How To Get More Followers On Twitter (Top Mistakes)

Most of the advice to get more followers on Twitter is the same – post valuable content consistently.

Yet many people feel they are already doing this and their Twitter audience still isn’t growing.

The problem is that there are various levels of “valuable content,” and the reality is that consistently posting quality content is difficult as it takes a lot of effort to think of great content ideas.

So if you feel stuck, this post discusses the three key mistakes that hold many new Twitter creators back and several advanced strategies to grow your Twitter following in less time.

Top Mistakes Preventing You From Growing On Twitter

If you’re already posting content, these are the top three mistakes most people make that hinder their follower growth rate.

Mistake #1: Your Audience Avatar Is Too Broad

The more specifically you articulate your audience’s pain points, the more memorable you’ll be to that avatar because they’ll feel that you wrote the content for their specific problem.

For example, most local SEO advice works for any local business. However, if you specialize specifically in local SEO for dentists and frame your content to speak directly to them and their pain points, you’ll be much more likely to earn a following of dentists.

However, speaking to your audience extends beyond just framing the wording of your content. It also needs to address the specific pain points that your audience feels.

Therefore, use a tool like SparkToro to identify Facebook groups, podcasts, publications, Reddit threads, and other content to immerse yourself in that community and truly understand their nuanced pain points and what they care about.

For example, maybe trust is the main factor patients consider when choosing a dentist. If dentists are your target audience, providing content about building patient trust would likely resonate with them.

The other key problem that can kill your following is addressing too many niches. This problem often happens when creators become bored with their niche and want to expand to other niches. For example, if you primarily talk about digital marketing, your audience will likely lose interest in your content if you then expand to talking about general productivity.

Mistake #2: Your Content Is Generic 

There’s already a lot of content on the internet, so coming up with great, original content ideas can be tricky. 

Yet if you publish “me-too” content that anyone can find on Google, people won’t feel inspired when reading your content and ultimately won’t follow you on social media. 

To solve this problem and ensure your content is truly unique and original, write about your personal experience and opinions. 

Here’s a simple 3 step framework you can use to make your content unique:

1. What is a top problem your audience struggles with?
2. How have you solved this problem in the past?
3. How can you turn this experience into a repeatable 3-5 step process?

For example, instead of creating a thread on “5 steps to get more reviews,” reframing it as “here is the 5 step review process I used that helped me double my reviews in 30 days” is much more interesting. Then, throughout the thread, discuss anecdotes from your real experience.

Here’s an example of this framework in action from Matt Gray. 

Using personal experience also makes your content much more entertaining and engaging, and sharing your experience also makes you seem more credible and trustworthy. 

Additionally, drawing from personal experience makes your content unique because nobody else has lived your life.

Opinion pieces that incorporate personal experience also work well. Here’s a great example from Nick Huber:

You’ll also notice that by incorporating anecdotes from your personal experience, you inevitably include storytelling in your content, which immediately makes it much more engaging.

Mistake #3: You Aren’t Posting Consistently Enough

You probably already know that you should be posting more frequently, but consistently coming up with original content ideas that avoid the first two mistakes is tough.

Unfortunately, if you start posting content for the sake of maintaining a consistent publishing schedule, your audience will be able to tell and they’ll likely quit following your content altogether. 

The good news is that there are a few strategies you can use to fix this problem.

First, you can simply repost your top performing content.

For example, Justin Welsh reposted this exact same piece of content just 12 days apart and the second one still received thousands of likes and hundreds of comments.

Social media algorithms rarely show your content to all your followers, so many people will likely see the reposted version for the first time. Even if these individuals have seen it before, there’s a good chance they forgot about it, so they may still engage with the reposted version.   

Additionally, if you already create other content, such as long form videos or blog posts, you can look at which ones were most successful and then repurpose snippets from them into Twitter posts. In fact, you can even hire a ghostwriter to do this for you. 

Finally, using frameworks is one of the most effective methods to post quality consistently. 

Nicolas Cole has a variety of excellent frameworks to post quality content on Twitter consistently, and here are just a few of them:

You can also use a social media scheduling tool like Buffer or Hootsuite to schedule your content in advance so that you stay on top of your publishing calendar.

If you avoid these mistakes and consistently post high quality content that’s relevant to your audience for an extended period of time, you’ll eventually grow a substantial following on Twitter.

Advanced Strategies To Grow A Following On Twitter

If you want to grow your Twitter following faster, here are a few more advanced tactics and strategies that we’ve found are highly effective at expediting follower growth.

1. Collaborate With Influencers 

Collaborating with other influencers is a great way to reach a brand new audience, though most people don’t know how to collaborate with influencers.

One approach is to do podcasts or video interviews and then simply promote snippets of what you learned during the interview on your Twitter account.

Here’s a great example of this where guest Syed Balkhi went on the My First Million podcast and then promoted it on his Twitter account:

Even if your guest doesn’t share the content on their Twitter account, you can still leverage their name and influence to earn more reach by simply repurposing content they provided during the interview.

Here’s a great example of this strategy from Eric Siu. He extracted a snippet from his interview with influencer Alex Hormozi and posted it as its own Tweet.

In addition, simply engaging with micro-influencers on Twitter is often a highly effective strategy to build genuine relationships with them, which can lead to other content collaborations.

