Quoting near:

Put an unreasonable amount of effort into your content.

The Internet is filled with content, and if yours is significantly better than average, it’ll help your odds tremendously.

you have years of interesting experience in a field, you may just be able to tweet stream of consciousness thoughts and takes on things successfully, in which case the above doesn’t exactly apply: the unreasonable amount of effort that you put in was applied elsewhere (e.g. in your career), and you’re just translating your knowledge from there to Twitter. In general long posts are not a great idea and should be separated into threads

Make your tweets as easy to consume as possible

Respond frequently, early, and with high-quality content

When someone popular tweets about something you know a lot about, respond to it with something useful (or funny). If you do this shortly after the parent tweet was made, there’s a good chance you will appear near the top of the responses, enabling you to piggyback off of the popularity of the original poster.

Thus, numerically speaking, to grow your twitter account:

1. Tweet frequently
2. Tweet consistently
3. Do this for a long time, ideally for years

Most social media accounts can be mapped into a category based on the type of value they provide. Broadly those categories are:

1. Funny
2. Interesting
3. Useful
4. Sexy
5. Entertaining

be positive and constructive. You can get engagement with dunks, but the followers and network you’ll end up with won’t be pretty. I’d avoid the political areas of Twitter at all costs.

Err towards saying things rather than being shy

This is hard for some people, but exposure therapy is the best way to fix it. Never be scared to tweet something because you have a lot of followers, or overly important followers, or anything like that, as long as it’s something you actually want to say. This is good advice for life in general. Trying things is good, and not trying things is bad.

Optimize your content for twitter

Linking to a 30 minute youtube video will generally get very low engagement, but specifically cropping out the best 30 seconds and adding a quick summary, quote, or thread will do much better. You should keep most posts short and crop images accordingly.

Don’t tweet walls of text

Both spacing out your tweets and tweeting with images are usually good ideas. If the first one or two sentences of your tweet aren’t interesting, few people will finish reading it. It’s possible to succeed with long-form essays and threads if you have good content, but this is usually more difficult and vastly depends on your niche.

Make your own images

There’s a lot of value in making custom images. Most of my best performing tweets contained images that myself or someone else made, some which took as long as 5-30 minutes to make.

Having a pseudonymous account can be advantageous. A lot of people are scared to tweet their true thoughts publicly in a permanent form with their face and name directly adjacent to them. This is understandable and there’s nothing wrong with that. Even if you don’t have your name and face on your account you can still make friends, meetup with people, and even network professionally or get a job as long as you’re willing to share more details with individuals.

You can probably get away with tweeting more provocative content than you think. Cancellation may have been a formidable force a few years ago, but as of 2024 unless you’re diving straight into hard-politics you shouldn’t let it scare you out of trying to live your life.

Cold DM people more

You should cold DM people more. It’s a great way to get a job, make a friend, find a partner, and much more. If you’re curious why this tip has been repeated twice, it’s because it’s at least twice as important as the other tips.

Only follow people you want to become more similar to

Only follow someone if you want to become more similar to them in some way (at least with respect to the content that they tweet about). Following someone gives them a limited type of write access to your brain, which for powerusers may be reinforced multiple times a day over the course of many years. This will significantly alter the type of person that you become, so use this super power wisely.

Optimize for virality only at the cost of your soul

I would advise not purely seeking virality, even if you manage to avoid politics. Our best selves are probably not consistent with the versions of ourselves that maximize engagement online.