Growing your number of Twitter followers is easier said than done. Though Twitter is a great opportunity to make new connections and find customers, your power of persuasion is directly linked to how many followers you have.

There are a bunch of things you can do to grow your Twitter account, including some we don't recommend you try.

What not to do

Purchase followers

Even though it's tempting, purchasing fake followers is something you should avoid doing. The reality is it can give you a small boost at the very beginning of your account. It's better to have a couple hundreds followers than 17, and the first ones are pretty hard to get. However, you do run the risk of:

• Having your account suspended by Twitter
• Raising suspicion from real people who see your tweets but 0 engagement on them
• Never being able to use the "lookalike" targeting (paid ads) on your own followers
• If you're into influencer-money or affiliation deals, you might lose partners who see little to no engagement rate on your account

Though most Twitter Follower sellers will tell you what they provide is 100% organic and undetectable, this is simply not true. If it was real, why would any person or brand pay for a premium Twitter agency? Or purchase follower ads on Twitter? Or even bother to write decent tweets?

Follow-unfollow

Following a bunch of people and unfollowing them to grow your audience is 1) not cool, and 2) sooo 2010.

Nowadays, many free services exist to monitor the people who unfollow you, so setting up this technique will definitely get noticed.

Depending on your audience, most people have stopped following back every single person who follows them. So the follow-unfollow strategy is outdated and doesn't really work anymore.

DM everyone

To be honest, this can work if you can do it at scale. The limit is 1000 DMs per day. However, you will look a bit desperate and spammy to most of the people you contact. So if you have a super large audience and no particular interest in doing business with them, this is a fine strategy. If what you're looking for on Twitter is a business-oriented audience (entrepreneurs/founders, marketers, sales, small business owners, etc.), we suggest you either:

• Find ways to make your Cold DM-ing as precise as can be. Avoid automation or at least find enough data to make it seem personal.
• Don't do it.

Valid ways of growing your Twitter account

Be the first to reply

You probably already follow bigger accounts than yours and try to interact with them. This is one of the important things to do if you want to get noticed and possibly earn a follow or retweet from influential people.

A couple of things you can do to maximize "early replies" are:

• Activate notifications on important accounts, so you know when they tweet and can react first
• Sort your Twitter feed by "Latest tweets" so you only see recent publications

Note that usually saying "+1" or "I love this" or "Great job" is definitely not the kind of stuff that will get you noticed by interesting people on Twitter. What you need is to be the first person to reply something useful, funny or interesting. So before you rush to replying "So true", think for a couple minutes and try to find something more impactful to say!

Write good Tweets

This can seem like a no-brainer, but 10% of the people on Twitter create 80% of tweets. So most people are definitely not focused on creating but are rather consuming content.

The best way to grow is to write and publish better tweets. It's a long term play, and you need to show up every day, but this is definitely the best way to grow on Twitter. We already took a spin at explaining how you can start writing better tweets, you can read that to get a better sense of how to do it.

Tweet every day

Think about it. Who would you rather press that "follow" button for?

Person A: tweets something interesting every couple of weeks or so Person B: tweets interesting stuff every single day

Probably "Person B", right? That would be the go-to answer for most people who use Twitter daily.

Twitter's algorithm knows that and therefore prefers to push people who tweet 5 to 10 times per day (half of those times being interesting tweets) more than people who tweet once a month but are 100% interesting every time.

Giveaways, AMAs, etc.

Once your audience has started to grow a bit, you can start experimenting with formats that are typically dedicated to users with a medium to large following and are asking for interactions.

Those can include:

• giveaways
• AMAs
• open questions
• polls

These are really great ways to increase your followers, but they only work when you have an audience to talk to organically. We don't think you should start considering those formats before you reach at least 1K followers.

We hope you appreciated this article. If you're having trouble writing great tweet, know that TweetHunter is here to help. If you want to grow your audience, check out what we do now!