Growth Tips for Startup founders Building on Twitter

In this article I’m going to share with you some of the tips I picked up that helped me to grow in Twitter.

So here’s the thing, in May 2021 we didn’t have Prelo, I was busy getting over the failure of my previous Startup.

We had tried everything, nursed it for 2yrs adding features and hoping it would sell itself. πŸ™„

We had to switch it off at the end of May, but by early June, I’d embarked on a new shiny adventure. I’d started building Prelo with the same team.

A friend suggested to me in July, that I should start using twitter. So I registered.

Prior to that, I’d spent majority of my time on LinkedIn where I had enjoyed some good traction and contacts for life, but it wasn’t the hangout for our ideal customer….so I left, and here I am on twitter!

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…One word of warning, I’m missing my coffee today which means I’m struggling a little. I got our grocery delivery dates wrong, so we’re now out of coffee and I’m rocking in a chair with my laptop. Patiently waiting for Saturday to come 😰

πŸ“Œ</warning>

Before we get into this month’s blog, I’d love to connect with you!

Soooo, let’s do it follow me on twitter (DMs always open) πŸ“¨

4 useful tips for founders and developers looking at using twitter to improve their social presence

4 Growth Tips for founders on Twitter

I first joined twitter several years ago, I quickly got fed up and went on a 7 year hiatus. I then re-joined in April 2021 and wanted to be authentic in the way I engaged…I hope, it’s been working.

My focus is to build real relationships, and to do that I needed engaged followers.

My Startup isn’t a household name, so I’m particular about building a real connections with real people who might some day use Prelo.

 

 

1️⃣ Define your audience

There are many growth tips on twitter, but the most important one is to define your audience:

Before you “blow up” πŸ’₯ twitterverse with random unstructured tweets, please answer this question.

  • Who are you tweeting to?

I can only share from my experience that I’m interested in tweeting to founders, specifically early stage founders. Founders lilke me. They fall into a number of categories:

πŸ’° founders with a product looking for funding (me)

πŸ‘©β€β€οΈβ€πŸ‘©founders with an idea looking for co-founders (me once)

πŸ‘©β€πŸ’» founders with an idea looking for a dev community (again me)

😫 founders who are bootstrapping right now (me today)

So to re-iterate I’m tweeting to ….. f-o-u-n-d-e-r-s “early stage” . I simply share my experiences to help other founders like myself get better. If you’re a founder I hope you’ve found my tweets useful.

For developers or marketers that want to become founders, I’m hoping that my tweets are useful or at least you find this blog to be a place to learn and appreciate what founders are going through. If you’re an investor, you may want to follow me if my content resonates with you and perhaps introduce me to founders in your network I may be able to help.

 

2️⃣ Find your twitter tribe

I wasn’t looking to grow on Twitter when I came back. all I was looking for was a group of founders with similar shared experiences.

Those who know me, know that my whole being is built on “helping” that’s what I love doing and that’s what gives me true satisfaction. So I wanted to find similar people.

What did I do, I started tweeting. I started sharing thoughts on things I had personal “lived” experiences on.

I figured there was no point in googling answers πŸ˜‚ there’s already too much commoditised answers out there.

“Be different, be you”…. that was my MO

3 Ways to find your tribe

πŸ’™ Search for the topics you’re interested in, and I guess most comfortable about giving an opinion on

(for me it was Startups, bootstrappingΒ and early-stage challenges)

πŸ’™ Look for the people in tweeting and commenting about things you are specifically passionate about

(for me it was Startup failure, how to help founders and navigating the funding space)

My Canadian Eric Rafat from FoundersBeta has been awesome

πŸ’™ The rest is simple, follow them. Help them engage with their tweets and follow the people they follow. Find out if they belong to groups and follow those groups.

πŸ’› Bonus, if you find a group that you truly resonate with, ask the owner of the group if you could join their group. Attend their online meetings… (I know I said 3 but if you’re still reading, thank you and this is a bonus)

 

3️⃣ Always tweet for engagement, never for followers

Perhaps my strategy is a little off, but I’m not engaging to gain 1000s of dis-engaged followers…I’d rather have 200 engaged followers than to have 3000 dis-engaged ones. I always use this scenario below…

Have you ever been at a party when a DJ starts playing a set and everyone walks off the dance floor? 🀣

That’s exactly how I see twitter, you are that DJ and the music are your tweets. So if you don’t want to spend your time playing to an empty dance floor, you need to make sure that the people you’ve invited to your part like your music 🎡

3 things that create authentic engagement

a) Use actual names in tweets, it’s a subtle way to demonstrate that you’ve cared to look at their profile

b) Simply “liking” someone else’s tweet is ok, but if you have a question – this is a perfect way to engage

c) Startup community on twitter is an extremely helpful one, so “sliding” into the DMs is acceptable

I have just under 350 awesome individuals following my account. They’ve actively connected with me, hopefully because of what I talk about, and I follow most of my them because I enjoy their content.

 

4️⃣ Things you should avoid at all cost

As an early stage founder on social media, politics and religion are 2 topics I rarely tweet about. Perhaps not the right approach but that’s what works for me right now. I have so many other things to talk about, and quite frankly I don’t know enough about either to help anyone at this point.

β›” Less than 1000 followers – Avoid Retweeting
I have less than 1000 followers, whilst it’s ok to retweet the odd tweet, I find that liking a tweet and adding a valuable comment is of a higher value count than retweeting it.

Customers look at this if you’re trying to build your brand…bearing in mind that your personal brand is instrinsincly linked to your company I personally know founders Kilian and Dago doing amazing things

Also scrolling through an account with 100s of retweets doesn’t fill a customer or an investor with confidence that you have any original content.

I know, I know we should be running the startup not tweeting – it’s the world we now live in

β›” Avoid posting when your audience is off-line
Majority of my audience happen to be online between

3pm – 6pm GMT | 10am – 1pm EST | 7am – 10am PST

This ensures that when I tweet, I’m actually reaching out to people at a period I’d be most likely to receive maximum engagement. Nothing worse than tweeting…going away for 6 hours to find there’s a ton of questions you’ve not been able to answer. Lost opportunity to engage.

β›” Less than 250 followers – Avoid asking questions
I’ve tried this a few times and it’s never really received much engagement. At 350 followers, people sometimes engage with my questions. You can however, ask questions within other people’s threads, just not as a stand-alone tweet.

β›” Avoid talking about your Startup
Nobody cares about your startup at this point. People, selfishly just want to know how you can help them. It is just the way it is at this stage. Once you’ve built some credibility in your community, they will reach out to you about your Startup. Until then – give…give…give..

One awesome human being I follow, who’s become a friend is Dago. His Startup , setup with his wife is called Logology but you’d never in 1 million years know that. Follow him he is doing amazing things for founders looking for logos.

For more information on achieving growth on Twitter, follow me.

If you’ve built an MVP and you’re thinking about reaching out to growth Startups to try your hand at DIY lead generation….we’ve carefully curated some Startups for you πŸ‘‰ check out prelo

 

On twitter : 🐀 @oluadedj
subscribe : πŸ“° prelo newsletter

Until the next time!

Olu
Founder, Prelo
I tweet about helping founders win!

 

 

main image provided by Alexander Shatov πŸ™
second image provided by pch.vector πŸ™