How to Get Twitter Followers in 2022

Overview

1. Choosing a niche.
2. Getting started.
3. Growth strategy.
4. What not to do.
5. What to Tweet.

1: Choosing a Niche

Your niche should be something that you enjoy. What do you read the most books on? What do you like talking about? That should be your topic.

The key to choosing a niche is to be under a broadly appealing topic and then find a niche within it. You could choose the 'health and fitness' topic, for instance, and your niche could be 'jump rope'.

Broadly appealing topics (non-exhaustive):

1. Health and fitness
2. Personal finance and investing
3. Self-help
4. Diet
5. Productivity
6. Career advice
7. Relationships
8. Knowledge (books)

You don't have to be an expert. As Austin Kleon says, amateurs are better than experts at teaching beginners.

2: Getting Started

Content account vs Personal brand

You should make a content account if you are trying to grow mostly from Twitter itself. If you make a personal account, people will think you're a random person (rather than a content account) and not follow you.

You should make a personal brand if you are planning on growing mostly from other platforms (YouTube, blog, etc). I recommend making a personal brand because most of your growth will likely come from YouTube.

Setting Up

There are 4 essential parts of setting up your account. You need a good username (handle), name, profile picture, and bio. We will also cover the header image but it is less important.

Username

Content account: If you make a content account, you want your name and handle to reflect the kind of content you make.

Example: Financial Education @financialeducation for a personal finance account.

Don't add numbers or special characters to your handle or name. Your handle should be @financialeducation, not @financialeducation11.  

Personal account: If you make a personal account, you want your username to be your name.

Profile Picture

Content account: Your picture should be related to your content topic. If you have a content account about finance, for instance, incorporate something about money, like a dollar sign or a bitcoin logo.

Personal account: Make the profile picture a good picture of yourself.

In both cases, the profile picture should look professional.

Bio

Your bio should be concise and answer 2 questions:

1. Why should people follow you?
2. What kind of content do you make?

Use your bio to tell them what YOU can do for THEM. It's not for saying who you are or what you do. If you're a finance account, your bio should say something like: "A guide to wealth."

Header Image

The header image is not very important. When you're getting started, just insert an image that is related to your content that looks professional.

3: Growth Strategy

The growth strategy is to reply to the tweets of other accounts. This is how prospective followers will find your account.

The beginning is the most difficult stage because you have no positive reinforcement. Growth will seem slow, but after 3-6 months of consistent effort, you will start seeing better results.

In the beginning, you will tweet roughly 15 reply tweets and 5 regular tweets every day.

• Your reply tweets should be useful. On my Twitter, I reply to a lot of tweets about books. I usually comment relevant book recommendations.
• Your replies should be targeted at accounts larger than yours.
• Don't reply to the same account too often. Spread your 15 replies to 10-15 other accounts.
• Your replies should be on recent tweets (1-2 hours old or less). A tweet more than 1 day old is too old.
• You can retweet your reply so that it shows on your account profile.
• Your regular tweets should be evergreen content that provides value to your followers. On my Twitter, I try to condense the lessons from my blog posts into a tweet format.
• Reply to or retweet your own tweets. Twitter only shows each of your Tweets to a portion of your followers, so to make all of your followers see it, reply to or retweet your tweets in the day and at night (for international followers).

As you start to get thousands of followers, you can slightly reduce your number of replies and increase your number of regular tweets. Reply only 5 times and regular tweet 10 times a day.

4: What NOT to Do

1. Follow for follow. Follow for follow is when you follow a bunch of other accounts and hope that they follow you back. This doesn't work because you need followers who will like your content, reply, retweet, and share.
2. Hashtags. Hashtags are not good for growth. Most people don't look at hashtags, so you won't get many followers by using them. They also make your Tweets look unprofessional.
3. Tweet too much. You don't want to post Tweets too often. It's not a good use of time. The main way people will find you is from your replies to other Tweets.
4. Tag large accounts. Only tag accounts around your size.
5. Purposely get into arguments.

5: What to Tweet

Style tips

1. Break the tweet up into separate lines. To do this on an iPhone, you press the "123" key on the bottom left of the keyboard. Then you press the "return" key on the bottom right of the keyboard. This moves your text cursor a line down.
2. Use bullet points or numbers to create lists when applicable.
3. Use emojis sparingly.

Content tips

1. We need to ask ourselves "so what?" What value does the consumer get from our post?
2. Tweet every day.
3. Be social. Spend DMs to people and talk to them. Don't try to DM large accounts. If you have 500 followers, for example, message accounts with 400 - 1000 followers.
4. Look at the kind of content and styling that the larger accounts in your niche use. Copy them.

Some of these ideas come from the LifeMathMoney Twitter course.