4 Secrets to Crafting the Winning Twitter Profile

"Let me just tweet more to get more followers."

I know! You want to grow an audience, this is why you're here. If your only strategy now is to tweet more, STOP that and you have to keep reading.

Remember how I told you about meeting my wife in my previous email? Through a dating app. I also told you how it was our interactions that pulled us together to get married and that the dating profiles weren't an important factor.

Okay, I lied.

The profiles actually had a role - in the early moments.

When crafting a profile, most people would put up their best looking photos. "I really like this photo of me, let me add it to my profile!"

But that's not the case for me. Instead of picking my best photos, I was thinking about how the other person sees me through the photos.

I know the kind of girls I'd want to meet - family-oriented, kind, sweet, caring, not competitive ... so when I was picking my photos, I went with:

1. A picture of me with my mum and 2 sisters
2. A picture of me with a puppy
3. A picture of me with lots of kids (I was running a kids coding school back then)

Why did I do that? Because I understood how people check out my profiles and what kind of people would react to what kind of photos.

And I was lucky enough to meet my wife this way. The rest is history!

Why am I telling you how I was strategic about my dating profile? Well, it is because the same theory applies to your online profile for growing an audience too.

Instead of creating it based on what you like about yourself, you should consider how people perceive you. And these are the 4 reasons why someone follows you.

Understand this will unlock your follower growth without you tweeting more!

1. They see you as an expert

This one is obvious, but hear me out anyway.

Human craves motivation and new perspectives. We all love to learn new skills and follow latest trends.

This is exactly why I follow some foodie bloggers on Instagram. Because I want to know what restaurants are new in town, so that I can take my wife! I need restaurant ideas.

And this is why you want to become an expert in their eyes for SOMETHING.

Maybe you don't particularly know something super well right now, but that's totally okay, many creators (including myself) start off with zero knowledge on a topic.

All you need to do is to start learning all about it intensively.

Subscribe to 10 newsletters, follow top influencers in the space, allocate an hour each morning to "consume" content about this one topic ... and soon enough, you'll start to have more knowledge about this topic.

And how do you become an expert? You digest the new information, process it, and present it clearly.

I'm simplifying a lot here, but you get the idea.

2. They like you

I was lucky enough to get mentioned when Andrew tweeted this:

He was looking for new people to follow on Twitter.

He didn't really care whether these 2 people were "experts", all he wanted was people that he enjoyed being around!

This is actually one thing a lot of people miss out in growing an audience. It is not enough to have a static profile, you need to be dynamic and get people to like you.

People scroll through your wall and what they're really doing are 1) checking out your personality and 2) observing how you treat your existing followers.

How? They scan your wall quickly:

1. They see whether you just tweet about yourself (are you self-centered?)
2. They read your tweets to find out your tone (are you rude or aggressive?)
3. They see if you only tweet and never engage with anyone else (are you just using people?)
4. They see if you support other people (are you a good person?)

Within 60 seconds, they can already tell who you are based on your actions and decide whether they'll like you.

If they do, they'll follow you.

3. They want to be like you

Other than learning new perspectives, we all want to be successful, right?

So it is natural for us to look up to some people and want to follow & observe to see how we can achieve similar success one day.

For example, Monica Lent is someone I look up to a lot. She is friendly and helpful. She shares transparently about her journey. She is sharing and teaching people all the time.

When I first learned about her, my mind went "I want to be like her!"

This is because as human, we also crave hope. We want to know that it is possible for us to get there one day.

Since I want to "be like her", I follow her in every possible way.

And this is also why I started sharing my monthly income reports on my blog. I want people to have the same feeling "I want to be like him!" when they learn from my content.

So, what can you do so that people want to be like you?

P.S. again, you don't have to be an expert. People want to be like you in many ways, e.g. your unique personality, how you present info (video, audio, visual), you're generous, etc.

4. They get pleasure from you

Do I really need to mention this?

Yes, because we all forget. Most of us think that the online world is easy, it is scalable, it is transactional ... But actually when it comes to following someone, the basics like pleasure plays a huge factor.

What is pleasure? A few things:

1. Your content is not all over the place (messy!) - some people talk about all sorts of things like sports, politics, games, etc. Can you imagine someone to get pleasure from a set up like this? Not really.
2. You have consistency. You make sense - no matter how good you are, if you become very hard to understand, or if you disappear for days and shows up at random times, people just don't want to bother anymore.
3. You're a source of inspiration - you're not using social media to unfold your life, you're using social media to share great advice, tips, knowledge. People feel good learning from you.

Surprisingly, this sounds easy but is very hard to do.

So now that you know the 4 reasons why people follow other people, you can plan and execute strategies to achieve these 4 things over time.

Don't even bother tweeting more, or engineering viral tweets, or replying quickly to influencers' new tweets hoping to get exposure. These are short-sighted tactics.

Why do some people tweet only once a day and still have a huge engaged following? Because they get this.