In the past two years many people have claimed that Twitter is a dying social network, but in reality it’s still one of the most important social media sites for marketers. Business owners of all kinds can benefit from understanding how to get more followers on Twitter.
This guide will show you how to get more followers on Twitter by closely examining some of the most successful Twitter influencers in a variety of industries.
Let’s start with the most powerful strategy for gaining followers on Twitter, regardless of industry.
How to get more #followers on #Twitter: an in-depth guide 
1. Find a way to include humor
If there’s one thing that works for almost every single user on Twitter, it’s humor. I suspect this is because Twitter is a heavily news-based social media platform and people need that laughter interspersed between world-altering events.
Some of the most popular Twitter accounts are outright satire accounts, like this user who claims to be God himself:
This approach can even work for certain brands, like the Brooding YA Hero account run by a Young Adult author:
However, the pure satire approach only works for very specific brands. Maintaining a humorous tone across all your posts is also an enormous challenge. Most businesses are better off adding occasional humor to their posts.
Fantasy author Brian Rathbone does this by posting jokes about various fantasy creatures:
You’ll notice that several of these humorous posts don’t even have images or hashtags, yet they receive a significant amount of interaction. An excellent humorous post transcends the regular rules of Twitter.
How to use this strategy in your posts
You don’t need to work in a creative industry to include humor in your posts either. All you need is an understanding of your target audience’s sense of humor and some time to brainstorm funny tweets.
Of course, this is easier said than done. Being funny is difficult, and doing it on a regular basis even more so. Don’t force it if it’s not natural, but if you have a talent for making people laugh, you can use it to get more followers on Twitter.
At the bare minimum try to retweet one or two funny tweets that are relevant to your audience per week. This will show that you appreciate their sense of humor, even if you aren’t great at developing your own jokes.
2. Invite your audience to communicate
Twitter may not be the best place to drive sales, but it is an excellent place to build relationships. And one of the best ways to build those relationships is to openly invite people to communicate with you.
Some popular Twitter accounts do this by posting open-ended questions, like the one displayed in the following tweet by KM Weiland:
Others do it by posting polls, which are simple to create on Twitter. The key thing to remember here is that your poll can only have four potential answers, and each answer can only be 30 characters long. This means you’ll want to focus on simple questions with short answers.
Some creators also like to host Twitter games that give followers the opportunity to learn something about them:
How to use this strategy
Set a goal to directly ask your audience for their input at least once a week, and brainstorm a variety of questions to ask and Twitter games you might want to play. You can schedule these posts in advance, but remember that engagement is key here. You want to these posts to go live when you actually have time to respond so your audience doesn’t feel ignored.
If you really want to ramp up engagement and you have time to commit to communicating with followers on Twitter, consider posting a daily question like the WQOTD shown above.
3. Share excellent content by other people
Sharing other people’s valuable content helps diversify your feed, shows your audience that you understand your niche, and encourages other content creators to check out and even share your work.
Some successful Twitter feeds consist almost entirely of this type of content:
You will probably want to include a larger percentage of your own content, but this is a great strategy for times when you aren’t producing as much content overall.
How to use this strategy
This is perhaps the easiest strategy to employ right away when you’re learning how to get more followers on Twitter. After all, you’re already following several of the top blogs in your niche, right? You can start by sharing the links to those articles when you’ve finished reading them.
If the creator’s following is around the same size as yours or smaller, make sure to tag them – they’ll be grateful for your help and happy to share their following with you too. I personally read and share 3-4 articles per day on my Twitter account, and this has earned me thanks from some of my favorite brands and even a couple of opportunities to write for those brands.
Other ways to employ this strategy include scheduling curated content in advance and setting aside 5-10 minutes per day to retweet recent content from your favorite creators.
4. Publish quick tips
The character limit on Twitter posts may be 280 words now, but shorter posts still do better on the platform. This makes it an ideal place to publish quick, actionable tips—and you can expand on those tips by linking to one of your articles or even someone else’s content.
There are also several hashtags specifically for different types of tips, such as #marketingtips and #writetip.
You can also use these posts as opportunities to link to larger collections of tips on your website or YouTube channel.
How to use this strategy
The best way to use this strategy is to include a regular selection of quick tips in your social media calendar. Find some “tips” hashtags relevant to your audience and use them to brainstorm as many different pieces of advice as you can. Take a look through your archives to find opportunities to share some advice and link to your website at the same time.
How many tips you’ll want to publish per week depends on your audience, the goals of your products and/or services, and your overall posting schedule. We recommend starting with at least one tip per week.
