Hey Prompt Entrepreneur,
In the previous Parts we’ve set up your basic Content strategy and began Engagement.
Do this consistently and you will grow. That’s almost guaranteed.
However: it will be long, slow, hard work.
If you love being on X creating and interacting that’s fine: just enjoy the process and the organic growth over time.
We are building businesses though. We are not growing an X audience for the sake of it. We want to use the audience to drive our business.
In this Part we’ll talk about a few methods to accelerate growth. You’ve already build a fire that is burning nicely – now we’re just adding more fuel to speed everything up.
Let’s get started:
X Growth
1. X Premium
The first and fastest way to boost your growth on X is to get verified by signing up for X Premium.
The main advantage for your growth is that you get expanded reach on your own content – basically your posts will be seen by more people each time you post.
In addition, your comments on other people’s posts will naturally be shown at the top.
This is a huge advantage when we are applying our Engagement tactic from the previous Part.
Basically if you are serious about building an audience that you can monetise and drive business with this is non-negotiable. So I won’t spend any more time here!
2. Analytics and doubling down
Our first major growth method is to find out what is working and double down on this sort of content.
This allows us to refine our own growth strategy rather than rely on some “guru” telling us what works and what does not. Because guess what: it changes all the time!
This is why in previous Parts I’ve been careful to give you enough to get started but haven’t tried to tell you that this is “The Way”. Your strategy will depend on your niche, your audience, your content and you.
Instead of trying to force all of that into a one size fits all strategy I’ve instead suggested you start with the basics and then pivot and adjust based on what works. We’re now at the point of analysing and pivoting.
X has its own analytics at https://analytics.twitter.com which will give you some basic info. However, we want to use AI to give us insights.
On the desktop version of X go to More > Settings > Your Account > Download an Archive of your Data
This will give you a CSV record of all your posts as well as all the data surrounding the tweet: date and time, likes, comments, re-posts etc.
We now want to upload this whole file into an AI for it to analyse.
You will need ChatGPT Pro for this step as we need to use the Code Interpreter. This allows you to upload a file for ChatGPT to work on.
Upload your CSV and then use this prompt to begin analysis of your data:
Act as a Twitter data expert
Analyse the attached file of my past activity
Provide answers to the following:
1. Give me the top 3 days to post.
2. Give me the top 5 times per day (any day) to post.
3. What type of post leads to the most engagement by likes, comments and retweets.
4. Tell me my top 10 most engaged posts.
5. What type of post leads to the most profile visits?
6. What type of post leads to the most follows?
7. Which type of post leads to the most link clicks?
8. Which type of post leads to the most website visits (my URL)?
For each of the post type questions above design a "perfect tweet" that will help me replicate the most successful tweets above.Tip: sometimes Code Interpreter can be temperamental. If you have trouble with the above prompt try asking one question at a time.
Prompt Output 💬
There is a huge amount of output so we’ll focus on some highlights.
First, ChatGPT tells me my top days.
I can dig deeper by asking more questions. For instance if I ask for the “% of weekly engagement per day, controlled for the number of tweets by using average engagement per tweet” I get:
This is a fairly complex task and would take a human a little data wrangling. ChatGPT can just spit out the answer in seconds though- Friday is best, almost double Tuesday. That tells me to go hard on Fridays.
What about posts that drive people to come and follow me?
Apparently it’s posts with mentions. These are when I’m directly engaging with larger accounts – which was discussed in the last Part. This tells me that engaging with my Dream 100 works to push growth.
The basic idea here is that you use ChatGPT to find out what works and what is not working. Then do more of the successful tactics moving forward.
If you want a specific growth plan ask “Based on all of the data provided and only the data (do not draw from your past experience) suggest a follower growth plan.”
Repeat this whole exercise about once a month to continuously get new insights. This will allow you to continuously focus on the best growth tactics based on your content and not what some “guru” is telling you.
3. Engagement groups
Next up are engagement groups.
The basic idea here is a group of X accounts who are all in the same space who help each other grow.
For example let’s say you are in a group with 20 other people who all create content in the same niche. When you post something you copy/paste the link into the engagement group and ask people to help boost it.
They’ll like, comment and maybe share your content. Preferably soon after it’s posted. This tells X that the content is valuable and it therefore shows the post to more people.
It’s a way of juicing the algorithm and as such it’s a little bit grey area.
The tradeoff for you is that you also need to like, comment and engage with the content of the other people in the group. It’s a mutual support group where you all need to help one another.
Engagement groups can be really useful early on to get some traction with larger accounts – you may even find that some of your Dream 100 are in the group. Bonus!
Some pointers:
- Groups that are too large aren’t valuable. There will likely be lots of junk accounts in there that you don’t want to support. 10-20 is reasonable.
- You shouldn’t have to pay for an engagement group. I’m sure there are some good paid groups out there but unless you have strong proof that the ROI will be positive stick with free mutual support groups for now.
