What makes a successful social media account?

Someone (you know who you are!) recently wrote to me with the following request:

"We're stumped and curious about the social strategy you've employed that has yielded your 200K following on Twitter. Just how do you do it, sir?! We stand in reverence! I would so appreciate it you could provide an inkling to the Twitter strategy you employ."

Here is how I replied (with a few minor updates added here for completeness):

Thank you for your kind words. It's not entirely easy to answer your question. Every person is different, and so is their content, their engagement frequency, their style of "speaking", their strategic objectives for being on Twitter in the first place, etc.

I guess my main objective is to use Twitter as my micro-education platform (since I am an educator first and foremost) and I also use Twitter for social reporting (of latest trends and developments) -- telling people useful, beneficial, and educational things, without too much self-promotion or too much promotion of my employer (though some of that is necessary and essential, in order to justify my social media activities as well as to keep it real and honest).

I also inject some occasional humor (**). I try to show that I am a real person, not a bot (which I have had many people ask me about!). I also avoid going off-topic into other areas that are not related to why my followers come to me (which is for Big Data, Data Science, Analytics, Machine Learning, AI, their applications, and scientific content). Plus I nearly always include some form of informative graphic or illustration -- such visuals are proven to be very engaging in content-based marketing.

I guess that sums it up --> Content-Based Marketing <-- that's what I do ...I promote (primarily) big data, analytics, machine learning, AI, and data science through engaging content, which consequently promotes my twitter account (secondarily).

So, thank you all for listening, for following, for engaging, for retweeting, and for helping me to reach that lofty number of 200K Twitter followers! If you are willing and interested, please also follow me on LinkedIn. :) We are all in this together. The Data Science community reigns supreme!

(**) Note added: it is now proved beyond doubt that cigarette smoking is one of the leading causes of statistics. (REFERENCE)