January 9, 2022 by Dejan Gajsek in Marketing

Crushing it on Twitter: How Amanda Natividad Went From 16.8k to 59k followers in 4 months

Crushing Twitter: How Amanda Natividad went from 16184 followers to 59,100 in less than 4 months

How to Get thousands of Twitter Followers

I’ve heard it enough times from credible people that Twitter is a great way to build network, learn awesome shit, and also get customers.

So being a noisy prick as I am, I wanted to see how to get the most followers as possible. The best way to do that — well let’s see who gained the most followers in a short amount of time.

I’m not sure what podcasts I’ve listened to but someone mentioned the name Amanda Natividad. I know her name from Nat Eliason’s Growth Machine SEO agency and I know she made a switch to SparkToro was founded by Rand Fishkin (one of the main guys at MOZ and author of a good book “Lost and Founder”. This will all make more sense soon.

Amanda went from 925 followers in May 2020  to over 59.1k followers at the time of writing (Jan 9, 2022). That’s 57,000 followers in 600 days (or 1 year, 7 months and 25 days).

That’s 1000x growth and by the looks of it, they are not bought accounts but legitimate follower count number.

I wonder how the hell she did it because I want to try something similar. Using tools and reverse-engineering I believe I have the answer.


Before

Amanda’s Twitter Profile on 15th of May 2020

 

Amanda’s Twitter Profile on Sept 8, 2021

 

Amanda’s Twitter Profile on Sunday, January 9, 2022.

 

Faked, Bought or Gamed the System?

If someone gets amazing results my first question would be – is this real or just fantasy. Is Amanda hacking the system and buying fake followers? Knowing her work that would be unlikely, however I did check on Follower Audit to confirm.

It’s saying that only ~5% are fake followers. That’s normal.

 

And even more beautiful – 92% of Twitter followers are active! Everything looks legit.

 

Mentions and TwitStorms

This is the biggest insight. Looking at Social Blade analytical results, Amanda started to get THE MOTHERLOAD of all her followers in the last 2 months

 

Few other patterns:

  • Amanda used default web twitter platform app the most, mobile app second, and Twitter web app Typefully. There were speculations that posting on Twitter platform directly will get you more impressions – looks like she did that.
  • No fucks given about hashtags (thank goodness – hashtags can eat my shorts)
    Twitter followers gained per day

 

I’m cheap so I didn’t want to pay for historical analytics, but there are few days when Amanda got 2 or even 3k followers in a day.

Hmmm what happened there?

Secondly, her last 30 day period got her 14k followers. That’s about 25% of all the followers she has right now.

The next step would be to check what she posted on days when she got 100x more followers per day than usual. So I checked another sweet tool → Vicintas. 

 

Vicintas will let you download the last 3,200 tweets from any Twitter account. According to Social Blade, Amanda has 16k tweets but she made a big growth spike in the last 6 months so I will be able to see the top performers.

Here’s why:

Check that naughty red line.. Totally stagnant for years than a small wave in January 21 and a year later it’s a fooking’ vertical line upwards.

Naturally that coexists with “likes” – it’s only logical.

 

Another “coincidence” – by looking at the graph the little movements started in July 2021. Guess what happened in July – Amanda became a VP of Marketing at SparkToro – the tool that gives you audience research, finds the right influencers, and helps you craft the right message for that segment of users.

And would you look at that:

marketing at sparktoro

 

I’ve downloaded all the tweets, put them in Google Sheets and checked the winners.

The top 9 tweets have more than 1000 likes; top two have more than 1000 retweets — can you imagine what that does for your impressions and new followers?

Well, yes you can – it means insane growth and new followers. About 40 thousands followers in Amanda’s case. Daaaaaaaaaaaaang. ?

Ok last step. Analyze the top two tweets and check for patterns.

 

Top three Tweets

Top Tweet #1

https://twitter.com/amandanat/status/1475864875284852737

Type: Long ass Tweetstorm (10 parts with CTA in the end)

Subject: Job Promotion advice

Tone: helpful advice through narrative

 

Tweestorm calls out Rand Fiskin (@randfish) and Casey Henry (@caseyHen)

CTA in the end (sub to twitter about personal brand)

 

 

Top Tweet #2 

https://twitter.com/amandanat/status/1466436477135437824

 

I really like this one. 

 

Type: Even longer freaking Tweetstorm (20+)

Subject: Calling out Marketing Experts on Twitter, Tagging them in each tweet and adding example of one of their best tweets.

Tone: Helpful but also giving credit to other twitter users

 

Alright this one is even more spicy, since that’s a calculated, researched tweetstorm that took some time to create and publish.

 

I have a hunch this was done with SparkToro. Amanda chose top 20 influencers and found the best performing tweets and made a nice little summary of people to follow on Twitter. It blew up. Most of them retweeted (I wasn’t checking but if someone is saying nice things about you, you’ll probably retweet or follow that source).

 

I’m assuming she mentioned those people not (only) because she knew their work, but because their SparkScore was flagging them as VIPs.

Intel + Value + execution = results

Genius!

 

Top Tweet #3

https://twitter.com/amandanat/status/1467884540744003590

Type: well gosh darn it, it’s tweetstorm again (only 8 tweets this time)

Subject: Good books with an argument why that book is great. Call outs to authors who are on Twitter

Tone: Helpful (shocker!)

Do you know what #4 – #12 top Amanda’s tweets are?

Yes, you guessed it – value- driven tweetstorms with callouts

 

Really Cool Takeaways and Insights

Not only the intro tweet in the tweetstorm gets the attention but every tweet in the tweetstorm chain gets an individual dedicated love in the form of retweets and shares. It’s a nuclear bomb for engagement.

It’s like a beautiful long-form content piece in SEO that not only ranks for the main keyword but for a few secondary keywords and a dozen of long-tail keywords.

 

TL;DR:

  • Do really valuable tweetstorms
  • Call out other influencer’s accounts
  • Ask to follow for more juicy content
  • Subscribe to SparkToro for data on who to target
  • zero fucks for hashtags

If you think this is just anecdotal data, check the biggest influencers on Twitter in your field and follow the steps above. I’ve done similar with two other badass women who are exploding on Twitter right now – Steph Smith (from The Hustle / Trends) and Codie Sanchez (from Contrarian Thinking).

The pattern is the same. By the way, let me know if I can help – I’d love to work with y’all.

Over the next months, I’ll see if I can gain followers using this exact blueprint and if that’s true then we have the playbook for growing Twitter audience for 2022.

P.S.: My team does marketing research, competitive intelligence and sales enablement for B2b Tech companies which lets you close bigger accounts in less time and more clarity. Let’s touch base on Twitter if that’s something that sounds interesting to you.

 

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