The Social Media Marketing to Developers Guide (B2D)

Developer-centric businesses do marketing differently — partly because developers respond to marketing…differently. They’re tech-savvy, often skeptical, and prone to using ad blockers to stop ads and keep popups off their screens. Better luck next time, brands!

Why bother if they’re so anti-brand (or some think)?

Developers are vital decision-makers in infrastructure, software, and technology purchasing decisions (depending on experience level and career stage). Developers choose a product knowing their reputation is on the line.

Our Social Media Marketing Survey for Developers shows that the key to gaining developers’ trust is simply asking them what resonates. The survey also reveals where to find them across the social media universe.

For this guide, we surveyed 35 developers from North America, South America, Asia, Europe, and Africa on their social media marketing perspectives and what brands can do differently.

What we learned can help you too.

Successful marketing strikes a balance between Developer Marketing and Developer Relations, or DevRel. How? Our comprehensive guide will discuss findings from our survey and offer practical social media marketing practices for B2D businesses.

Business-to-Developer (B2D) Explained

B2D, or Business-to-Developer, refers to businesses that offer their products and services to developers.

Here’s the thing — in traditional framing, those businesses are typically either B2B — where developers are the users and decision-makers — or B2C, where developers are the customers.

For simplicity’s sake, we’re going to call these B2D businesses.

B2D companies don’t sell their brand as the end goal. Instead, their products are tools to be leveraged as part of a new product.

The B2D model works this way:

Business -> Developer -> Consumer/Business

Some examples of B2D companies are Amazon Web Services (AWS), Zapier, GitHub, Expo, and other SaaS companies.

Guide to Social Media Marketing to Developers

1. Focus On Unique Developer Needs
2. Leverage Developer Communities
3. Using Influencers
4. Avoid Spammy Tactics
5. Leverage Discussion on New Technology
6. Offer Quality Social Media Content
7. Take a Multichannel Approach
8. Use All Available Social Media Features

This guide will help you understand:

1. How Business-to-Developer (B2D) Marketing Works – The Framework
2. Social Media Strategy for Your Developer-focused  Business
3. Developer Marketing Strategies — Social Media
4. How to Create a Personal Brand Online as a Developer — The Right Way
5. How do You Create the Perfect Marketing Strategy for Developers
6. How Should you Optimize Your Social Media Presence on the Major Platforms
7. How can I Create Effective Social Media Content

How Business-to-Developer (B2D) Marketing Works – The Framework

A successful B2D program combines Developer Marketing campaigns and Developer Relations (DevRel).

These can completely transform your social media marketing when done right. We find this example of how to market to developers on Twitter very useful.

Developer Marketing campaigns aim to provide developers with an in-depth understanding and awareness of your product. DevRel, on the other hand, is practically the CRM of B2D businesses. It involves everything your company does to build and strengthen relationships with developers and developers’ communities.

Our comprehensive guide was created to help you effectively combine these two concepts in your social media marketing to quickly grow your user base. It also provides real examples of how to market your startup to developers.

Social Media Strategy for Your Developer-focused  Business.

Developers are humans, too, so the usual platforms used in online marketing are still important.

Social media offers plenty of opportunities. According to our Social Media Marketing Survey for Developers, 28.6% of developers access social media 1-2 hours each day; up to 20% use it more often (5-7 hours).

Developers use Twitter, StackOverflow, Slack, Discord, and Reddit to learn about new solutions.

Here’s a breakdown of preferred social media platforms according to our survey:

• Stack Overflow (65.7%)
• LinkedIn (51.4%)
• Twitter (45.7%)
• YouTube (42.9%)
• Discord (28.6%)
• Instagram (20%)
• Reddit (14.3%)
• Facebook (11.4%)
• TikTok  (2.9%)

As a B2D brand, there are various ways to market your product on social media. We’ve put together 9 best practices and marketing tips for developer-focused businesses to help fast-track your social media marketing.

1. Focus On Unique Developer Needs

Developers typically use more than one tool. They use products based on how they fit pending or current needs. So your social media framework should focus on how your product can meet those specific needs.

