How to get more Twitter Followers: 10 Semi-Legit Ways to Grow Your Following Fast

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Social media marketers put high value on the size of a following, so here’s a conversation that happens a lot between marketers.

Q: “How do I get more Twitter followers?”

A: “Tweet more, engage with people, share something useful or provocative.”

Sound familiar? Maybe you’ve heard this conversation or been part of it. Maybe dozens of times.

But here’s a less common question:

Q: “Why do some Twitter accounts grow faster than others?”?

This post answers that question. Then it goes into some practical tips to grow your Twitter following, including some of the more spammy tactics. Yes, we’re going to step over to the dark side of social media.

Quick disclaimer: before you scorch me in the comments, please understand that this post is informational only. These are not recommendations or judgements.

Why do some Twitter followings grow faster than others?

We analyzed the Twitter accounts of 300 bloggers and marketers to discover what actually correlates with follower growth. We used?Follower Wonk?to check the number of followers, number of tweets per week, total tweets over time and the likelihood of retweets.

Each of these correlates with follower growth at different rates. The findings might surprise you. Here’s the data.

Surprised? I was.

• Tweeting a lot DOES NOT correlate with follower growth.
• The statistical relationship is very weak. Only 10% of the accounts that tweet a lot are growing fast.
• Getting retweeted DOES correlate with faster growth.
• In 35% of cases, Twitter accounts that get retweeted a lot are also the accounts that grow fast. This suggests that being engaging does help.
• Big Twitter accounts grow much faster.
• Size matters a lot. The size of the following has a powerful relationship with the follower growth rate, much more than any other factor. Twitter accounts with large followings are the fastest growing accounts in 96% of cases.

Why do the big accounts grow faster?

It’s partly due to the design of Twitter. From the moment you set up a Twitter account, it starts recommending accounts with large followings. It promotes these accounts in many places and ways.

And then of course, there’s the bandwagon effect, aka the conformity bias.?A lot of followers? It’s gotta be good!?

A large following is social proof. It’s evidence of legitimacy, even if that following is not an engaged audience. Even if a large percentage are fake.

No one?checks for fake followers?before clicking the follow button, right?

Regardless of the reason, it’s clear that big accounts grow faster.

So it’s a chicken and egg problem.?The key to getting more followers is to have a large Twitter following. But how do you get followers in the first place?

Here are ten ways to grow your Twitter following, from sketchy and spammy to human and high-touch.

For the rest of this article,?click here >