5. Share longer thoughts in threads
In Twitter’s most recent set of updates, they made it easier to connect your tweets by creating threads. When you create a thread, your tweets will all be published in a connected line. If someone clicks on an individual tweet within the thread they’ll immediately be able to see other connected comments.
Threads can be used to tell a story, share information too complex for 280 characters, share links to your favorite creators, and more. And they can be wildly successful—a two person Twitter thread between Chuck Wendig and Sam Sykes even became a horror movie in 2019.
Another common use for Twitter threads is to compile the best advice someone has to offer on a certain subject, like this thread by editing company Write Plan.
Every individual tweet in one of these threads is a shareable, actionable piece of advice, and together they demonstrate your expansive knowledge of a given subject.
How to use this strategy
Every audience has different limits, but one thing remains true: you don’t want to overwhelm them with too many posts. No matter how useful your posts are, past a certain point, you will start to lose followers.
You also want to plan your threads meticulously so you can publish the tweets in rapid succession. This allows people to follow your thoughts in real time.
You can publish threads as often as once a week, but avoid publishing them every day—this will lead to you running out of topics quickly and annoying your followers.
6. Use great images
Of all the major social media platforms, Twitter is the most word-based, but great images are still key to success. Tweets with images get 150% more retweets than tweets without them.
If your tweet includes a WordPress link with a Featured Image, it will automatically display an image from the link.
This also works with several other types of links, although you might not always like the image Twitter decides to use.
Promotional posts also lend themselves to images—all you need to do is post an image of your product:
For other posts like quick tips and quotes, people often create graphics using some or all of the same text in the Tweet they’re posting:
The first step to using great images with your tweets is to create a collection of images you can pull from when scheduling social media posts. If you sell products, stage photos of them whenever and wherever you see an opportunity. If you run a service based business, get a friend or employee to photograph you at work.
For other graphics, sign up for a free program like Canva and read our guide to social media graphic design. Create graphics for all of your scheduled social media posts in advance so when the time comes you can simply add them to your social media automation program of choice.
7. Post often
Twitter posts are technically around forever, but they stop achieving their ideal reach within half an hour of being posted. This doesn’t mean you need to post every half hour—that’s an enormous amount of work and a great way to alienate your audience—but you should be posting more than once per day.
Many of the most popular Twitter accounts tweet several times on weekdays and even sometimes on weekends. Some successful Twitter accounts even post as often as every half hour, although this tends to work best for news-focused organizations.
How to use this strategy
Take a look at how often the most popular accounts in your niche tweet. Once a day? Three times a day? Twelve tweets per day? Do they tweet only on weekdays, or are they online on the weekends too?
For most brands, you want to post at least twice a day on weekdays. Depending on your niche, you may also want to tweet on weekends.
The easiest way to do this is to create a schedule featuring different types of tweets at different times of the day. Start with the quick tips we discussed above, then brainstorm other types of content you can post throughout the day. Schedule a wide variety of tweets at the appropriate times using a social media automation tool and schedule posts a week or month in advance.
8. Understand hashtags appropriate for your audience
Twitter is the birthplace of the hashtag, and if you want to understand how to get more Twitter followers, it’s important to understand not only how to use hashtags, but also what hashtags to use. Hashtags you assume people are interested in might not always be winners. For example, you would think the hashtag #twittertips would be enormously popular since people always want to know how to get more followers on Twitter. But when you look the hashtag up, this is what you see:
Several of the top tweets for this hashtag don’t have a single like or retweet, and the top tweets are all multiple hours apart. This shows that few people are using the hashtag, and people aren’t really searching for it either.
The most successful Twitter users don’t just put a “#” in front of any word they like and consider their posts complete. They find the hashtags their audience is already using and find creative ways to incorporate those hashtags, like this post from Libby M Iriks:
How to use this strategy
Hashtags have been a major part of Twitter since 2007, and a lot of today’s popular hashtags have been around for a while. Many helpful souls have collected lists of hashtags for their industries and posted these lists on blogs or other websites.
You can find these lists with a simple Google search for your industry name and the word ” hashtags” or by using tools like RiteTag.
Another great way to find hashtags for your industry is to pay attention to what influencers in your industry are using. What hashtags are in their most popular posts? What hashtags are most commonly used by your colleagues?
Create a list of popular hashtags for your industry and sprinkle them throughout your tweets.
Final advice
In the past few years, Twitter has unveiled a variety of new features like Twitter moments and new rules, but these strategies for how to get more followers on Twitter are timeless. Master them, and you’ll enjoy a steady stream of new Twitter followers week after week.
Strategies for gaining more #followers on #Twitter
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