How to Get Your First 10k Followers on Twitter: 5 Simple Steps

Choose a Niche

Cool Personalized Name, Bio, Banner, Profile Pic

Tweets

Strategies

Check Your Metrics

Hashtags & Lists

Black Hat

Not Getting Suspended

Getting your first 10k followers on Twitter is a remarkably easy process – when you have a strategy in place. By following these foolproof methods, you too can get to the magical realm of 10k followers.

Whether your goal is to create a personal brand, monetize, sh*tpost, chase clout, gain exposure for a certain cause, or whatever it may be, there are ways to guarantee long term success without tweeting into the void.

It may seem daunting at first, but give it some time and you too can have a high authority Twitter account to give you a launchpad to whatever you seek out to achieve.

A big following may seem like a breeze if your goal is to make money, but tweeting for authenticity’s sake is far more important as a personal brand than a large disengaged following.

The goal should be a high quality loyal following. You should check out our article here if you wish to make money from Twitter.

The purpose of this article is, however, to grow a following.

You could buy followers to feign authority, but an army of bots can only supply you with superficial prestige. 

Sooner rather than later, people who follow you make think ill of an account with a vast following but no engagement.

Sure, it looks good on the surface to have a large following, but once you’re established on Twitter, you will give off the wrong impression and harm yourself in the long run.

10k Twitter followers is an admirable milestone — and you should seek to grow this following 100% ORGANICALLY.

Big media corps such as CNN or Fox can get away with stuffing their follower count with hundreds of thousands of followers, because they already have brand reputation.

But it is little more than social media crotch-stuffing. 

It does nothing for your brand in the long term. In fact, it WILL harm you as an up-and-coming Twitter account if you aren’t a media organization.

Let’s jump straight in and discuss what you will need to do to grow to 10k Twitter followers.

Choose a Niche

You can be a Jack of all Trades, but we recommend that you master a sub-niche within a certain category.

Whether your main niche is finance, you will want to be known as “that guy”. Pick a sub-niche within finance that you really know about and rock it. 

Say your area of expertise is marketing, but you really excel at copywriting. Make your niche about copywriting — which exists within the rubric of marketing. 

If you wish to expand outside of copywriting itself, the fact that you’re a known gifted copywriter will enable you to gain access to others within the marketing niche.

Your skills as a copywriter and the way you convey yourself on the platform will help you gain exposure as time passes.

For something completely different, say Fitness, if your skillset is unparalleled in fat loss, focus on that. Other fitness gurus will catch on to your content if it is good quality.

As an artist, double down on your best pieces of work. 

And so on and so forth. 

If you’re lucky enough to be multi-faceted, then you can employ all of your skills to grow a following. But — now this is very important — you should treat it like a college degree where you major in one niche and minor in others. The bulk of your content and presence should focus on one thing.

For example, if you want to be known for your blog but you’re also a part-time rapper, make your blog the primary focus of your Twitter account, then have another Twitter account where you post about your burgeoning career as a rapper. You may tweet about your rapping on your blogging account, but remember that the bulk of your followers will be following your blogging account for — you’ve guessed it — your blogging.

Cool Personalized Name, Bio, Banner, Profile Pic

Now, you need to distance yourself from other content creators within your niche.

This is a very important point as it will be your logo on social media.

You want people to recognize your name, profile pic, banner, and bio in descending order of importance.

Even when companies go through a rebrand, you still remember the name. The logo may be revamped, but you still buy their products or services for their name.

The same applies for your Twitter account.

If you want people to continue to consume your content — monetized or not — your name must remain the same — absent a life-changing event or complete overhaul.

Picking a name should be something unique — like your own name.

It could be a pseudonym or brand name.

Just make sure it’s unique and yours.

You won’t have a good time if you pick a name within your niche that’s already been taken as people will think you’re a scammer.

If you don’t like your real name or wish to preserve a degree of anonymity, feel free to pick an alias or brand name.

Just make sure it’s unique and yours.

It doesn’t really matter what you pick.

Just make sure it’s unique and yours.

And for goodness sake, Google the name you wish to pick.

I’ve had two brands in my marketing infancy that were unintentional duplicates of pre-existing brands. Thankfully, both of them were duplicates in other subniches, but you don’t want to get in trouble in the future.

Prevention is always better than the cure.

The last point I would like to make applies to people who want to underscore their specific niche.

Say your name is John Doe and your niche is copywriting. As a nobody in the copywriting niche, calling yourself John Doe and tweeting about copywriting and marketing won’t give people a reason to follow you for your copywriting advice.

There needs to be more substance in there.

Make it crystal clear to potential followers that you’re a copywriting expert. 

