32 Unorthodox Twitter Tips for Solopreneurs to Win Subscribers, Clients & Friends

Last updated: February 10, 2020

Twitter works differently for solopreneurs as it does for larger businesses. It’s actually easier, but only if you know what you are doing. Check out these Twitter tips I use to grow my audience, get clients and win like-minded friends.

I hit “publish” on my post and proudly pinned it to my Twitter profile. Five minutes later, I got a comment from a cheeky-looking avatar.

A woman I’ve never seen before was publicly correcting my grammar.

Kitty, a Dutch copywriter and a blogging coach, has corrected my grammar many times after that, saving me from public embarrassment.

She alone is responsible for at least 20 subscribers on my list and other good things that happened to me and my website, because she generously shares my posts (and even newsletters).

Kitty also became a good friend, a brainstorming partner and a client (although I tried really hard to persuade her not to pay me).

***

As a solopreneur and a personal brand, this is what you want from social media: Loyal fans, like-minded friends and people to learn from. The rest will follow automatically.

Someone contacted me because he was impressed with my Twitter feed, and I’ve got 3 new clients.

A famous account in my niche shared my post with their 50K audience multiple times, and I’ve got new subscribers.

Things like this happen to me regularly on Twitter. Which might seem coincidental, except it isn’t.

I am on Twitter with a purpose: To learn, to spread the word about my business, and to meet like-minded people.

And although my purpose may not be different from yours, I think I figured out a way to get Twitter to serve my purpose effectively while not spending much time on it.

Here are my Twitter tips for solopreneurs and personal brands. At least half of these tips I’ve never seen mentioned anywhere else online.

32 Unusual Twitter Tips for Solopreneurs to Win Subscribers, Clients and Friends

Before we dive in, I’d like to clear a couple of misconceptions.

• You don’t need a massive following to see any results from your presence on Twitter.
• A person with 100 followers may be able to do more for you and your business than a person with 20000 followers.
• If your main purpose on a social network is to sell, you are wasting your time.

Twitter profile: No dogs or cats, or any other pets

1. Use a good head shot (of yourself!) where you look people in the eye.
2. Write a clear and concise bio telling people what your business is about.
3. Add a link to your website.
4. Make your cover image consistent with your website’s design and message.

Automation: Only if it doesn’t look like automation

5. Use an auto-schedule app. It will save you truckloads of time. I use Buffer, because they have the best price plan, the best features and the best customer service.
6. Automate only things that won’t look automated at the end. For example, tweets during the working days.
7. Don’t send automatic messages when people follow you.
8. Cut the “thank you my top interactors this week @ruth @wandy @mandy” crap. If you want to thank someone, take 2 minutes to write a personal sentence.
9. Don’t auto-tweet on the weekends or holidays. Real people do real stuff on the weekends, not mass-tweet business articles.
10. Take 1 hour at the end of the week to autoschedule the tweets for your own posts through the week and the content of others for Monday. Fill your queue with content of others as you go through the week.

Timings: Figure it out for yourself

11. If you already have a following, check when your followers are active on Twitter with Followerwonk. Don’t tweet when too many people are tweeting already.

12. Don’t tweet during the times when there are Twitter chats happening in your niche. To find out when Twitter chats in your niche take place, google {your niche} + twitter chat (or simply wait till your stream will get flooded with tweets having the same #somechat hashtag).

Your Twitter feed: Get out of the echo chamber

13. Use lists to organize the people you follow to be able to filter things you want to look at at a particular moment. For example, “online business”, “photography”, “favorites”, etc.
14. Be picky about the content you tweet – yours and others.
15. Don’t share just your own content (here’s something you didn’t know!)
16. Rumors have it that your own content should be only 20% of what you share. I do it 50/50, and it works just fine. Experiment and see what works for you.
17. Don’t let anyone tell you how often you should tweet. Find out your own optimal amounts of tweets a day. 14 times a day works just fine for me.
18. When tweeting an article, if possible, mention the author not a blog.
19. To find quality articles to share that are different from what others are sharing, check out (and tweet) the internal links of those popular articles.
20. Don’t always just retweet. Add your own thoughts when retweeting to show your expertise and personality.
21. Don’t be afraid to use emojis if it fits your personality and topic.

Sharing your own posts: Don’t be a bore

22. After you hit “publish” on it, pin your new post to your profile for a week.
23. Tweet the same post with different messages and images not to bore your followers. If you don’t have custom images within your blog post, use any other free images that are related to your topic, screenshots of text paragraphs from your posts or Twitter GIFs.

24. Use hashtags in your tweets to increase discoverability. I use Hashtagify to find the most popular hashtag for a topic.

Making friends: Correct people’s grammar

Note: Be genuine in everything you do. If you are reaching out or retweeting with a purpose to promote yourself or suck up to an influencer, that’s uncool.

25. Don’t use follow/unfollow technique where you automatically follow random people but unfollow them if they don’t follow back. This won’t get you any genuine interaction. Or are you here to collect numbers? In this case, this one is pretty cool: 9,223,372,036,854,775,807.
26. If you noticed a typo in their recent post, tell them. Don’t do it publicly, though. I personally don’t mind a public comment about my spelling mistake, but most people do. If it’s a serious person who cares about the quality of their work, they would be grateful, and you might get into an interesting conversation.
27. Strike a conversation. Leave a reply if you have something to say or have a question. What’s the worst that can happen?
28. Got an email newsletter that you love? Tweet it letting the author know!
29. Be generous with compliments. If you are impressed, don’t be shy to say it, even if it’s a famous person. Because famous people are also people, and they would love to hear that their work made a difference.

30. Don’t take it personally if someone doesn’t reply. There are 1000s of reasons why it happens, and it’s possible none of them is about you.
31. Participate in Twitter chats when you get a chance. You don’t need to know anyone in advance, and anyone can participate without any invitation. See what others are tweeting, like and comment on their answers, contribute yourself if you have anything to say.

Getting better at this: Test, analyze, repeat

32. Test, analyse and repeat what works best. For this, use UTM parameters when sharing a link to your post on Twitter to determine:

Bonus tip

33. If someone (famous) tweets your post saying nice things about it, and it also gets likes and retweets, use it in the post on your website as a testimonial.

Did I miss anything?

What’s Twitterland like for you? Do you have any personal tips that I didn’t mention? Do you think some of the tips won’t work for you? Leave me a comment. I always reply.