Growing Your Followers:

Introduction

• Why do people want to grow their number of followers on X? Followers mean connections with people and organisation who could help you build your career, become great friends, and inspire new ideas. A large follower count also makes your account look more prestigious to humans and boosts its visibility—even to those who don’t follow you.
  
• You can buy bot-followers to artificially inflate your follower count, but this is easy to detect, by humans and algorithms, so don’t risk it!
  
• The best thing to do is to grow your followers consciously and deliberately, which is a lot slower than buying bot followers but also a lot safer and more rewarding. Every new follower represents the potential of a new connection with a real person or organisation, as well as broadening your account’s reach.
  
• We will go through some methods that anyone can use to grow followers naturally, and then go through some ways you can use the /Reach platform to enhance this process.
• Speaking of /Reach, part of what affects your /Reach level is your follower count, so more followers also means you’ll get a bigger rewards multiplier via access to Premium missions!

Nuances Of Following Accounts

• One of the most straightforward ways of growing your followers is by following accounts! However, enormous accounts are not likely to just follow anyone back, so you need to be strategic.
• It’s not necessarily a true indicator of the quality or influence of an X account, but it remains the case that people and algorithms don’t take accounts seriously that follow many more than follow them.
  
• You don’t need to follow the biggest accounts (major politicians, celebrities, big mainstream media, etc) on the X account you’re trying to grow! Save your follows for accounts in your niche, that are likely to follow you back.
  
• Follow accounts that have a history of meaningful engagement with other users, that are acting responsibly and avoiding spam and scam activity, and that are part of communities you’re involved in or interested in. These accounts are likely to follow you back, if you’re not acting like a spammer/scammer, have a healthy, human timeline, and are posting about things that are relevant to their interests. Then, you’ll have a strong chance of getting followed back!
  
• Even if you aren’t immediately followed back, keep engaging naturally. Over time, if you’re showing up and contributing meaningfully to discussion, prestigious accounts might follow you back!
• Avoid any unnatural engagement with followed accounts; pick your moments to reply, don’t reply to every post they make! It’s also generally inadvisable to ask for a follow as it looks spammy and can annoy, risking attracting reports.

Find Your Communities

• X’s users are not one community—they are many, and the X algorithms, as well as people actively finding each other, help users group together. Even a few days of using X with a fresh account will cue the algorithm to offer you content from accounts that you might find interesting on the For You tab.
  
• If you’re in web3, you’re already in lots of communities—for NFTs you own, tokens you hold, blockchains you’re interested in. Find influential accounts in these communities and interact with them and with active, responsive; non-spam/bot accounts that interact with them. Engage with and follow these accounts, and you’ll likely find loads of fellow community members to follow, and get followed back in turn.
  
• Oftentimes, once communities you’re involved in find you, you will find that your X account has been added to a group DM full of members. These groups are great places to pick up more followers.
  
• One of the most effective ways to find your communities is by engaging in their discourse off-platform, such as Discord servers and Telegram channels.
  
• Once you’re in these groups, listen and learn for a bit, then get active! Make memes, post project news, ask questions, and engage. You’ll find lots of people following you.
  
• When you get a follower, glance through their account before considering following them back. Make sure they’re not a spammer or scam account!
• If an account following you is especially unsavoury you can remove their follow by blocking them, at which point you can either keep them blocked or remove the block—in either case, they will no longer be following you. This is called “soft blocking”.

Spaces on X

• Spaces is X’s live audio (and, recently, video) feature, where users can get up on stage and join a group of people discussing a topic together.
  
• Besides being really fun, Spaces are a great place to discover accounts to follow and to pick up new followers. Anyone can listen, and the Spaces host can invite and allow people to request invitation to the stage, where they can speak. 
  
• While some Spaces are tightly controlled and moderated, with few others except the already-influential allowed on stage, there’s often a culture of listeners following speakers and listeners alike. You’ll also find great, active accounts to follow among the speakers—including up and coming users who are growing their accounts and likely to follow you back.
  
