Attract, engage and grow your community via Twitter growth hacking? It’s easier than you think.

A few months ago, I opened a twitter account for my startup. I planned a great content strategy, put together a list of influencers and starting scheduling my posts on Hootsuite. Slowly, but surely, the number of followers started to grow.

However, I didn’t want slowly. I’m not sure any founder in today’s digital world hopes for their social media marketing to grow slowly, but surely. We want instant gratification: viral content to sprout magical communities and result in immediate sales. Ok, let’s face it, that’s not very likely.

But, you can rapidly speed up your twitter growth with these growth hacking tools. Hacking twitter isn’t about being a spammer. It’s about being smart and ensuring you optimize content, timing and audience.

Forget about growing slowly, but surely. The new paradigm is to grow fast, but controlled.

3 Tips for Twitter Growth Hacking

1 Increase and automate more relevant content

We do this by using IFTTT to connect Feedly and Buffer. First things first, what are all of these applications?

Feedly is a news aggregator platform for various publications. You can follow the media that is most relevant to your audience and then stay on top of the latest news.

Buffer is a social media management platform allowing a user to schedule social media posts. You can indicate the times you want Buffer to tweet on your behalf.

IFTTT is a web-based service that creates chains of simple conditional statements, called applets. IFTTT acts in a similar way to how Zapier connects many different software and applications.

So, now that we have the definitions down. What’s the end goal?

Well, by providing IFTTT some rules to go by, the service can push certain content from Feedly to Buffer on our behalf. We already provided Buffer the rules of what times of day to publish, so Buffer merely stores these articles and tweets them throughout the day.

There are several different applets available on IFTTT at the moment. The easiest one to implement is “send new items appearing in a Feedly category to buffer”. This requires no ongoing effort on your part, as you have already indicated the relevant and trusted publications to draw this content from.

Boom! You now ensured that there is relevant, interesting content being pushed throughout the day to your twitter audience.

2 Automated following

Don’t be a spammer. I repeat. Don’t be a spammer. Do be an entrepreneur trying to enable brands and influencers to take notice of you. There’s a big difference.

Using Twitter Follower Pro you can easily mass follow other twitter accounts. We all know that the era of guaranteed follow-backs is long gone, but many accounts who you initiate a follow with, will still often follow you back.

Remember to be conscientious when using this method, don’t be constantly following and unfollowing the same people. Also piggy-backing off another account’s followers enters a grey area and really deserves it’s own discussion in ethical growth hacking. Ultimately, you know what is best for your business and you know you don’t want to be perceived negatively. So, use this tool thoughtfully.

You need to attract more followers, and this is an effective method to achieve that. But, remember our goal is to grow fast, but controlled. Play with the tools settings and set it up for intelligent automation. You want quality followers in your community, not just a group of random people.

3 Bulk direct messages

Sending DMs are a great tool to really create the connection between you and your growing community. Try and make your first message a non-promotional one. There’s few things more annoying than receiving a clearly automated message with a link to buy an unknown product. I don’t know about you, but I certainly don’t go opening links from untrusted brands.

Crowdfire is the most well-known tool that includes bulk messaging. Chances are if you are on twitter, you have received at least one “welcome” message followed by a “via @crowdfire” note.

When it comes to sending bulk direct messages as a means to grow your twitter base, use it as an engagement tool more than a sales tool. Use the message to offer help or show you are open to outreach. This way, a new follower will see the value in continuing to follow your account. You provide not only relevant content, but are responsive and open to engaging with your community.

Only pursue bulk messaging if it’s a way to really add value to your following. If you send messages asking for engagement, you risk angering your community if you do not respond in a timely manner. Sometimes automating your twitter as a “one-man band” can backfire, because you aren’t able to control what you have created. Don’t grow so fast that you can’t keep up with it. You risk damaging your brand.

Slowly, but surely is a thing of the past. Using these incredibly simple ways to hack your twitter growth, you can tweet much more content and rapidly grow and engage your community.

Just remember to keep the automation in check and actually log in yourself from time to time to answer messages and ensure everything is working smoothly.