How to Automatically Grow Your Twitter Audience?

5 min readOct 28, 2020

2023 updates:

Phantombuster released a Phantom which allows setting up the whole process easily: Twitter Auto Follow.

Twitter automation limits are now quite low. I recommend focusing on LinkedIn automation instead. If you need inspiration on the topic: here are 12 LinkedIn automation templates.

What will you be able to do:

I this article article I will guide you through a basic Twitter automation strategy, which will boost your Twitter engagement:

On top of that, you will manage this automation from a Google doc dashboard. This dashboard displays the conversion rate of your Twitter campaign in real time:

In order to do that you will need

A Twitter account , obviously…
A phantombuster account.
To make a copy of this google sheet template

Step 1: Create a target audience

The first step is to create a Twitter target audience for the automation. To do that you will need to use Phantombuster. There are three ways to create twitter audience with Phantombuster. You can generate audience by extracting:

Extracting followers or following will require Phantombuster to connect to Twitter on your behalf. You are, therefore, limited in how often you can update the audience. Targeting people based on hashtags doesn’t require Phantombuster to connect to your account, and can be done at a wider scale.

The Google template supports all three approaches, so you can pick the one you prefer.

Set up the Phantom for it and run it at least once. Then you will be able to copy the URL of the result file:

Paste this URL in cell B4 of the “Dashboard” sheet in the template.

Step 2: Follow the audience

Next you need to set up the Twitter auto Follow Phantom.

The Spreadsheet URL should be taken from your template:

Go to the sheet “To follow [input]” of your template and copy the URL. Make sure that your template is accessible to anyone (this is required for Phantombuster automation to retrieve information from it):

You can set up this Phantom for repetitive launches up to 5 times per day for 20 follows (check out the recommendation about the automation scale at the end of this article).

Run this Phantom once to be able to copy the URL of the result file. Paste the URL of the result file in cell B5 of the Google template’s “Dashboard” sheet.

Step 3: Check follow back

Here comes the tricky part. Phantom doesn’t have automation specially designed to check who follows you back, but you can use the Follower Collector on your own account instead.

Pick the Twitter Follower Collector Phantom:

In the “Account to scrape” setting put the url of your own twitter account :

In the “Behavior” setting, check the “Watcher mode” option:

Set the automation to run on a daily basis. This automation will extract a list of all your Twitter followers. The Google spreadsheet will then compare this list to the list of people that you followed to identify the follow back.

Run this phantom once to be able to copy the URL of the result file. Paste the URL of the result file in cell B6 of the “Dashboard” sheet.

Step 4: Send out welcome message (optional)

Once some people follow you back, you can send them automatic welcome messages.

Pick the Twitter Message Sender phantom.

Go to the “To message [input]” sheet of the template, copy the URL, and use it as input for the Twitter Message Sender.

Run this Phantom once to be able to copy the URL of the result file. Paste the URL of the result file in B7 cell of the “Dashboard” sheet.

Step 5: Unfollow those who did not follow back (optional)

Twitter limits how many people you can follow in total. So you might need to unfollow people who did not follow back from time to time.

The template includes a sheet “did not follow back [to unfollow]” to use as input if you want to unfollow people.

Scaling Your Twitter Automation

This Twitter automation is a hack. If you don't want your Twitter account to get a ban, you need to do it at a reasonable scale. But what does it mean? Well, it depends.

If you have a new Twitter account which is less than six months old, you shouldn't follow more than 20 people a day. If your account has less than 100 followers, it is also wise to keep the automation at 20 people per day. However, with a Twitter account which is older than six months and has 100+ followers, you are safe to follow 50 people a day.

It is also advisable to leave some time between the follow and unfollow actions. I would recommend you to set up the Phantom for unfollow (step 5) at least a week after the one for follow (step 2). This will make Phantombuster wait a week before unfollowing people who haven't followed you back.

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