Growing a Twitter following is tedious and boring. You follow a bunch of people, hope they follow back, then you unfollow all the people who didn’t follow you back so you can open up slots to follow more people. It’s called grinding, or gaming. Or the great follow-unfollow process. It’s the only way to grow your account. Traditional growth is from 1 – 3 new followers a week, and that’s if you’re really posting great stuff all the time.

Well, now I’m going to share with you another strategy, that makes it more fun, and will increase your reach no matter what your interest in Twitter is. Here’s the trick: MULTIPLE TWITTER ACCOUNTS.

I know that doesn’t sound like a trick. And if you’re overwhelmed by “working” one Twitter account, why would you want to do more than one? Let me share my metrics with you.

When I tweet from my main account I have about 22,000 followers. And this “stream” I have honed to be 90% business as social media marketing. (2% politics, but only because I’m reckless) This is my @jmacofearth account on Twitter. (please follow)

But I have several other Twitter accounts (a lot more than I will share with you here, but most of them or dormant, for now).

I have two accounts for my Divorce blogs.

@theoffparent – 12.7k followers

@wholeparent – 5.7k followers

I have one political account

@99stickers – 99 Voices – 600 followers

and one fitness account

@fitbytech – Fit By Tech – 600 followers

The first three accounts I WORK and I WORK HARD. The second two, well, they are something. But I don’t work to grow them, they just are. And they give me a nice place to send my political tweets when I don’t want to clutter up my main account. And that’s the trick.

Each Twitter account should have a single point of focus. Build Twitter accounts around ideas and stick to it. Then as you get followers, you know they are interested in the topic. You will see results when you build LIVE Twitter followings. Active Twitter followers ReTweet your best stuff. How many RTs are you getting on a daily basis? That’s a pretty good indication of how well you are tweeting.

Please follow all the above accounts, my future tweets will appreciate it.

Oh, now the master stroke: the unified topic of tweets.

Apple Watch

BMW Lifestyle

Coffee

When I tweet on any of the above topics I can broadcast to all of my Twitter accounts without fear of damaging my brand. That doubles my reach. And that, my friend, is a master stroke.

Make sure you use Tweetdeck (see Twitter for the Win on the Active Media Academy) to manage multiple accounts. You’ll wonder how you did it with Twitter.com alone.

John McElhenney

@jmacofearth (also seen on Google+: jmacofearth)