- Think about setting up your own smaller, niche group. Whilst there are plenty of large groups you may find it more beneficial to work with 5-10 people you really align with in a smaller, more active group.
- Finding a group initially is hard. As you grow and make connections though you’ll be invited. This often happens via DMs.
4. Promoted posts
Promoted posts are specific posts you make that you put some cash behind.
This is different to advertising campaigns, which we’ll cover next.
You can promote specific posts via the desktop interface using the promote button.
This is important: when you promote a post it is not shown as promoted. It’s an invisible boost.
This is how lots of accounts can make a certain post go “viral” – you simply post something thing and then put cash behind it to ensure if gets a lot of reach.
I’d recommend promoting posts that are already doing well. In the example above you’ll see that the post got ~7000 views organically which isn’t too bad. There’s also a decent level of reposting and bookmarking. This would be a good candidate to place some cash behind to really make it fly.
If you boost a bad post you are just showing a bad post to a lot more people. If you boost an already popular post though you will be showing it to lots of people who will then repost, like, comment and bookmark, further propelling the reach.
Here’s another tip. You can Promote a post that you commented on someone else’s post. Basically you can promote your comment. Sounds confusing? Here’s a screenshot:
This is the comment I put on a larger account in the previous Part in order to get some visibility.
Here’s the cool thing – I can promote that comment for visibility. That secures me the top comment on that original post.
To do this click your response then Analytics. Inside you’ll see Promote. This is a bit of a “hack” so I wouldn’t be surprised if it disappears one day.
5. Advertising
Advertising is our last rapid growth tactic.
Lots of influencers on X do not talk about this. Advertising is a “dirty word” and it is considered cheating in some creator circles.
If this is an opinion you share don’t worry – go ahead and build organically. It’s an entirely valid option. It will just take longer.
If you are open to advertising though that’s great.
Because, guess what: we’re building a business. Growing our audience base is an investment – much like we’d invest in building a website or designing a logo.
What advertising does is also allow us to get over the awkward early stage when we have a few hundred followers.
It doesn’t matter how good your content is when you are tiny. No-one will take you seriously. But as soon as you start to hit a few thousand followers everything ramps up.
This is because humans need social proof. We trust larger accounts because they are large. They are large because they are doing right surely? That’s how our brains work unfortunately!
Unlike Promotions with Campaigns you can set up a range of posts and see which one does best. It’s more complicated to set up but once you’ve found a good fit it can keep running. Promoted posts have a more limited lifespan.
You can set up X advertising here https://ads.twitter.com/
Advertising could be its whole guide so we’ll keep this high level for now.
For your first campaign keep it simple:
I suggest testing the Reach and Engagement campaigns to see what works better for you. Reach will generally be the better option if the content is really good and likely to be engaged with. Whereas Engagement campaigns force engagement more so can be used with lower tier content. Ideally though all your content should be great!
What content should you put in your ad? This depends entirely on what your objective is here. But considering this guide is focused on growth we’ll stick with that for now.
You want to use a piece of content (or variation) that has previously shown success in bringing you new followers. You can get that information from step 2 above.
You can also try a more direct route of asking people to follow. One of my most successful campaigns like this was super simple.
I found memes that were related to the niche and posted them as the ad’s main image. I then added a super simple text call to action like “How to use ChatGPT and AI to start and grow your business. No fluff only deep dives and prompts. Follow for actionable advice and guides.”
The combination worked to grab attention (using the meme) and then drive followers via the call to action text.
Targeting is the next page in ad setup:
- For Demographics I suggest you leave it wide for now. Then once you have run one or two campaigns you’ll be able to see whether Male or Females engaged more as well as the best age groups.
- For geographic targeting the same. Leave it blank for worldwide targeting initially and then analyse the data to see which countries lead to the best results.
- For targeting one of the most powerful tools is “Follower Lookalikes”. This basically allows you to target the following of other accounts in your niche and pull their followers over to you. Use this to target Dream 100 accounts.
With ads, like with your content strategy, you’ll need to experiment to find what works best with your audience. I suggest doing lots of small $5 tests to collect results and then when you have found a good fit you can increase budgets.
As always you can hire experts in setting up advertising campaigns from sites like Upwork.com if you want expert guidance.
Pulling it together
Today we delved into detail about how to accelerate growth on X.
I’ve delivered a range of options for you to explore – some paid, some free. Hopefully some or all of these options will become useful tools in your arsenal.
If you are continuing to produce content and engage with your Dream 100 these additional techniques will 10x your speed and you’ll soon be racking up a solid follower count.
In the next Part we’ll look at how exactly we begin to monetise that following and start generating revenue.
Part 1: X Niche
Part 2: X Content Creation
Part 3: X Engagement
Part 4: X Growth
Part 5: Monetising X