How To Get More Followers on Twitter

Have you ever seen one of those “how to draw a face” tutorials?

1. Draw an oval, divide it into 4 sections

2. Mark the location of facial features

3. Sketch in facial features

4. Add shading – and there you have it!

Too many of the “How to Get More Followers on Twitter” pieces we’ve seen read the same way…

1. Follow interesting people, learn what they post

2. Post stuff that people want to read

3. Re-tweet stuff from interesting people now and then

4. Voila! You have a billion followers!

Seems to be something missing there, especially just before the last step! Like so many things that look simple but aren’t, there’s more to getting Twitter followers than a vague set of generic steps. Twitter, it turns out, follows the same rules we see in all online media—a precious few “publishers” get a boatload of traffic while the vast majority, no matter how worthy, do not.

Actually, there are some straightforward guidelines for becoming a mass-market tweeter, which can easily be seen by analyzing some of the most-followed Twitter accounts.

1. Be Famous. Seriously. No other single factor matters more than already being famous. Take the late-to-the game but well-known actor Ben Stiller, who went from 0 to 5,000 followers in a few days. If you aren’t already famous, you’re going to have to work on that. Or hire a spokesperson who is. The bottom line is that Twitter is not likely to make you famous.

2. Do Stuff Most People Don’t Do. Almost every porn star with a Twitter account has a decent number of followers. So do people climbing Mt. Everest and Tweeting via Satellite phone. Protesters getting fired upon by police in the streets of Iran got plenty of followers in a hurry. In a business, or life, that’s fairly mundane? Be realistic. Your tweets are doing well if they reach a hundred or two-hundred people. To be worth following at mass scale, you have to be tweeting about things that are aspirational, dramatic, unique, sensational.

3. Share information nobody else has, but lots of people want. The release of exclusive, timely, and truly useful information always attracts attention, and it’s no different on Twitter. To attract durable and meaningful attention, offer a consistent source of useful news and information, particularly of the actionable variety (“Tickets for the next U2 Concert to the first 10 RT’s of the this message” ).

4. Be a foremost authority in your field and share what you know. Even here, the numbers are relative—how many people are there either in, or interested in, your field and how techno-savvy are they? The foremost authority in a small pond may pull 500 followers, but depending on the quality of that reach, may be doing great with that.

By now, you’re either thinking “Cool! I can deliver!” or “Those guidelines may be straightforward, but they ain’t simple.” Either way, like it or lump it, these are the core tenets of Twitter reach.

In Part 2, we’ll explore a few examples of how Twitter follower growth was attained—and what the benefits of having a large following are.