• As you listen to a space, livetweet it—this is taking good comments from speakers and putting them into posts. You don’t need to do so verbatim. Share the Spaces link in the post and tag the speaker and they will very likely follow you! You can also make a thread of these as the Spaces continues, which makes these posts valuable after the Space, boosting your followers (and impressions).
  
• Many Spaces are quite open to users with small accounts joining the stage. If you’re going to request to join the stage, it is very important to make sure your account doesn’t look spammy or scammy, as malicious users will join a big Space to promote scam links or just be rude.
• If you get the chance to speak (some hosts like a free for all, and some want you to raise your hand) make sure you have something important to say. Pay attention to the Space’s discussion and engage with someone on stage who says something you’re interested in, curious about, disagree with, have a question about, etc. if you sound coherent and thoughtful you can get dozens of excellent followers from speaking in a big, busy Space.

Replying For Follower Growth

• Meaningful, relevant engagement with rising and large accounts, whether in replies or quote-reposts, are great ways to encourage both the original poster and other accounts reading the thread to follow your account. Replies work best as they are more likely to be seen by the original post’s readers—and the original poster likely has more visibility than you would by posting on your own timeline.
  
• Turn notifications on for some of your favourite big accounts in order to get your reply in quickly when they post; if you’re doing a quality reply that actually addresses their post 
  
• You can also engage in conversation with other repliers, but be careful never to engage spam and scam replies or replies that are hidden behind “Show Probable Spam.” Choose high quality, high-engagement replies to interact with.
  
• Questions, connections to other concepts and ideas, respectful disagreement,and clarifications work great, as do relevant images and video. Memes and jokes can work, but be it is very challenging to predict how humour will land!
  
• If you’re engaging among communities you’re established in, like fellow holders of an NFT, memes, particularly original ones that use the community’s imagery and in-jokes, are very effective.
  
• Don’t engage with more than one or two of a given user’s posts at once, and don’t do it every day, as this can feel uncomfortable for the original poster and their regular readers.
• Consistent and good quality replying can be challenging, but is attainable when you focus on the accounts, and areas of focus, that genuinely interest you! Replying, whether for follower growth or boosting general visibility of your account, works best when you’re active over time, so it needs to be something fun and interesting for you, not a chore.

Using /Reach To Boost Followers

• /Reach will soon have following missions, in which members can earn rewards by following an account on X. It’s worth following these accounts, and setting follow missions for your own account are a great way to build your follower count safely and quickly, rather than risking your account being flagged for having lots of bots follow it in an instant.
  
• When you see fellow /Reach members replying to posts—you may recognise them from the Discord server or simply by seeing them appear on various mission posts—follow them, particularly if they are producing quality replies! Don’t follow the members posting low quality replies, as they are the ones who risk being flagged by X as low-quality accounts (and suspended or banned from both X and /Reach).
• Using your X account simply to complete /Reach missions means that it’s hard for X users who see your timeline to see a coherent picture of who you are, and be inspired to follow you. Focusing on completing missions in just a few topics is a little better; but what is best of all is interspersing /Reach mission replies with great non-mission replies to influential accounts about topics that interest you. Then you’ll attract greater visibility from algorithms and inspire X users who encounter your content to follow you!

Discussion Questions

• Identify areas of interest for yourself, within the web3 space, and pick a handful of high profile accounts to follow. Turn notifications on.
  
• Have a look at some of their existing posts and the replies to those posts. Which replies are getting the most engagement? Which are getting the least (excluding obvious spam and scam-posts)?
  
• Now, it’s time for you to start replying. Try all sorts of replies; asking questions or checking for understanding, discussing the post with other replying accounts, connecting concepts to others. Come back to your replies a few days later. What’s worked in terms of impressions and what hasn’t?
  
• Have a look at your bags. Even the lowest-performing assets, NFTs and coins will have communities attached—sometimes very active ones. Start searching on X for these projects’ active supporters, joining telegrams and discords and following fellow active holders. Put notifications on, and reply to project account posts and active community member posts. Are you getting follows back?
• Join up with a group of friends to share insights, giving each other the heads up on fruitful communities to join and effective tactics. A group chat on X, Telegram or Discord is a great tool!