How I built a Twitter network from scratch

I went from 0 to 24,000+ Twitter followers from scratch – never knowing any of them in real life first, living in an isolated city, and without cold-contacting any of them. Perhaps more importantly, my followers and readers include some of the smartest and wisest people on the planet.

Here is how I did it and the principles I followed.

My first 1,000 followers

Building a following from scratch is hard because no one sees the content you post.

Therefore, it’s critical to leverage the platform-specific features that get you seen when you don’t have followers.

For Twitter, it’s replies. You build your first 1,000 followers by writing value-adding replies to users with a wide following.ShareCopy For Instagram, it’s hashtags. For YouTube, search relevance. Each platform has its own feature to leverage, and some work better than others. But what’s critical is that writing great content isn’t sufficient when you don’t have followers – you must get it in front of eyeballs too, and simply posting to your feed is not enough.

In fact, a common mistake of novice creators is to focus on creating content for their existing following before they have enough followers for it to be a sufficient growth engine. Until then, your focus should be on acquiring new followers by posting not on your feed but where these potential followers are.

Twitter is a particularly good choice to build a network from scratch because users can easily retweet replies – whereas in other social media, users cannot share them or are unlikely to do so.

From 1,000 to 5,000

If replies were the dominant way I gained followers from 0 to 1k, retweets were how I got from 1,000 to 5,000. Post great content, and your followers will show it to theirs.

This is where Twitter really shines. Retweets are so frictionless and central to the user experience that going viral is easy. Other platforms have repost features too, but they are less frequently used.

How do you write great content? A great way is to answer the most difficult questions your audience has. Why the difficult ones? Because they are the ones that wow people into following and recommending you.

From 5,000 to 10,000

The growth from 5k to 10k followers happened in just a couple of weeks in February 2020, thanks to a few tweets I wrote about the pandemic as a risk management expert.

Writing about current events is a good way to gain followers, but beware of how you do it. Simply covering the facts like any news outlet would make you a commodity – you will gain followers, but for the wrong reason, and they won’t be relevant to you. They will grow your follower number but won’t retweet your tweets (unless on the specific topic you wrote about when they followed you) and won’t become your customers.