Yesterday I got my first 100 followers on Twitter. I know that for a lot of Twitter savvy people, this is a very small number. But for me, it is a HUGE number. One that essentially took 7 years to get to.

Before you stop reading, hear me out.

In 2009, I created my first Twitter account. I saw Twitter as an opportunity to engage and talk to my favorite singer (Shakira). I remember tweeting her a couple of times. To make the story short, she never replied to any of my tweets and I just lost interest on Twitter and anything it had to offer to me.

In 2013 I started my first blog. It was a blog where I shared my experiences with cooking. I created a Twitter for my blog and I even did a giveaway to get people to follow me(mostly family and friends). A handful of friends followed me.

I got 25 followers there.

At that point I gave up on Twitter. I accepted it. I wasn’t a cool tweeter. Is that even a word?

This year I started a YouTube channel. Everywhere I read said to use social media to promote your channel. I went and created another Twitter account this time for the channel.

Once again, I failed at Twitter. I was posting about my vlogs and once in a while I will get a follower but I wasn’t really getting any traffic to my channel (which was the ultimate goal) Then one day, I decided to get serious. I did some research and found this article.

It gave me some basic understanding on how Twitter works. But more importantly I was in the right mindset to be social on Twitter. It all made sense now.

How to be social on Twitter

Reply and like others’ tweets. I rarely did this before and it is so simple! Sometimes people will retweet your reply which mean your tweet will show up on their timeline for their followers to see YOU! New followers opportunity right here.

Follow people in your niche. Following those people that share common interests is very important. You will make connections and friendships.

Contribute to conversations. Reply to tweets with more that one person tagged in it. You will start understanding how powerful Twitter is. You may be talking to someone accross the world that never heard of you. And if you say something interesting they might even click on your name!

Use #hashtags. Every time I use hashtags I get a new follower or at least a like. Look up what are the common hashtags people use for your niche to find and connect with others.

Search for people to follow. Once again, use hashtag to find people within your niche to follow. I use #vlogger to search for new people to follow. Sometimes they follow back, sometimes they don’t. And that is ok. You are following them and you can still connect and interact with them. They might even follow you back after they see you are a real person with real interest in connecting with them.

If you’re promoting a business such as a blog or a YouTube channel, make sure to write your tweet for your link in a friendly manner. Use a short URL generator so you can use the 140 characters wisely. [Since the time this article was written, I learned that it doesn’t matter how long your URL is, a link will take 23 characters. However, you may still want to use a short URL so it looks more presentable.] In my case I always try to put an engaging sentence, then the link to my vlog, followed by a couple of powerful hashtags relevant to the vlog I’m sharing and my niche. Make sure you use all of your 140 character! And lastly I always add a picture (vlog’s thumbnail) to my tweet. Once I started adding a picture to my tweets of my vlog, I started seeing likes and even a retweet from my followers. We all agree that looking a beautiful picture is more interesting that reading words.

Just Tweet. Yes, it is so simple, something I shouldn’t even mention right? Well, for the longest time I only tweeted links to my vlogs. I always felt awkward about tweeting. When you only have 10, 30, or even 50 followers you feel like no one is reading your tweets. No one cares. It wasn’t until I got to 73 followers that I realized. I have 73 freaking followers! That is more than the amount of people I interact with in a regular basis. Even if you have only 1 follower, tweet like you have 1 million. The potential of someone seeing your tweet is greater than the amount of followers you actually have.

I know it feels like you are talking to yourself, but please do talk to yourself and tweet about random thought you have. Maybe not so random. This basic principle it is probably the most important realization I ever had about Twitter. You need to be You and express your thoughts.

And just like that I hit 100 followers on Twitter. My goal is to get to 500 followers by my birthday coming up in 4 weeks! This is a huge goal, one that I’m not sure I will get to. But in the meantime I will be social on Twitter and have a blast making new friends!