When asked what B2D brands on social media should do differently, one of our respondents said: “Make things personal to your brand rather than [creating] generic posts. It’s the same with getting to know someone at a party—you don’t care about the weather usually, and it’s more interesting to hear about their own traits or hobbies.”

To be perceived as an authority, your content and community activities should amplify your product’s purpose and demonstrate how it addresses developers’ pain points.

For example, Amazon Web Services (AWS) shares various hacks with developers that let them use the service to enhance efficiency and output.

#AWS X2idn and X2iedn instances, powered by 3rd generation @intel Xeon Scalable processors with an all-core turbo frequency up to 3.5 GHz, deliver up to 50% higher compute price performance—ideal for memory-intensive workloads. ☁️🚀✨ https://t.co/dQwcvurxuD #CloudComputing pic.twitter.com/JKIk3r0cdi

— Amazon Web Services (@awscloud) March 10, 2022

2. Leverage Developer Communities

Understanding how the developer community operates is key to earning their trust.

Use developer communities to create, cultivate, and bolster relationships with devs (developers). We mentioned earlier that an effective social media marketing strategy for B2D companies combines Developer Marketing campaigns and Developer Relations (DevRel).

Rather than focusing on sales and marketing tactics (which most developers will tune out), get involved in discussions, answer questions, and connect with developers.

For example, depending on your product, you might seek out online communities for devs focused on a specific programming language, like Javascript, Python, C#, research the problems they face, and connect by offering possible solutions.

Crypto communities, for example, are currently seeing significant growth — developers are looking for the latest in the cryptocurrency world.

Consider communities focused on: Web3 (using Javascript to work with blockchain), DAO (decentralized autonomous organization), Defi (decentralized finance), and NFTs (non-fungible tokens).

Example: Flamingo DAO is an NFT-focused DAO that explores and buys rare NFTs.

3. Using Influencers and Dev Content Creators

According to eMarketer, 67.9% of marketers at companies with 100+ employees leveraged paid or unpaid influencer marketing in 2020. A trend that has continued annually.

Developers follow content creators who are experts in their space and share stories, tips, and jokes. Whether through paid or unpaid partnerships, you should leverage influencer marketing and user-generated content in your social media marketing as much as feasible.

Here are examples of tools you can use in your marketing strategy to find creators in your category:

• Sparktoro – This tool helps you analyze connections between an audience and its followers and surface accounts of influence.
• Onalytica – The enterprise SaaS option for B2B influencer marketing with powerful features and a premium cost. Once you upload a piece of content, their platform can help you find the top influencers around that topic.

Looking for Dev content creators you can learn from? Crowd.dev put together a list of 200+ creators across web development, machine learning, DevOps, and even specific programming languages. Access it free, here.

4. Avoid Spammy Tactics

When you’ve developed a product to improve your audience’s workflow, it’s only natural that you’ll want to talk about how great you think it is.

But if your tool isn’t communicated in a way that speaks to developers, they’ll be more likely to see your enthusiasm as social media spam.

According to one software developer in our study, it would be wise for brands to consider reducing “10-things every developer should know” threads and post useful things like interview[s], coding tips, etc.

So be sure to ask yourself these questions before hitting the post button:

• Is the marketing about them or us? Make your campaign more about developers’ pain points, especially those your product solves.
• Did they ask for the tool or feature? It can be unpleasant when the first conversation you have with a developer is focused on trying to sell your products. Particularly with developers, it’s essential to first build a rapport. Avoid gating content or access to your product right away — it’s a huge turnoff.
• Do I engage in conversations? We can’t stress how important it is to engage in conversations with developers in developer communities and beyond — including through your social media posts. Your posts need to come from humans. If a bot is handling your socials, they’ll know. Like, retweet, and reply to comments from developers.
  5. Understand Developers’ Desires

Generally, developers want the same things other consumers do — to solve the problems in front of them and make their workflow easier.

They want to focus on doing what they do better, faster, and in a more streamlined way.

Understanding your audience and their desires will make your message functional and attention-grabbing.

Developers generally fall into four categories:

• Engineers (e.g., Full Stack Developers, Web Developers, and Software Engineers)
• Architects (e.g., Software Architects, Database Admins, and Web Architects)
• Data Scientists (e.g., Data Engineers, Data Scientists, and Data Analysts)
• DevOps (e.g., DevOps Engineers, SysOps Administrators, Systems Engineers, and Network Engineers, among others).

