How to Track and Gain Followers on X (Twitter)
X, formerly Twitter, has over 600 million monthly active users making it the 12th most popular social network globally. Over the last few years, X has experienced numerous changes, however, it’s still a leading platform for real-time updates, provoking conversations, and building authentic communities.
With the right tools and strategies in place, brands and businesses can leverage X to gain quality followers and drive brand awareness. This article explores tracking X followers and best practices to organically grow your channel with a consistent, valuable content strategy.
Tools to Track X (Twitter) Followers
Measuring follower balance, including acquired and lost followers, reveals key data about community growth. This helps brands increase visibility and understand the profiles that follow them, including verified users.
Below are crucial tools (free and paid) to track X followers and manage accounts in the same space:
Metricool
Metricool is a centralized social media management platform powered by content scheduling, analytics, and management tools. Compatible with all major social media networks, Metricool allows brands to centralize social media assets and strategy analysis. Furthermore, in the Analytics section, users can precisely track their community growth, content performance, and competitors.
Metricool’s X analytics display a Balance of Followers chart, to track acquired and lost followers against posting days in the period. Users can also read a list of acquired and lost X followers in the period.
Source: Metricool
While tracking followers, Metricool users can also track industry competitors to benchmark results and compare strategies. This can unlock industry patterns and new ideas unique to your brand.
X native analytics
X users can leverage native insights to measure community growth and content engagement. However, the network only offers a unified dashboard to X Premium users. Nevertheless, users can access their account followers to track growth.
When analyzing your X followers list, filter by Verified followers, Followers, and Following to understand the scope of followers. Although basic and limited, any X user can access follower data.
Social Blade
Social Blade is a free analytics service that generates user statistics for public YouTube, Twitch, Instagram, and X users. This allows brands to track their follower growth compared to industry competitors.
After searching for a username, Social Blade populates data by total followers, follower rank, tweets rank, weekly following balance, and real-time followers. Again, this data is only available for public accounts. Yet, this is a great tool for monitoring competitors and tracking their community growth and tweet ranking over time.
Source: Social Blade
Best Practices to Get Followers on X
Organically growing a community doesn’t happen overnight. However, by implementing key strategies and staying consistent, brands can generate new followers and increase brand awareness.
Understand your audience’s interests
Knowing who and how you target drives a content plan, putting clients’ needs and interests first. To attract followers, you need to know what they care about. Research your target audience’s preferences, pain points, and trending topics within your niche. You can use X’s native analytics tools to identify the types of posts that resonate most with your current audience and tailor your content to their interests.
Alternatively, analyze your X analytics with Metricool to measure which posts best resonate with your audience. You can view your top X posts by metric to isolate posts by KPIs and relevant metrics for your brand.
Choose a weekly posting frequency
Consistency is key to maintaining visibility on X. Determine how often you can realistically post without sacrificing quality. A regular posting schedule, such as 3-5 times per week, helps keep your audience engaged and ensures your content appears in their feeds frequently enough to build recognition and trust.
Leverage trends and newsjacking
Capitalize on trending topics and hashtags relevant to your niche. Newsjacking—incorporating breaking news or popular stories into your content—can significantly increase your reach and attract new followers. However, ensure your input is valuable and aligns with your brand identity to avoid appearing opportunistic.
Share high-quality content
Quality always trumps quantity. Focus on creating informative, entertaining, or inspiring content that adds value to your followers. Use attention-grabbing visuals, clear and concise messaging, and thoughtful hashtags to increase the likelihood of your posts being shared and discovered.
This is where social media analytics come in handy, providing the data to optimize your content.
Stay engaged with followers
Engagement is a two-way street. Respond to comments, answer questions, and acknowledge shares or mentions. This not only strengthens relationships with your audience but also increases your visibility as X’s algorithm tends to favor accounts with high interaction rates.
Metricool’s single inbox feature allows brands to unify all social media messages in one place. Also, work together with your team to answer questions, tag team comments, and note unanswered responses to avoid confusion.
Analyze and optimize content
Regularly review the performance of your posts using X’s analytics. Identify what’s working and what isn’t, and adjust your strategy accordingly. Experiment with different types of content, posting times, and engagement techniques to continually refine your approach and maximize growth.
To track results monthly, leverage Metricool’s monthly social media reporting feature to automate social media data.
By implementing these best practices, you can steadily build an engaged and authentic following on X. Stay consistent, listen to your audience, and continuously improve your strategy to see lasting results.
Centralizing social media management can assist in effectively executing your marketing strategies. Metricool offers a completely free plan to start social media management, no matter your expertise.