Try something like John Doe | Copywriting Wizard or John Doe | Marketing Maestro.

Your potential followers will know what to expect from your account.

For your profile pic and banner, unless you’re a solid artist or wish to model yourself on a pre-existing character, we recommend that you commission a graphic designer to create a profile pic and banner that is unique and yours.

If you don’t have any graphic designer friends, you can go to a freelance website such as Fiverr and find a graphic designer to make your custom profile pic and banner.

Your profile pic will be your Twitter account’s logo. 

People will recognize you by your profile pic, which is why it is important to make it memorable.

For those creating a personal brand, we recommend you to use a professionally shot picture of you.

Say you’re into the fitness niche, you should find a flattering picture with you doing something in the gym or looking lean and muscular.

The aim of the game is to convince people who see your tweets to follow you.

You will also learn that if your tweets are particularly thought-provoking, you may be shared on other platforms such as Facebook (both pages and groups), Instagram, or Telegram via a screengrab.

Having a memorable profile pic and name will allow people from other platforms to follow you on Twitter.

I have had dozens of tweets shared to YouTube which have garnered me tens of thousands of followers in the past.

Moving on a bit, we need to discuss your banner — which is essentially a billboard for your account. 

The banner isn’t as important as the profile pic, but it is an opportunity to create almost a second bio.

Again, say you’re into fitness, it can tell a frozen story. If you were skinny and became muscular, you can include a before and after picture to showcase your transformation.

This will be memorable to profile visitors and enable you to distance yourself from others.

Remember: you want to be known for being “that guy”, the specialist within your niche.

And lastly, you need to include a decent bio.

Like with your banner, this is a short advertisement detailing who you are and what you do.

You can fill it with inane bs — that’s up to you.

In our experience, over 95% of Twitter users fill it with garbage. But 95% of Twitter users are there to consume.

You are there to create, which is why this is an opportunity to convince somebody who views your page to follow you.

There is a specific formula we recommend you to follow.

What you have done | What you are doing | What you will do | Who you are | Landing Page

So, John Doe | Marketing Maestro’s bio should look like this, for example:

Generated $X for brands through emails | Building Marketing Maestro LLC | Working towards $Y p/a | husband, gym bro, rapper | marketingmaestro.com

Simple, effective, tells potential followers what you do. 

You can brag in your bio, but don’t be a fool about it.

Potential followers can be turned off by inauthenticity. 

Tweets

First off, you need to be authentic.

Liars often get caught in their lies and are weeded out.

Scammers often get caught in their scams and are weeded out.

Make sure you are always consistent and authentic.

There is a clear tweeting outline that we recommend new accounts to follow:

3-5 high quality value-adding tweets per day about your niche.

5-10 high quality value-adding reply tweets per day about your niche underneath big content creators tweets. 

3-5 high quality value-adding quote tweets per day about your niche on tweets from big content creators within your niche.

2-3 high quality value-adding tweet threads per week about your niche.

1-2 personal, authentic tweets about you or what you’ve done or are doing per day.

Until you have some recognition (1-3k followers) you will be tweeting into the abyss.

Rinse and repeat this tweet schedule until you’ve reached 10k followers.

For the next step of growth to 30k followers, you can take your foot off the gas a little. 

But until you’ve made it to 10k, TWEET, TWEET, TWEET!

You must be consistent in your tweeting as the Twitter algorithm will begin to punish you for long absences away from the platform.

The last thing you want is to be devoting hours of your time each week only to lose traction after a period away.

The final way to gain exposure through tweets is through memes, funny screenshots, and viral content.

Sounds great, but it is a double edged sword.

Memes are a wonderful way to have your name and brand do the rounds and even reach other platforms.

But they attract a low-quality audience, on the whole.

If you want to grow for the sake of growth then viral content is the way forward without having to create high value content.

You can also plug a lead magnet with viral content, but they will be less willing to converted to higher ticket offers than people who follow you for your content. 

When you create your own memes, don’t hesitate to add a watermark with your brand or handle so that others may find you.

Memes are often shared across various platforms and are a great way to gain brand exposure if you’re their original creator.

Here are some examples of powerful memes that have helped brands build a following:

Strategies

As we mentioned, until you have a small following of between 1-3k followers, you will be essentially tweeting into the abyss.

But there are ways to gain recognition without writing your thoughts into the digital ether.

There is a strategy to grow on Twitter which I’ve called “tailcoating”, where you are effectively riding the coat tails of bigger content creators within your niche.

For this, we recommend that you get notifications of large accounts within your niche so that you are first to reply to their tweets.

Here, you should respond with USEFUL, QUALITY, HIGH VALUE content.

