Your own Twitter virtual troll army

I need to assemble one of these: How A Twitter Fight Over Bernie Sanders Revealed A Network Of Fake Accounts

She had a virtual army of trolls.  She got some real accounts, and probably made a lot more, and then used Buffer to control them.

Meanwhile, the Bernie side was like the opposite. We’d call people, and they’d want to talk with us.

What’s crazy is that it is possible to build an audience manually, if you can get 2 or 3 people a day.  I saw Caroline O’Connor do it.  I think she took it to 8K followers, and it’s now at 15K.  Not super huge, but ok for the labor niche.  Here’s how I think it was done:

• Have something good to post.  Use photos.  No need to post all the time, just sometimes. This is the hardest part, because most organizations don’t have daily “stuff”, and a lot of their information is kind of boring or so organization-specific that people really aren’t going to look at it and get happy.
• Stay on schedule as much as possible. You need to work on it almost daily.
• Be a voracious reader of the news – and not necessarily a big commenter.
• Seek to get the attention of huge influencers who have huge followings. You want to get retweeted, because that’ll help you grow outside your circle.
• When people follow you, say “thanks for the follow” and include their @name.
• Sometimes, do the same for retweets and likes.
• Learn the hashtags in your niche, and use them. There are also some unique tags that are like a dogwhistle. Know them.
• Respond to replies and comments, if they are polite.
• Participate in retweeting and using hashtags and once-a-week things like #followfriday, if they still do that.

This is pretty much what all the other articles about this say. Maybe they split it across two articles. Anyway, the reason why people don’t grow is usually because they don’t have something good to post, and don’t stay on top of twitter.

Also, you need to be “in the game,” and reading the news daily, and going to events, and really be more “out there” than most people are. The readers are living vicariously through you. If you, like me, are very home bound or stuck at work for whatever reasons, it’s going to be tough to build an audience around new content, and you’ll need to be more of a bridge between people who *are* doing things, and the Twitter readers.

I think the best ages for Twitter are late teens to mid-30s, when, in the US, people are really “on” and doing things.

(I have only 900+ followers, but don’t really pay much attention to Twitter.)