Developers are not a monolithic audience. They have different interests, roles, and software tools and use different languages and hardware. All of them have desires that are specific to their roles.

Let them know how your product improves efficiency and solves specific challenges. This will help the right people find your offering.

5. Leverage Discussion on New Technology

In technology, there’s always a new kid on the block.

It’s not enough to “be aware.” You also need to jump on discussions about new developments (which often happen on a daily basis). Leveraging discussions about new tech helps you better infuse it into your social media strategy.

Developers are usually looking to understand new tech better and discover how it can help them, which means they will always be interested in posts and content.

FreeCodeCamp, as one example, is a  platform that offers its services to developers, and marketers can learn from their strategies. As one angle, the developer-centric platform has a YouTube channel solely for tech talks, with more than 37k followers, and it’s a favorite for many developers.

If you're building a website, you might want to divide a page into different sections.

And you can build a handy (& responsive!) section divider with some CSS & some optimized code.

That's what @ChallengesCss shows you how to do in this hands-on guide.https://t.co/IeyNzwKlT9

— freeCodeCamp.org (@freeCodeCamp) March 14, 2022

6. Offer Quality Social Media Content

There are two core content types to use in your social media marketing strategy.

• Relatable content about challenges that developers face. (In particular, always ensure you make your documentation a great experience.)
• Content has to be relevant to the audience, and it doesn’t always have to apply to your product. Speak to the pains and challenges developers face in a way that lets them know you understand what they’re experiencing.
• Offer content that is useful to developers, entertaining, or a combination of both.

IBM, for example, shares insightful content to help its developer audience understand trends and offers discussions across various industries.

How are we thinking about the future of #AI? With trust and transparency. 💡 Discover the 5 primary ethical concerns around AI.

— IBM (@IBM) February 10, 2022

One respondent from our survey suggests that brands provide content that helps developers learn how to be better developers. They also recommend showcasing products and partnering with other brands that complement them. In addition, they recommend supporting non-profit organizations that developers rely on.

7. Take a Multichannel Approach

Omnichannel is a must in the B2D environment.

While some channels are ideal for raising awareness, some are better for customer acquisition. Others are ideal for fostering community and driving deep interaction. So it’s crucial to be in as many places as possible — but not at the expense of quality.

Don’t create a “one size fits all” message for all platforms. There are, in fact, unique B2D social media tactics that work effectively for each social media platform (which will be touched on later in this guide). Naturally, a single channel won’t address all developer challenges. The developer journey takes place in different channels and in several different ways.

8. Use All Available Social Media Features

When you’ve decided on the social media platforms you want to use, it’s essential to make sure you leverage all of their unique features and use them as long as they’re available.

For example, Twitter is a great platform to write high-quality content using threads, but you can also host Spaces. (Thankfully, unlike in the past, you no longer need a certain number of followers to host a Space.)

Hosting regular Spaces with developer audiences to discuss relatable issues with new technology and sharing helpful information can help boost your developer relationships.

It can also position you as an expert and influencer.

And if you’re using Instagram, you don’t just have to post on your feed. You can create video content with Reels and organize polls with Stories.

LinkedIn also allows you to create polls to engage your audience and share documents as organic carousel posts.

The bottom line is: Whichever platforms you choose to use to connect with your developer audience, make sure you leverage all the platforms’ features to your advantage.

Social Media Strategies that Work for Developers 

Using a Community-Driven Approach

Developers are not big on traditional marketing. They will spot traditional marketing tactics immediately and move on.

That’s why developer communities are essential in B2D marketing.

Channels such as Stack Overflow are, at their core, communities where devs go to learn, educate, and share and discuss ideas, challenges, and solutions.

Usually, companies that come up short in their B2D marketing strategies try to push their products on developers rather than collaborating with the community to improve product development.

In our research, we found 65.7% of developers use social media to research or discover new solutions. And 62.9% of developers use social media to learn new skills and improve their existing ones.

To achieve success, it’s a best practice to embrace a peer-to-peer approach that focuses on offering genuine value to the community, regardless of whether they adopt your product. You can build genuine and long-lasting partnerships from these relationships and advocates for your product, even if specific developers don’t see a need for it in their own use case.

