Starting a corporate X account from scratch isn’t easy. X tends to limit the reach of professional accounts, and people are usually hesitant to follow businesses, worried they’ll get hit with sales pitches.
That said, we managed to grow our @CRANQNow account (CRANQ.ai) from about 60 followers in March ’24 to around 1,200 by September.
How did it happen? I’ve got a reply for that.
We Optimised Our Profile…Or Did We?
Back in April of ‘24, this was our X Profile.
The profile picture was great — it featured Sam, who manages the account — but the header image was too generic and didn’t catch anyone’s attention with a clear message. Plus, it didn’t include a call to action (CTA).
So, we revamped the header with a more targeted message related to X.com and added a CTA that focused on the benefits of following our X account, instead of just promoting the CRANQ product.
We believe this approach worked better, though the stats are a bit more nuanced, and it feels as though seasonality has a big influence on this statistic. Here’s a look at our 30-day trailing New Follows/Profile Visits percentage!
New Follows / Profile Visits % @CRANQnow 2024
Replies, Replies, Replies
As a small account, most of your profile visits will come from being seen in other people’s posts, which is why the “Reply Guy” strategy works. Starting in May, we aimed to post around 250 replies in a day. If you’re really dedicated, you can shoot for 120 replies per minute and finish in about two hours, spaced out over the day.
The key to being an effective “Reply Guy” is balancing quality with quantity. From August 11th to September 11th, 2024, we’ve been averaging about 1 follower for every 10 replies we make.
‘Nice post, Franco!’
‘You’ve hit the nail on the head with this one’
Not rocket science. Sometimes I have good ones, but sometimes they’re just a friendly pat on the back to people.
Keep track of the people you engage with, and work on building and maintaining those connections. You’ll gain followers, friends, and learn a lot along the way!
We Automated Using CRANQ
Automation is a huge support in building your brand on X, because X’s API is one of the more powerful ones in social media.
Staying within X’s Automation Rules, we used CRANQ.ai’s powerful automation capabilities to carefully select Ideal Customer Profiles (ICP) that we thought might be interested in our X account, and focus our Engagement and Replies on them.
We used natural language prompts to create a number of different CRANQ workflows, and we were surprised by how powerful they were in shaping our X.com activity.
Posting When Your Audience is Available
CRANQ’s audience is made up of busy professionals who use X for work, so most of our impressions happen on Mondays, Tuesdays, and Wednesdays, with engagement dropping off toward the end of the week and over the weekends.
Weekends are more for “Casual Xers” who are focused on TV shows and memes, but we’re here to do business.
As for our posting style, if you follow us, you’ll notice it’s a bit sporadic. We like to take our time, crafting unique posts that we hope will both entertain and inform our audience.
We Iterated on Content
It’s currently kind of fashionable on X to repost rewritten old posts from the past like motivational statements etc., ‘zombie content’ if you will. It might work in terms of impressions, but we’re not on X for that.
We tried lots of different content this year, from analysis of the #buildinpublic threads, profiles and metrics, to an extensive analysis of JD Vance vs. Tim Walz X activity. We did some more casual fun stuff too.
We’re probably proudest of posts like our analysis of duplication, and content hooks, but there’s no way of knowing what will get the most Engagement. Sometimes something really easy will catch people’s imagination! The below post for example got us 22 Profile Visits.
Videos Just Get Stronger
X is more and more focused on video, and we know that new ways of browsing them are coming soon. Our videos have been great on X, and we usually leave one as our Pinned Tweet.
We have some new videos coming and look forward to publishing them here.
Good luck building your own brand on X. And look out for my Replies!
