Update: I have a video about this too:
At the time of writing, I have 14,400 Twitter followers. I started out with 0 followers like everybody else. I signed up for my account in 2008. This is what the growth of my Twitter following has looked like over the years:
I’ve wanted this for a long time. I don’t think I’m unique in saying that I believe that I deserve a large audience. Every other guy thinks that. But what’s different about me, maybe, is that I’m willing to figure out what it takes to get it, and to do the work.
So… how do you do it?
There are a few variables to this. There are surely other ways to do this, but I’m going to talk about my personal method.
First, you want to know what sort of content you want to be publishing. In my case, I don’t make this easy for myself – I want to post about all sorts of things. I’ve developed a reputation as “that guy who has a thread for literally everything”.
This is actually the slow and tedious way to develop an audience. The faster way is to decide, for a start, what sort of audience you want. I recommend (1) picking one or two different topics that you’re interested in and tweeting about them regularly – (2) try and build up maybe 50-100 good tweets about your interests, so that anybody who shares your interests, when they scroll through your timeline, would consider following you.
(3) You want to make sure that your bio is something that’s compelling, that conveys to people what to expect if they follow you. Maybe a couple of details about yourself, your interests, and what your tweets are about. You want people to feel comfortable following you.
(4) You want to follow the right people. Don’t bother following institutions or organizations. You want to feel comfortable replying to anybody in your feed, with the confidence that they’re somewhat likely to reply back. I recommend following maybe about 500 people tops, specifically focusing on people who are likely to respond when you reply to them. Ideally, look for people who are also following about 300-800 people, who have under 20,000 followers. Figuring out someone’s likelihood of replying and following back is a bit more of an art than a science. Some people use Twitter almost purely as a broadcast medium – if they don’t reply people, they’re not really worth following.
(5) Practice good reply game. You can earn interesting and cool followers by replying well even to popular accounts where the original poster is unlikely to see or reply to your tweet.
(6) Learn to search your own tweets for old tweets (from:username search query), and thread the best stuff together. If you have a web of threads that people can explore to discover your best ideas, they’re likelier to follow you. Here’s a list of my threads, for example.
Will update with more details if anybody has any questions.