Create, Attend, and Sponsor Events

Many developers participate in online conferences and local meetup groups.

Attending these events is the most inexpensive way to get into developers’ faces. You’ll have the opportunity to network with devs between sessions and get quality marketing research.

Sponsoring conferences and meetups are fantastic ways to build relationships with software engineers if you have the resources. Local meetups, specifically, are less expensive to sponsor. Funding an online conference could be more costly, but it can provide great exposure.

One example: IBM was a major sponsor for DeveloperWeek 2022, which took place in February.  Other B2D companies that sponsored the event and gained more exposure include BridgeCrew, ClickUp, HackerRank, Oracle, Toptal, and many others.

As another option, you can choose to create an event or podcast, like GitHub’s ReadMe podcast,  which takes a peek behind the curtain at some of the most impactful open source projects.

Have a Free Option

Developers don’t just want a demo. Developers want to thoroughly test your product to accomplish a meaningful task in their work – and hopefully, it does what you’ve promised your product can do.

Developers are not interested in sales engagement, short trial periods, or shelling out cash to access the best features for a relatively unknown tool.

Unless it’s been approved and demonstrated to work by an influencer or someone they trust, no developer will proactively consider a product they aren’t familiar with and haven’t adequately tested. Paid products are a harder sell when there are typically open-source versions available.

In response to the competition from open-source, multiple B2D companies will offer a commercial product at either no or low cost to encourage developers to try it out. Some of those companies are:

• GitHub
• New Relic
• GitLab (open source)

To reach developers, offer value before asking for a  purchase.

Be Clear and Straightforward

When marketing to developers via social media, make things crystal clear.

According to a study by StackOverflow, the developers interviewed said they’re always looking for new technologies and want a clear definition of what the new tech or product does and the problem it solves.

They also want to know how it integrates with their existing technologies.

Check out these insights from developermarkepear.

• If you do ads, be careful. Probably search ads are the safest bet. Podcast ads are a good new channel to try
• Run swag campaigns
• Blog with education content should be the core thing
• Word of mouth is super crucial. How can you facilitate that?
• Say what you don’t do.
• Let devs DIY as much as they can.
• Avoid the words “marketing”, “promotion”, and “advertising” if you want devs to associate with your content.

Developer Marketing Strategies — Social Media

For Developers on Twitter

Of course, your priority is to share great content — photos, brief videos, and infographics. Share relevant news and updates and what your brand or product has done to make life easier for developers in your Twitter feed.

Tweets from New Relic, for instance, share helpful content and upcoming events and are created to start discussions aimed at helping developers.

Here are some example tweets:

We're big, big fans of @Netlify because it helps developers ship faster, making their jobs easier. 😌

We like it so much that we made a Netlify plugin and quickstart for developers who want to add performance monitoring to their builds and Jamstack apps.

— New Relic (@newrelic) February 10, 2022

Polish your Twitter bio

Make sure your bio introduces your most significant product for developers. The tone of the bio should be straightforward.

Create different accounts for each product

For example. Atlassian has an account for each of its product. They have an account for Jira, customer support and an official page.

Use Twitter hashtags

Twitter is great for hashtags, so use community hashtags to your advantage. Some popular hashtags on Twitter for dev communities include #100DaysofCode, #AndroidDev, #JetpackCompose, #javascript, #Python, etc.

Answer questions and engage

Be prepared to answer questions or respond to comments sent to your page, and don’t be reluctant to connect with others via Twitter.

There are also helpful tools that can make using Twitter better. For example, you can load and schedule your tweets from the Tweetdeck dashboard.

For Developers on Slack

Most people see Slack as a platform where companies communicate internally.

But it can be so much more. Slack can be a potential goldmine of leads for your B2D company.

With thousands of different communities, you’re leaving money on the table if you’re not marketing on the platform.

According to EarthWeb’s b2022 Slack statistics, over 40% of Fortune 100 companies pay for Slack.
And with more than 10 million daily users, it is an excellent platform to network and connects with potential developers who will be interested in your product.

Building Relationships and Acquiring Developers in Slack Communities

Slack is a great platform to help build community and increase engagement.

