How we’re growth hacking Twitter

An easy-to-follow guide for how we are growth hacking Twitter and acquiring new users by monitoring the right keywords and sending direct messages.

Are you looking to grow your customer base from Twitter? If you don’t have a large audience or a ton of content to share, this can be an arduous process. However, if you’re targeted in your approach, you can connect directly with prospective customers via direct message.

We start by monitoring keywords that would likely show strong intent to use our product. We then send a reply in the conversation, talking about the problem our product solves, along with a short demo video. We’ve added several new paid users over the past few weeks with this method.

Here’s a step-by-step guide for how we are growth hacking Twitter, including all the tools we use to make it happen efficiently.

Scrape conversations that mention your keywords

We first start by discovering and scraping all the conversations that mention our targetted keywords - in our case, its timeblocking, productivity apps, and time management.

We do this using the Phantombuster* Twitter search export tool. This allows you to run regular searches for your keywords. Select “Watcher Mode” on the behavior tab to ensure you are continuously finding new posts with your keywords.

We have this set to run four times per hour, which finds anywhere from 1 to 15 new posts each run.

Then, using the Webhooks trigger in Zapier, we retrieve all the results from Phantombuster* and then create a new record in Airtable* for each one (copy our Zap here). 

Doing the outreach

We use Airtable* as our dashboard for staying organized on our outreach. Here we can see the text of all the posts we’ve scraped, along with a link. We get quite a few irrelevant posts, but our system allows us to quickly hide them and move on to the next ones. We have a checkbox field called “Processed” and once clicked that record is hidden from the view.

When we do find a relevant tweet, we click the link and jump into the conversation. I generally like the tweet, and then copy the link to it. I’ll then click on the user’s profile and give them a follow. If their DMs are open (generally they are) I’ll send them a message with a brief intro to Taskable, along with a link to a demo. Depending on the conversation I might post a similar message as a reply, but I try to avoid hijacking a conversation when it’s not relevant to share.

I use Demo Genie for a better demo flow that includes a Call to Action to sign up to Taskable at the end, helping improve our conversions on the demo.

And to make sending the DM over and over again super easy, I use Snippets from Raycast that let me just type in a quick shortcut and populate my message for me.

And that’s basically it. We are seeing lots of conversions from this outreach, as well as getting involved in relevant conversations and growing our social audience at the same time.

* Affiliate link