How I Doubled My Twitter Followers in 2 Weeks, and Why It Wasn’t Good for Business

There’s the genuine, thoughtful way to build a social media following, and there’s the cheater’s way (or as some put it, the “hacker’s” way). I’m a big proponent of thoughtfulness in all things – but I took a shortcut a few weeks ago with the Horizon Peak Twitter account, and I’m not too proud to admit it.

Growing Your Twitter Follower Number in a Thoughtful, Genuine Fashion

To thoughtfully build a following on Twitter, your goal should be providing value to a targeted audience.

I believe that scheduled posts are the backbone of a strong social-media plan, and real-time posting is the arms and legs of that plan.

• Scheduled posts make sure you are visible when people are looking for you, your product or your service


• Real-time posting shows you are a human being and not an auto-posting robot, and encourages real engagement

For both scheduled posts and real-time posts, to really connect with the people you are trying to reach on Twitter, you need to think about your audience. Provide content that your audience will be interested in. Share opinions and give your audience the chance to respond with their own. Give behind-the-scenes info about your business that your audience will be curious about. Follow people you actually want to read.

Being genuine about how you manage your social media accounts will increase quality followers – that is, followers who are really interested in what you have to say.

Hacking Your Way to a Higher Number

There are many tools out there that claim to help you grow your follower numbers. Most of those tools will either auto-favorite tweets or auto-follow people for you. The one that I used was Spokal.

Spokal is inbound marketing software for small businesses. It’s actually a really powerful suite of tools. One of the many features they offer is the Twitter Builder. This fancy little tool lets you identify three sets of keywords, and then it goes to work auto-favoriting posts that match those keywords.

Why do I think this is a “cheater’s” method? Because a machine can’t tell what tweets are truly valuable to your audience.

For example, one of my keywords was “B2B.” For the most part, Spokal identified and auto-favorited relevant posts about B2B. But it also favorited…

• The same post retweeted from ten different people


• Posts about some European indie rock band with “B2B” in their name

Neither of those things is helpful to my audience. And worse, if you look at my favorites list from June 6 to June 20 of this year, it’s obviously 99% done by robots.

Ick factor #1: I effectively removed the human element from my Twitter favorites list for 2 weeks.

Quality Versus Quantity

Over the two weeks that I let Spokal auto-favorite tweets on the Horizon Peak Twitter feed, my number of followers more than doubled.

That’s great news, right?

Not so fast.

Many, many – too many – of those followers were not even remotely the kinds of people I want to reach. In fact, I think it’s fair to say that many of them are probably using tools that auto-follow anyone who favorites one of their tweets.

Horizon Peak helps B2Bs, professional and technical services businesses, and creative and marketing agencies with their web copy and content marketing. That is the audience that I think about when I post – or when I favorite other people’s posts. That is the audience I can help.

That is not the audience that followed me with the Spokal experiment. About 90% of the people that followed me during that two-week period were not even close to my target audience.

Ick factor #2: Now my followers list is cluttered with people who aren’t actually helped by my posts, and that don’t even really want to read my tweets.

Not a Failed Experiment – But Not Successful Either

So why did I use Spokal’s Twitter Builder in the first place? Two reasons:

1) It is my responsibility to my clients to make sure I am up-to-date on all the modern content marketing trends, tools and technology. To me, that means trying things out to see how they work so I can better explain the options to my clients.

2) Because people really do sometimes judge a business on its Twitter follower number. I want to grow that number for Horizon Peak, and while I want to do it in a thoughtful way that attracts quality followers (that is, followers who I can help with my posts, and who really care about what I have to say), I’m only human and of course I would like to do it quickly.

I’m glad I tried this method of growing my Twitter follower number, if only because I now know that that type of “quick and dirty” method of growth feels really icky to me – and ultimately doesn’t really serve my business.

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