Grow your Twitter audience in 5 easy steps

How many times have you heard people talk about how getting on Twitter has helped them build businesses, make friends and start new careers? And how many times have you tried to grow your Twitter audience, only to get discouraged when you don’t see results?

Twitter is a long game. Growth is sometimes slow and difficult to jump start, but we’re here to tell you that once you unlock it, you’ll wonder how you ever lived without this platform. We know because we were once in your shoes.

Time and time again, we’d try to grow our Twitter audiences without much success. It seemed like we were tweeting into the abyss. But if it worked for other people, it couldn’t be just pure luck. We knew we were missing something. We started experimenting with different techniques and - soon - growth followed. The results were mind-blowing: new users, inbound investor outreach, many new friends and a crazy good deal on an NYC apartment.

You can do this too. We synthesized our experiments into a simple framework that anyone can implement to grow and get great value from Twitter. Here are the 5 steps that helped us gain 1,000+ followers since the beginning of the year:

1. Update your bio with any professional affiliations you might have (e.g. TechStars, YC, On Deck, etc.). This will make you more discoverable and allow other people from these communities to follow you.
2. If your audience is small (read: less than 1,000), your individual tweets are likely to fall on deaf ears. This means you’re better off “piggybacking” on someone else’s audience.
3. Curate who you follow to make sure you’re including relevant industry experts and/or people with whom you’d like to build relationships
4. Reply to their tweets with thoughtful comments. Something like “Great thread!” or “I agree” adds little value. Aim to stand out.
5. Try to be one of the first 10 people to reply. This means that the likelihood of the “important” person seeing your tweet and engaging with it is higher. Also, the algorithm is more likely to show such a tweet to their audience.
6. Not all engagements are created equal. Retweets will get you the most impressions, followed by replies and likes. You want to optimize for RTs, but since you can't control that, you might as well try to engage people in a conversation. It will also help you build relationships with them.
7. If you really want to do a stand-alone tweet, tag someone who already has the audience in your tweet. However, you need to make sure that it's not just a tag with no substance. The tweets that do best have some sort of insight.
8. Last but not least, if you have influential friends that can help you build a following, ask them for help. People are more likely to follow someone new (who doesn't have a following) if someone they already follow and like recommends it.

That’s it. If you follow this framework consistently, we guarantee it will work. The key is not to show up day after day and not give up, even if the progress is slow. As you do this, you will find your own unique voice and start the snowball effect of building an engaged audience.

We promise you, it’s worth it.