2. Test Different Content Types

Twitter is primarily a text-based platform, but you can help your content stand out by including a visual asset, like a graphic or a screenshot. Here’s a great example from Paddy Galloway.

While the image itself is just a simple screenshot, it captures your attention and communicates the value to the scroller.

Even if you aren’t a graphic designer, taking a picture of a sketch is a fairly clever way to make your content stand out on Twitter:

3. Consider Paid Promotion

If you’re in a hurry to build your audience on Twitter, you can use paid promotion to boost your growth.

However, only use paid promotion once you know your content resonates with your audience. Promoting content that doesn’t resonate with your audience won’t help you earn more followers.  

Begin by looking at your current top performing content and then boost them.

If you need help setting up Twitter ads, here’s a guide to get you started.

Twitter ads are relatively cheap compared to other ad platforms and are easy for anyone to learn how to run.

4. Improve Your Social Media Copywriting Skills

How you frame your content ideas significantly impacts engagement. 

For example, the copywriting in this social media post opens a lot of curiosity gaps in the reader’s mind that encourages them to click “read more.”

If Jesse had framed this exact same story by simply saying, “here’s the story of how Sara from Spanx made millions,” it wouldn’t have been nearly as compelling. 

While there are plenty of copywriting tips, here are a few of the best ones:

• Craft a hook that opens multiple curiosity gaps
• Break up the text with bullet points and even emojis
• Analyze influencers with similar audiences and study the types of content that work for that audience
• Use the exact phrasing and words that your audience uses to describe their problems 
• Write on a 5th grade reading level

Incorporating these copywriting tips into your social media strategy is helpful, but the best way to predictably improve your copywriting skills is to practice consistently and ask peers and mentors for feedback on your work.

Several copywriting courses provide step-by-step guidance to improve your copywriting, though we felt that video instruction alone isn’t sufficient as there’s a lot of nuance to copywriting. Therefore, we designed the Copyblogger Academy to offer one-on-one mentorship and feedback, as well as access to a group of peers so that you can ask specific questions about your copywriting. 

It’s also much more fun to improve your copywriting skills alongside others, and it feels less overwhelming when you run into challenges if you can share them with others who have faced similar issues.

5. Incentivize Your Audience To Become Followers 

An easy way to get more followers in less time is to offer a lead magnet and only give it to them if they’re following you.

Here’s a great example of this strategy in action:

However, because people on Twitter are accustomed to consuming content for free, your lead magnet must be significantly more valuable than anything else in their feed to convince them to take action.

Startup Stash has an excellent guide to setting up Twitter DM automations, but it’s a fairly straightforward process if you use a tool like Tweet Hunter.

You can manually message each person who follows and comments for your lead magnet, but this approach will likely become unmanageable as your audience grows. Additionally, people want to access the lead magnet immediately. Therefore, I’d recommend simply setting up automated DMs. 

6. Incorporate Newsjacking

Unlike evergreen content, most top performing social media posts are often related to current events.

For example, when Sam Altman was fired from OpenAI, plenty of Twitter influencers used that event to create content.

Here’s just one example from Jesse Pujii.

While you can just cover the event itself, the best news jackers usually use one of these three frameworks to create viral content:

• What are people not talking about around this event?
• What is a contrarian take on this event?
• How will this impact my audience?

To stay up-to-date with the latest news in your industry, use a tool like SparkToro to identify the publications people read and watch and then use a tool like Feedly to receive a daily list of the most popular content from those publications.

7. Leverage Peer Groups

There are a lot of nuanced challenges to growing on Twitter, and you can sidestep many of them by learning from mistakes that others made. 

Therefore, leveraging peer groups where you can ask specific questions about your particular scenario is one of the best ways to grow your Twitter following faster.

There are plenty of free Slack groups, Facebook groups, and other communities you can join to ask questions for free. 

Alternatively, you can also join a paid community, like the Copyblogger Academy, where you can get one on one feedback from a community of advanced and beginner peers.

8. Monitor Competitors/Similar Personal Brands

Each audience has slightly different content preferences and will respond differently to various formats, writing styles, and ideas.

Therefore, make a list of the most popular influencers in your niche and then take notes on their content strategy.

A great hack is to use Twitter’s advanced search feature and then look up the influencer’s most popular content.

You can start with a high number and then lower it until you see a few posts that meet the criteria:

For example, here are a few of Neil Patel’s most popular Tweets. Therefore, if I were trying to build an audience in digital marketing, I might try the question framework Neil Patel uses:

However, keep in mind that you’ll have to find your own voice in whatever niche you choose. 

Monitoring competitors is a great place to find initial inspiration, but you’ll notice that there are usually a lot of personal brands within the same niche that post very different content. 

How to Earn More Twitter Followers In Less Time

There are plenty of ways to earn more Twitter followers, but the best way to get to your end goal in less time is to simply ask the people who have already been there and done it.

That’s why we started the Copyblogger Academy. Instead of just watching videos about what you should be doing, you get access to a community of peers, personalized feedback on your work, and the accountability you need to stick to your strategy.

To see if the Copyblogger Academy is right for you, sign up today, and we’ll give you a full refund if you aren’t thrilled after the first 30 days.

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