For example, WordPress.org uses Slack for real-time interaction and community building.

Steps to Take After Joining a Slack Community

When you join a Slack community, do the following:

• Give a brief but impactful introduction of yourself when you join a Slack group: Don’t start marketing your product immediately. Instead, introduce yourself by telling the community how much assistance you can offer. This will encourage members of a community to approach you.
• Choose your keywords for relevant notifications: Ensure you get involved in discussions where you can genuinely be of assistance. This helps start meaningful conversations. (Your keywords could be ‘Javascript,’ ‘React,’ or ‘Web3,’ depending on your expertise and product.
• Build a solid relationship with community administrators: This will make future cross-promotion and partnership easier.
  Welcome every new person to the community personally: Yes, each one. And again, you don’t have to pitch your product yet, unless it’s necessary.
• Promote your content in Slack communities: Do not promote all of your content. You’ll be perceived as spammy. So strive to show your knowledge when necessary or on special occasions.

Consider the common issues your specific developer demographic faces and the benefits your product or event you’re promoting has. Make it personal.

Structuring your content is easier when you ask yourself: “Why would any developer want to use this product?”

The Best Slack Apps for Marketing

Slack communities aren’t the only way to build relationships and get leads from your developer audience. Using some tremendous Slack apps, you can leverage your workspace to automate various tasks.

Here are some of the best Slack apps for B2D marketing:

• Awario – helps you monitor your competitors’ marketing. Like Reddit, you can keep an eye on what people say about your product or competitors.
• Yala – Helps you automate publishing your social media posts directly from Slack.
• InfluencerBot – A great tool to find influencers that can boost traffic.
• Ark and/or Clever for Google Ads – Monitor your Google Analytics account reports and statistics.

For Developers on LinkedIn

Earlier, we said various social media networks for B2D marketing could be used for awareness, learning (communities), and client acquisition.

LinkedIn combines all of these. Here are pointers to note when marketing on LinkedIn:

• Social selling: Use your LinkedIn profile to connect with your target audience. As with any social media platform, human interaction is essential to success on LinkedIn. The platform openly encourages it. They give you all the tools you need to identify and converse with your audience. We recommend using the Sales Navigator tool if you plan to progress significantly with your LinkedIn marketing. It’s a premium sales tool. It helps you identify LinkedIn developers that meet your criteria without the limitations of a free account. Additionally, ensure your profile is up-to-date and set up for social selling before reaching out to decision-makers. When social selling, focus on the solution your product offers to developers. It’s critical to emphasize the value you can provide within the top section of your brand’s LinkedIn profile because this is what devs (developers) will look at before accepting your connection request or reaching out.
• Create engaging posts: This is a constant in every marketing strategy. Use different types of media content, and create posts that require responses. For example, you can create a poll asking developers to choose the frameworks they currently use or the ones they wish to learn. (Of course, the polls could pose questions about your product, which helps you understand your audience better.)
• Use a company page to promote your B2D brand: LinkedIn company pages are a great strategy to show potential developer clients what your product offers. Make sure your company page has a clear call to action if you want it to be effective. Note that LinkedIn members can engage with your content but can’t contact you directly. As a result, add your email address, phone number, or website link to help interested prospects reach you. Remember that once you’ve created a company page, you must post new content regularly. For example, GitHub schedules two LinkedIn posts daily, on average. It’s the same with Stack Overflow.
• Use advertising to drive direct response: Building organic publicity from your developer demographic and network takes time. Thankfully, LinkedIn allows businesses to advertise to reach out to prospects right away. One of the most valuable features of their advertising platform is the ability to target your audience using granular segmentation settings. You may target particular groups of people based on their job title, rank, or geographic location, to mention a few criteria. Other advertisers strongly influence the costs you pay per click (or 1,000 impressions). LinkedIn won’t put all ads on your prospects’ timelines, so the competition could be high if several advertisers target similar audiences.

For Developers on YouTube

Devs use YouTube, and you should too. It is not only an excellent platform for community building and learning — it’s also fantastic for client acquisition.

Some brands focus their channel on product updates and education. While the biggest brands in the world lean more into entertainment, user education is a perfectly fine strategy for a YouTube launch. Product videos don’t typically drive subscribers, but they rank well in SEO and help devs become more informed users.

