually educational and informative to people who are going down a similar same path.

Now, if you don't work in something like digital marketing, you can still do this. Here’s a few examples:

• If you work in fashion, you can drop daily fashion tips and tricks, content about how to take one piece of clothing and turn it into seven different outfits, or how to take one pair of shoes and wear it in 10 different ways.
• If you do hair, you could talk about you know how you maximize a wig how you take care of wigs.
• If you do makeup, you could talk about how to properly clean makeup brushes, how to avoid getting bacteria and mold and your products, how to tell if a product is toxic to you.
• If you you're a barber, you could do the same thing by talking about how to shave, clean clippers, best blades for personal use etc.

It really doesn't matter what industry you're in, when you have customers using your services, products, & consuming your content you should be dropping educational content because it is going to make people trust you. When people trust you, they buy from you.

But when people don't trust you, they don't buy from you. When people are confused about the value that you can give them they do not buy from you.

You can overcome the hurdle of trust and people questioning the amount of value that you offer by incorporating educational content into your weekly regular content. Even if you feel like in the beginning, it's not getting a lot of engagement keep sharing.

It might be the way that you're writing, the format that you're using, or your tone. In the beginning, it also just takes time for people to find your account, so you need to be consistent to actually get better at it.

The only thing you guarantee By not continuing to share and promote educational content is that you will never get better at it. Which is why hack #4 is crucial, which is to get as specific as possible about who your ideal client is, and then create content for that specific type of person.

Tip #4: Create a customer profile

Creating a customer profile means that you understand how to identify who your target customer is + how to connect with them organically.

Now, other people will naturally be drawn to your content when you do this. And that's great. but you need to focus on one type of person to maximize engagement.

You also need to understand that your business, your products, & your content is not for everybody. So, the way that you market and advertise and position your brand cannot be for every body.

Although anybody can buy what you're selling & anybody can set subscribe to your services, not everybody is going to find the same amount of value in what you do.

Not everybody is trying to solve the exact same problem when they sign up for what you're offering. That's why it's important for you to pick one specific type of person to sell to. 

I'll give you an example of my customer profile. Now, I do have multiple customer profiles for different things that are offered, because some services and products are a lot more advanced than others.

My email marketing guide covers the very beginner basics of email marketing. So my customer profile for this will be:

• A new entrepreneur that has less than two to three years of experience
• Someone who has not fully emerged into email marketing
• They may or may not be building an email list, but they likely ignore it for months at a time.
• They are typically going to be a solopreneur or they might have a part time assistant
• They may or may not be working full time in their business. But if they if they are still working a job, they are surely trying to find a way to get away from it.
• They want to figure out how to increase sales & figure out how to get repeat customers. Because these are two things that they're struggling with, this is stopping them from leaving their full time job, or stopping them from really living the life that they want as a full time entrepreneur.
• They likely feel overworked by having to create so much content for social media, so they also struggle with repurposing, recycling and reusing old content in a new way.

This probably describes you in some capacity, because I create content for you most of the time. And if you can relate, then you need the Email Marketing Guide AND the Content Marketing Guide.

Now, understanding this is what helps me create new products, new ebooks, new digital things, new freebies, how to segment my email list, who I need to be engaging with on social media.

This tells me what exactly they need from me every single day in order to trust me to buy from me, to & to refer people to me.

If I didn't have that specific customer profile made up, then I would not know any of those things about them.

I also wouldn't know how to create content for them or how to sell to them. I also would not know how to get them to trust me.

So if you don't have a customer profile created yet, you need to sit down and figure out:

• What problems do they have?
• What are they passionate about?
• What do they do?
• Who do they do it for? And why?
• How much money do they have?
• Where are they from?
• What kind of car do they drive?
• Do they have kids?
• Are they married?
• What is their ethnicity, race and nationality?
• What languages do they speak?

You need to be as specific as possible & envision your ideal client in front of you in order to be able to sell to them online, because those people online are real people.

Thinking like that in terms of your marketing and how you position your brand, can help people connect with your brand more easily. With that being said, my last hack for you is that you need to show up every single day. 

Ttip #5: Show up every single day

 The key to growing online is to show up every single day, but especially when you're in the phase of growing your accounts. The only thing that you guaranteed to be true when you don't show up every day is that it is impossible to grow.

Even if you don't create new content every single day, show up and engage with other people to support them. Show up and share congratulations, create memes and add value to conversations that are already relevant.

Expand on conversations by quote tweeting and creating a simple thread to add on to what they're already saying.

 You might not be inspired to create content every single day and that’s okay, but you can always log on repurpose & re-share content, talk about updates on your site, share brand updates, drop industry tips and behind the scenes content.

Plus you can always talk about things that also build that emotional connection with your audience. If you don't feel like talking about business that day, talk about things that your audience is interested in. But whatever it is, you need to show up every single day, okay.

 Something that I've learned to do when I don't feel like creating content is ask my followers for their opinions on things.

For example one day I asked what kind of movies or TV shows they’re watching right now, because I need something binge worthy.

I told them I like sci-fi & then I gave them a list of things that I like. Dozens of my followers commented sharing shows, movies & how much they love sci-fi to.

I would have never gotten any people to engage with me had I not given them the opportunity to tell me what they like and what they're into, or had I not created that conversation about sci-fi.

Now, I know that majority of my followers love sci fi, especially things about space and time travel, and history and science & I love all those things too.

You don't always have to create business content, you can create educational, informative, engaging and fun content about other topics that you enjoy as well, as long as they're things that your clients and audience enjoy to.

And that's why it's important for you to build that customer profile so that you can understand the other types of media, pop culture and topics that they enjoy discussing.

Now business besties if you did enjoy this article, please make sure that you donate to Touched By Ty’s Creator Fund, grab the Email Marketing Guide AND the Content Marketing Guide  and also tweet about it on Twitter. Let me know what your favorite tip was.

As always, Thank-you for taking the time to read this article it’s a pleasure to create content for you. In my next article, I’m going to share How I grew my brands monthly income to $10k a month in 2021.