If you fail to do so and simply reword or regurgitate what they’ve said, you might get blocked.

Reply something thought-provoking, clever, and high quality and you may even snag a follow back.

At a minimum, their followers will see your response and follow you.

Even better, you might begin to network with other accounts within your niche — even if they’re consumers.

You might be able to answer some of their queries, solve pain points, and network.

Either way, it is the best way to gain exposure if you’re still a nobody.

When I grew my first account to 10k, I employed this strategy for a couple of months — that’s all it took.

I didn’t diligently follow any strategies or read articles on how to grow an account.

It was purely dumb luck, but I would persist until one of my tweets gained 10 likes in a day. This quickly became 100 likes. And within a year, it would be a bad day if one of my tweets didn’t get 1000 likes.

Map out 10 of the biggest accounts within your preferred niche, then add their tweets to your notifications.

Set yourself a daily engagement target. It can be likes, impressions, follows, retweets, or anything you prefer. 

For goodness sake, DO NOT spam them. This is a good way to get blocked or muted.

Check Your Metrics

Checking your metrics is a fantastic way to help you on your journey to 10k Twitter followers.

Why?

Because you need to know what works.

If you’re not tweeting for efficacy, then you’re wasting your time as a content creator.

Unless you’ve already made it as a brand, you need to be doubling down on what works and discarding what doesn’t.

For your content, you need to see how many followers a tweet has helped you gain. 

Then you need to see how many profile visitors a tweet has helped you gain.

You may tweak your bio and overall content to convert higher rates of profile visitors to followers.

Try it out on both short term and long term scales.

On the short term, make sure that your tweet convert plenty of both followers and profile visits.

In the long term, you will want to see how many more profile visits you can convert into followers.

The best way to excel at both is to produce high quality content that will make people who see you tweets want to follow you.

The very best content creators can generate loyal audiences that hang off their every word.

Also, by glancing at the very best content creators, they do not stuff their tweets with a ton of junk hashtags. 

Consumers are mostly looking to get noticed on tweets with hashtags raising awareness for the latest thing from sporting events to breaking news.

You must remain consistent. 

If you have a tweet which is relevant to a current topic, I would refrain from using hashtags to grow your first 10k Twitter followers.

Lists can be useful — as long as you are simply a participant. 

Think of lists as a form of Twitter directory.

Bloggers may sign up to blog or business directories to gain exposure at first, but you won’t see big whale blogs on these lists — because they have no reason to join them.

Reverting back to the case of John Doe | Marketing Maestro, it could be beneficial for a third party to add this hypothetical account to a list that enables others to find him.

If you add people to a list, it is a good way for you to get blocked.

Black Hat Twitter Techniques

We have written a lengthy piece on Black Hat Twitter Techniques.

While they are an effective way to circumvent the process of tweeting hard into the air at first and to gain exposure, Black Hat Twitter Techniques DO have a risk attached.

You can get banned from Twitter for life. 

These techniques include:

– buying retweets, likes, comments or engagement

– follow trains

– tit-for-tat retweet deals

– creating a private network

– engagement groups

All of these methods can expedite the 10k Twitter follower growth process, but also lack authenticity.

Why?

Because many accounts that employ these techniques do so in cutting corners.

Low-quality content can get artificially promoted through retweets from bigger accounts, thus enabling them to gain more exposure. 

You may see generic looking Twitter accounts with vast followings, poor engagement, and low quality content.

Their content often belies their follower count.

Again, if your goal is growth for the sake of growth, then this could be an option for you.

But if you want to cultivate the best following possible, avoid falling into the temptation of employing Black Hat Twitter Techniques.

DON’T GET SUSPENDED

Goes without saying that this final point is very important.

The Twitter AI can pick up certain trigger words that will see your account terminated without a moment’s notice.

Threats, the use of certain insults, indecent images, etc., can all spell the end of your account.

The best thing you can do is to study Twitter’s Terms of Services to ensure that you are staying within their laws.

Otherwise, all of your hard work can go to waste in a heated moment.

While we always recommend that you politely engage with your followers and others on the platform, if you are a content creator YOU WILL encounter some hate.

It is a law as consistent as gravity. 

No matter how pleasant you are or how high quality your content may be, somebody out there will take issue with what you have to say.

Even if your niche is as benign as child care or 17th century classical music, you will always find somebody — often without a profile pic and 4 followers — who has nothing better to do with their time than insult you.

Simply block or mute the person and move on with your life.

There is no more pointless activity on social media than getting into heated arguments with complete, anonymous strangers.

You are the bigger person and you have nothing to prove apart from how amazing your content is. 

To recap, this is what you need to do to get 10k followers on Twitter: