To Gain Twitter Followers, Follow These Pro Tweet-Writing Tips
By: Drew Magary
Tags: Twitter, Social Media, Connect, Writing, How To Write Anything

Tweeting is Writing, Too

To use Twitter effectively, think more about your audience than yourself

This story is part of Forge’s How to Write Anything series, where we give you tips, tricks, and principles for writing all the things we write in our daily lives online, from tweets to articles to dating profiles.

Tweeting is writing. Twitter gives you the sugar rush of blogging, only with 99% less effort, but, still: It’s writing. I know a lot of online choads don’t use the platform with that mindset. That’s why they suck.

But you don’t have to suck. Being a better writer makes you a better tweeter, and vice versa. You can have a voice on Twitter, but you have to put SOME thought and care into it. I’m not gonna make you do worksheets or anything. But I am gonna teach you to leverage the freedom Twitter gives you to the benefit of both you and your followers.

Because the freedom of Twitter is vast. You can write about anything and anyone. You can BE anything and anyone. That freedom spawns a lot of belligerence, but there’s a sweet spot where you can use that freedom to enter into the fray with good cheer and, against all odds, make yourself the life of the party. You can be the reason OTHER people on Twitter are having a good time. Every tweet you write is the first impression you’re making on someone, somewhere, and you can make a handsome one even now. You just need to follow a few rules:

Be genuine

Don’t douse yourself in protective irony, looking for popularity but not actual human connection. Then you’ll be just like every other guarded dipshit, and your Tweets won’t connect.

Tweet only occasionally

Serial over-tweeters — we’re talking multiple tweets an hour, every waking hour — are a scourge upon humanity and must be dealt with.

But there are people I follow who either pop in just a few times a day or sometimes go a WHOLE day without tweeting. (OMG!) When they do pop up in my timeline, it feels like a treat. Oh wow, Dave is here! Love Dave! It’s just like real life. When you’re fashionably late or fashionably reclusive, you make your mere presence a special occasion.

Aim for under six tweets a day. Same deal with retweets. Hand those out like gold medals.

If you’re tweeting while drunk, tell everyone

When cocktail hour strikes and you feel like shitposting after knocking back a few Schlitzes, by all means declare your intentions to the flock. “Surprise! I’m drunk!”

Now everyone knows things are about to get a little blue. Also, this gives you a convenient out if you happen to tweet your admiration for, say, the Charles Manson. Not wise to let that part of your id slip out. Blame that one on the swig of Popov you just took.

Whatever everyone is tweeting about, tweet about something else

This is not a rule that I follow, which is why people tell me I suck at Twitter. I always roll my eyes at fake intellectuals who complain about Twitter being an echo chamber. But… stylistically speaking, there’s a good chance that you will be tempted to emulate the people you follow, reflecting their voices in your own tweets. That’s been the creative bummer of social media eating the rest of the internet: We all end up saying the same shit.

This is why I follow Russell Crowe. While everyone else is tweeting about the election, Crowe is posting snapshots of a bike ride he took out in the bush, or retweeting an art gallery, or passing along cool news like this!

It’s a respite from the usual flurry of bullshit that I voluntarily subject myself to. YOU can be that respite. You can be a breath of fresh air instead of being one more dude tweeting THIS IS NOT NORMAL YOU GUYS every time Trump releases a suitcase full of cockroaches into a pediatric ward. Speaking of oases…

Tweet about food

Food takes are the sports of Twitter, especially now that American sports aren’t around. Food takes are a grand diversion. They stimulate arguments that you can volley back and forth like a tennis ball without sowing any real enmity (unless you like mayo). Even as the internet threatens to section out humanity into a million hostile and isolated sects, we still all gotta eat.

Know the lay of the land

There’s a universal gallery of stock characters on Twitter. There are trolls. There are Weird Twitter types who occasionally nail a Mitch Hedberg-style one-liner but then also get creepy with women. There are remarkably informative scholars whose studied threads on, like, butterfly molting go randomly viral on occasion. There are cheerfully dickish sports bloggers (that would be me). There are parents who are over parenting (me again). There are brands, all of them DYING to be adored. There are inexplicably wealthy people casually flaunting their cushy lifestyles at you.

If you understand all these groupings, and the strange dynamics constantly mutating around them, then you’ll have a solid grasp of which ones you’d prefer to interact with on a regular basis. You’re a host now. Your feed is your party. To that end…

Don’t try so hard

I have tried to will tweets into virality, thinking to myself, “Oh yeah this one is definitely gonna get aggregated into a BuzzFeed roundup of some sort!” And then the tweet comes and goes. Meanwhile someone manually RTs Ariana Grande with a WE STAN tacked on and it goes through the stratosphere. GRRRRR. I am treating this like a contest, which is pointless.

Personally, my favorite Twitter moments have happened entirely by accident, like when I tweeted this out:

Within minutes, the replies came alive with stories of people’s grandpas. We weren’t having a contest to see who could get RTed the most. We were just having, you know, a good time. I died laughing that night. Twitter just… happened. If you show a genuine interest and enjoyment in what others are saying and doing, it can happen for you, too.