For example, Cloudera uses its YouTube platform to create how-to videos and tutorials on its products.

Take a look at these videos: These examples are marketing, tutorial, and explanatory videos, respectively, with thousands of views each.

You want to be sure to keep your YouTube channels active, so try posting at least once a week on each. It’s better if you can find time to post even more often.

Monitor analytics once a month to learn what types of content are most popular with your viewers.

For Developers on Reddit

A network of communities based on people’s interests, like Reddit, is a strategic place to engage in conversations and find developers interested in specific groups and topics.

Reddit is especially good for developer relations. But it’s also a great place to market regardless. However, you should know that Reddit marketing means playing the long game.

It also requires following simple rules:

• Don’t start with marketing: It’s highly unlikely that devs will trust a new page with zero posts telling people to use a product. So, be a genuine member first before you begin marketing. Get familiar with how things work, comment threads, terminology, and offer lighthearted jokes. Reddit, like any other platform, will reward you for being active. Commenting increases your karma score, which will help you when you start creating your posts.
• Give more to the community than you take: Most Reddit communities want you to contribute 80% of the time and advertise yourself or your product 20% of the time. Of course, this could differ based on content and audience. But members are more likely to trust you and your product when they see you as a substantial contributor who understands their challenges.
• Listen to what people are saying about your competitors: As previously stated, Reddit is a potential gold mine of business-related discussions. Customers seeking guidance and recommendations can be found anywhere on the platform. The important thing is that you don’t intervene or act. Pay attention. You can better understand where you’re thriving or underperforming and how you might improve and position your product by taking the role of an observer in talks about your products or competitors.
• Share meaningful content: Don’t just post links. It irks Redditors because they do not want to be advertised or used for traffic purposes. Instead, you can copy and paste text from a blog into a post, especially if the content is helpful.
• Provide support: Prioritizing support over sales is arguably one of the most significant ways to approach Reddit marketing. Many brands have dedicated subreddit communities where customers can ask questions and get help with challenges.  They establish a direct line of communication between your company and its customers while serving as a public platform for people to seek future solutions and product recommendations.
• Host AMAs: AMA refers to “ask me anything.” These threads allow Redditors to ask anyone any question. AMAs work well for people or brands with unique stories, excellent products to share, or a strong reputation. Different brands and notable people have hosted AMAs, and still do. For example, Following SpaceX’s BFR announcement, Elon Musk had an AMA on the r/space sub to provide further details to enthusiastic fans.  Another example is GitLab’s security team’s Reddit AMA on Zero Trust in 2019. All successful Reddit campaigns have one thing in common: They’re fascinating, engaging, helpful, and create discussion.

For Developers on Quora

Quora is a terrific place for marketers to find out what issues are troubling their present and potential customers.

You can demonstrate your experience and knowledge of a niche and improve your company’s brand image by answering questions on Quora.  You want to discuss how your product addresses a problem.

It is truly an excellent platform for direct marketing.

Quora is great for direct marketing. It’s similar to Reddit. You can identify and follow topics identical to your product.

But there are some things to do differently here in an app marketing strategy.

They are:

• Don’t write large blocks of text – Unlike Reddit, where you can write a wall of text, you don’t need to do that on Quora. Only do that if the question you’re answering requires it. Strive to answer questions as concisely as possible, or no one will read them. But make sure you answer the question.
• Answer questions to drive traffic to your product – But don’t be direct about it. Instead, make the answer helpful in itself while suggesting how the problem could get better with your product.
• Use picture and video content – This helps to keep readers engaged.
• Use powerful CTAs – This makes readers want to know more.
• Answer questions with lots of views – Focus on answering questions with fewer answers to keep your responses from getting lost in everyone’s feed. Navigate to the topic’s main page and click on the “most viewed writers” option once you’ve identified a relevant topic and the most-viewed writers. For example, answer questions where many people are already following the topic — and the more, the better, because people following the topic get an email and in-app notification after answering a question.

For Developers on Instagram

Instagram isn’t for everyone. If you want to build on Instagram, consider creating photos or videos that take audiences behind the scenes of your product development. Introduce your team and put a developer advocate front and center.

