Building a corporate X account from scratch is hard:  X seems to limit virality for professional users, and people are less inclined to Follow a business that might target them with sales messages.  Nevertheless, we took our @CRANQNow account from around 60 Followers in March ‘24 to over 1200 in September '24, maybe you can learn from our experience.

Here’s some ways that we built this account up.

We Optimised our Profile

Back in April, this was our Profile.  

It had a nice profile picture of Sam, who works on the account, but the header graphic was too generic and didn’t grab anyone’s attention with a compelling Proposition.  The image also lacked a CTA.

We redid the profile graphic, and came up with a more specific proposition related to x.com.  Then we added a CTA focused on the benefits to be had from Following our Twitter account, rather than the CRANQ product.

We think it worked better but the stats are more complicated.  Here's a 30 day trailing New Follows / Profile Visits %!  

New Follows / Profile Visit on X

We Replied.  A lot.

As a small account, your main source of Profile Visits is being seen on other people’s posts, hence the ‘Reply Guy’ phenomenon. From May onwards, we aimed for about 250 replies within a day. If you’re really keen, hit 120 replies/min & finish in 2 hours spread across the day. Balancing quality vs. quantity is the essence of reply guy work, and August 11th - Sep 11th 2024, we've been getting around 1 Follower for every 10 Replies we've made.  

Keep tabs on the people you interact with, build & nurture the connections.  You'll get Followers and friends, and you'll also learn a ton!

We Automated

Automation is a huge support in building your brand on X.  Staying within X’s Automation Rules, we used CRANQ.ai’s powerful automation capabilities to carefully select Ideal Customer Profiles that we thought might be interested in our X account, and focus our Engagement and Replies on them.

We used natural language prompts to create a number of different CRANQ workflows, and we were surprised by how powerful they were in shaping our X.com activity.

We Scheduled Our Posts

CRANQ's audience is professional, and high-powered, these are busy people who use X for work.  As a result, our X impressions tend to come on Mondays, Tuesdays and Wednesdays, with engagement trailing off over the rest of the week and weekends.

The weekend shift is for ‘Casual Xers’ to talk about TV and share memes, but we’re here to do business.

As for our posting, if you follow us you'll know it’s sporadic but we like to take time on it, crafting our own unique posts that might entertain & enlighten our audience.

We Experimented with Content

We never remix old posts to clog up your feed (See 'Duplicate Content' post).  It might work in terms of impressions, but we're not here for that.  

We tried lots of different content this year, from analysis of #buildinpublic profiles and metrics, to an extensive analysis of JD Vance vs. Tim Walz X activity.  We did some more casual fun stuff too.  

We're probably proudest of  posts like our analysis of duplication, and content hooks, but there's no way of knowing what will get the most Engagement.  Sometimes something really easy will catch people's imagination!  The below post for example got us 22 Profile Visits.

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Videos are Powerful

X is more and more focused on video, and we know that new ways of browsing them are coming soon.  Our videos have been great on X, and we usually leave one as our Pinned Tweet.  

We have some new videos coming and look forward to publishing them here.

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