Advertising is our last rapid growth tactic.

Lots of influencers on X do not talk about this. Advertising is a “dirty word” and it is considered cheating in some creator circles.

If this is an opinion you share don’t worry - go ahead and build organically. It’s an entirely valid option. It will just take longer.

If you are open to advertising though that’s great.

Because, guess what: we’re building a business. Growing our audience base is an investment - much like we’d invest in building a website or designing a logo.

What advertising does is also allow us to get over the awkward early stage when we have a few hundred followers.

It doesn’t matter how good your content is when you are tiny. No-one will take you seriously. But as soon as you start to hit a few thousand followers everything ramps up.

This is because humans need social proof. We trust larger accounts because they are large. They are large because they are doing right surely? That’s how our brains work unfortunately!

Unlike Promotions with Campaigns you can set up a range of posts and see which one does best. It’s more complicated to set up but once you’ve found a good fit it can keep running. Promoted posts have a more limited lifespan.

You can set up X advertising here https://ads.twitter.com/

Advertising could be its whole guide so we’ll keep this high level for now.

For your first campaign keep it simple:

I suggest testing the Reach and Engagement campaigns to see what works better for you.

Reach will generally be the better option if the content is really good and likely to be engaged with. Whereas Engagement campaigns force engagement more so can be used with lower tier content. Ideally though all your content should be great!

What content should you put in your ad? This depends entirely on what your objective is here. But considering this guide is focused on growth we’ll stick with that for now.

You want to use a piece of content (or variation) that has previously shown success in bringing you new followers. You can get that information from step 2 above where we used ChatGPT to analyse our analytics.

You can also try a more direct route of asking people to follow. One of my most successful campaigns like this was super simple.

I found memes that were related to the niche and posted them as the ad’s main image. I then added a super simple text call to action like “How to use ChatGPT and AI to start and grow your business. No fluff only deep dives and prompts. Follow for actionable advice and guides.”

The combination worked to grab attention (using the meme) and then drive followers via the call to action text.

Targeting is the next page in ad setup:

• For Demographics I suggest you leave it wide for now. Then once you have run one or two campaigns you’ll be able to see whether Male or Females engaged more as well as the best age groups.

• For geographic targeting the same. Leave it blank for worldwide targeting initially and then analyse the data to see which countries lead to the best results.

• For targeting one of the most powerful tools is “Follower Lookalikes”. This basically allows you to target the following of other accounts in your niche and pull their followers over to you. Use this to target Dream 100 accounts.

With ads, like with your content strategy, you’ll need to experiment to find what works best with your audience. I suggest doing lots of small $5 tests to collect results and then when you have found a good fit you can increase budgets.

As always you can hire experts in setting up advertising campaigns from sites like Upwork.com if you want expert guidance.