How often should you post? Aim for one post every week, at the very least.

Of course, this is all from an organic perspective. Because Instagram is part of the Meta network, you might be more likely to expand onto Instagram through the ad platform.

Tips for Creating a Personal Brand on Social Media

As a developer looking to create a personal brand, we recommend Twitter, LinkedIn, and GitHub.Twitter is great for connecting with other developers and building your brand.

Many devs who have created a personal brand have a Twitter account. And they spend a lot of time there, too.

Some examples include:

• Jason Fried, with more than 290k followers
• Scott Hanselman, with more than 285k followers
• Addy Osmani with more than 294k followers.

You don’t have to spend more than a decade on the platform to have a large number of followers. Listed are some examples of developers who have branded themselves with simple concepts (including some mentioned in this guide). They have hundreds of thousands of followers, and they only launched their brands recently, between 2019-2021:

• Danny Thompson, 2019: more than 250k followers
• Jack Forge, 2020: more than 195k followers
• Prasoon Pratham, 2020: more than 140k followers.

Here are some tips for getting high followership on Twitter:

• Publish quality content consistently (more on this below)
• Follow and engage with the guys we’ve listed above and others with an extensive network
• Follow your target audience
• Join a developer community
• Use social media ads to promote your content.

Understand Your Audience

When you discuss your projects, do you stop to think about what you’re saying and if the person or people you’re talking to understand?

Are you on the same wavelength as those who follow you and see your content? There’s no need for branding if the people who want to see you and your projects don’t feel impacted.

Understanding your audience will help you tailor your content to their needs, which will automatically help communicate messages effectively.

For example, Vito Rivabella, on Twitter, has a DevRel role at Alchemy Platform.

Looking at his profile, it’s clear that he focuses on Web3 and blockchain. And his content revolves around the crypto audience. He also has a newsletter called “The Crypto Developer.”

But there’s one crucial thing to note — Vito’s content is relevant to both newbies and professionals.

This example takes us to the next part of branding yourself as a developer.

Share Quality Content

Sharing your content can help you build your brand. It demonstrates your desire to assist others in learning new things through the content you share. You can do this through both technical and non-technical writing. That is why it is essential to understand your audience. Choosing the right channel is a big part of your content distribution.

For example, if you choose Twitter, like Vito, you may need to create threads or keep your message within the 280-character limit.

Once you’ve gotten that out of the way, you can start sharing information like technical lessons, guides, how you solved a problem, faster ways to code, and much more.

A simple guide to sharing quality content is asking yourself the golden question: What would you want to read or engage with as a developer? 

Find a niche, create high-quality content consistently, and build your brand around it.

Measure Growth

Measuring your growth is crucial.

Setting goals you want to achieve over a certain period is essential. (Check out our complete guide to setting and measuring B2B social media KPIs.)

You need to set metrics to measure your growth, which depends on your goals.

For example:

• What would you consider as growth within (insert timeframe)?
• How many views do you want to get after 6 months if you’re making videos for YouTube?
• How many relevant Twitter followers or LinkedIn connections are you aiming for if you’re on social media?
• How many newsletter subscriptions do you want to have after 6 months?
• How many page visits do you want in a specific time frame if you’re blogging?

It’s important to state that your time frame doesn’t have to be 6 months. Your time frame could be anything. The key is for it to be achievable.

Optimize for Growth

At the end of the time frame you’ve set for yourself, evaluate your progress.

Are you meeting targets? Then you’re on your way. Or maybe you’re tracking behind and need to re-evaluate.

Re-evaluating could mean changing your target audience, understanding your audience better, improving your content delivery, or something else.

Final Thoughts

B2D companies looking to market their products on social media must understand that the long game is essential to success.

The same applies to developers looking for the best way to promote themselves.

For B2D companies, don’t forget to make your product easily accessible to developers when you’re just starting out. You want them to use it on an actual project and see for themselves whether it will solve their problems before you introduce a paid version. And take advantage of Developer Marketing campaigns and Developer Relations (DevRel). These form the framework of a successful social media campaign.

We hope this comprehensive guide sets you up to understand how to successfully market products to developers and build a unique personal brand if you’re a developer.