How to get more followers on Twitter
Growing your followers on X is easier said than done. Some people created their accounts a long time ago but their only followers are their school friends. And there are other who joined X in less than a year but they already have more than 10k followers.
You’re probably wondering what their secret is. We’ve studied the X accounts with most followers and they all follow the same pattern.
The X Basics
The first thing is your profile. It is what people first see and people will decide to follow you based on that. You need to setup a trustworthy profile so that people click follow when they view your profile.
To achieve this your profile needs the following:
Profile Picture
Your profile picture is seen before even someone clicks your profile. Make it professional and use your face if possible.
You may also use a background color that matches your brand
Bio
This is your “About You” section. Although it is about you you’re not entirely supposed to be talking about yourself.
Instead you should show how you can help your audience. What will they gain when they follow you. What do you write about and why should they follow you?
Banner
X limits the bio to 260 characters. You can leverage the banner to talk more about how you help your audience. You can talk more about you, your services or what you write about. Just don’t leave it empty.
You can also match the colors to your profile and brand. You can use a tool like Canva to create a professional looking banner and profile picture.
Pinned tweet (Bonus)
X allows you pin a tweet to the top of your profile so that it can be seen by people who visit your profile.
Use this tweet to further show why people show follow you and this should be your best tweet.
Let’s take a look at Yannick’s profile.
First off, he has good looking face picture as his profile picture. The background is light which contrast really well with the dark banner he has.
On his bio he talks about what you will gain by following him. You will learn about marketing, business and startups.
He then proceeds to show social proof by indicating he is the co-founder and chief marketing officer at Hypefury. This adds weight to the previous statement “I teach you about marketing, business & startups.”
Right away you will think if he is a co-founder and a CMO then it means that he knows about marketing, business and startups so you can learn from him.
Then he says he is a podcast host. This means more ways for him to teach what he said.
And finally he say he flies planes. This is just something unique about him to create a personal connection.
On his banner he states what his mission is. Another way how helps his followers.
And finally his pinned tweet is about marketing. He delivers value right away before you even follow him.
You can use this as an inspiration to creating your own profile.
Once you’re profile is ready, you need some tweets lined up. Nobody will follow an accounts without tweets.
Post tweets providing value but don’t expect to get likes because you don’t have any followers. You post these tweets to convince visitors to follow you.
How to Grow on X Organically
Write great tweets
The first thing is let’s not forget that X is a text-based platform. You have to write in order to grow. Since you’re writing for humans, there are some rules you have to follow. Here are the basic ones:
- Avoid lengthy sentences
- Use enough white space
- Use list (bullets lists or numbered)
- A tweet should contain only one idea
You will pick up others as you write more and learn from other tweets which perform well.
Reply on other accounts' tweets
Unlike other social media, X released it’s algorithm source code online for all people to see. And the algorithm shows that replies are one of the factors for growth on X. But this doesn’t mean that you should go and spam on every tweet that you can find out there. People will report you and your account will be penalized.
Instead, you should focus on providing value through the replies. You can add your insights, share a link to a resource that can help them, a podcast link maybe (do not promote your product or affiliate link unless it relates to what the creator wants) or even tag another creator they can learn from. If you don’t have any value to add it’s better to keep quiet than say stuff like “Yeah, I agree”, “True”, “Great stuff”, etc because everybody else does this. You’ll just be like the rest. You can take a look at how others provide value and you can do the same on other accounts.
When you add value, other people will be interested in you, they will view your profile, read a couple of your tweets and eventually follow you.
Write threads
Threads are the heart of X growth. Many people have grown from 0 to 10k+ by writing threads every week. And if you want to grow on X you should write at least one thread every week.
Threads allow you to showcase your expertise and provide more value to your audience.
Threads perform well for a number of reasons including:
- X likes it when people stay/view a tweet longer than 2 minutes. A thread is long hence people stay longer than 2 minutes.
- X likes it when people stay on their platform. Threads do that
- Threads position you as an expert.
A thread’s success largely depends on the hook. Make sure your thread hooks are compelling.
We have hand-curated threads hooks from 15+ niches so Hypefury users can increase their chances of making viral threads. No more guessing work. The best part: you can access these hooks for free. Take a look at different threads hooks for FREE
Perform DMs giveaways
Giveaways are close to threads when it comes X growth. But you should not perform giveaways until you have a couple of followers. People will rarely want whatever you’re offering if you have 17 followers.
So your first step is to grow your followers through tweets, threads and replies and when you have a couple hundred followers you can perform DM giveaways.
DM giveaways are simple. You create an product, guide, checklist or anything of value related to your niche. Then you share it to people via DMs and you ask them to perform an action (comment, like, retweet or follow) so you know that they are interested and you send it to them.
But doing this manually will take time. Imagine in the above tweet there was 900+ replies. Replying to all those would have been exhausting.
Hypefury has a solution for this. You can create Auto-DMs that perform this very same function but without all the work
With Hypefury’s Auto DM feature, you no longer have to spend hours sending out hundreds of DMs to people who engage with your tweet. All it takes is a few clicks to get it done! You just create the giveaway tweet, setup the giveaway condition (reply, retweet or both) and the reply DM to send and you’re done! Try using Hypefury’s DM feature for FREE
Utilize videos
Elon Musk wants X to be more than just a text-based platform so know X allows videos more than 10+ minutes. And guess what? The algorithm wants videos to perform well so they prioritize videos.
This is your chance to try video content. You can make your own video content. The added benefit of this is you connect more with your audience. But if you’re camera shy, you can post video memes. Yes they work
What you shouldn’t do to grow your account to 1000+ followers
Here are some things that you shouldn’t do in order to grow your X account.
Follow for follow
This shouldn’t be a surprise but people still do this. Follow for follow is so old school and it doesn’t work. You may get a few followers initially but they will unfollow you eventually. And the you will end up hating the people who you follow because they don’t post anything valuable.
Just stay the course of tweeting and you will get followers
Buying followers
Buying followers is the worse. Not just because it’s against the rules of X but also people can easily recognize it. Imagine having 10k followers but only 2 likes on all your tweets. It will feel like dead weight and you’ll end up hating your account. That is if not X bans you first.
Tagging big accounts in your tweets
People know that you’re tagging them for engagement but you won’t get it. You won’t get likes, you won’t get retweets and you won’t get replies. You will get blocked.
Using (too many) hashtags
Hashtags were cool and they helped with growth back then but that’s no longer the case. Now they just look spammy and people will scroll past your tweets.
Tweet with links
This is worth mentioning, X penalizes tweets with links. They want people to spend more time in their platform. Links are the opposite of that.
How any X noob can grow their followers
- Follow people you know on X
- Engage with them and anyone in your niche
- Tweeting consistently is better than frequently
- Add value to timelines of big accounts
- Connect with new followers in the DM’s
- Nobody sees your tweets if you don’t have followers
- Follower growth goes slow first. Stay consistent!
- Don’t use tweets with links
- People follow people, not tweets. Show yourself.
