First, forget any notion that twitter is some kind of “social network.” Followers are numbers. Any fond feelings you may feel toward any of them are incidental. Never forget this.
Numbers. This will be a recurring theme, you’ll see. Do not allow the number of people you’re following to exceed the number who follow you by very many. It’s ok if it does by a little when you’re starting out, but not for long. Do not leave any @ replies up. If you get in a bind and your total number of tweets starts climbing, delete some. Poor performers. Older ones. But first, un-retweet your retweets. Those also count in your numbers and who are those people anyways? Fuck them. Keep your numbers down.
You should delete the poor performers anyways. They’re fucking up your brand quality. Dilution is bad. Delete anything with less than (insert some arbitrary number here) retweets.
Follow people. Follow a lot of people. When you follow someone, hit up the favstar, star like maybe 20 of their tweets. Retweet 10. It does not matter if they’re good. Monitor. If they do not follow you back, unfollow. Undo the retweets. Fuck that idiot. If (s)he can’t see how awesome you are then (s)he can get the hell out. If they follow you back, hell yes. You’re gaining numbers. Congrats, this is important. You’re doing important work.
“What about writing tweets?” you’re probably saying because you’re a goddamn idiot n00b. It doesn’t matter. You should write tweets, but don’t try to get clever. Stick to formats. Put people in a weird place doing something normal. Or a normal place doing something weird. Who cares? People will retweet them because those are the tweets you have and they’ve mistaken your hasty visit to their favstar page as kindness and will want to return the favor. If by chance you have a tweet do pretty well, a stand out, just stick with that. That’s your thing now. That format, that content. If it ain’t broke don’t fix it. Creativity is not rewarded. Re-read that sentence.
Tweet every day. Twice a day is best. If you don’t, people will ask where you are and some will unfollow you. If you can’t tweet every day, you can pre-write and schedule them to post automatically. Make sure you time the tweets appropriately. Some research on this issue is good, but mostly once in the morning and once at night works. Don’t tweet on the weekends. Definitely don’t waste a decent tweet on the weekend. Reply to one of your prior tweets at least once a day to push it back up in the feed. You can use the same shitty tweet multiple times until it gets enough accolades to make you feel good.
Don’t neglect your followers. Working off your notifications is a good start. Someone starred a tweet? Star 3 of theirs. Pay a lot of attention to your followers who have a large audience. Retweet them in blocks. They will retweet you back and, bam, you’ll gain some numbers.
Oh, follow everyone back. Unless they’re, like, obviously a nazi or something, follow them back. Unfollow anyone who unfollows you. No exceptions. This is not a social club. This is a game, a strategy. This is about dominating twitter and there is no room for that kind of shit on this bullet train to the top of twitter mountain.
This is how you gain followers and win twitter. It isn’t complicated and it doesn’t take talent. It does take some time and energy. I don’t know why you read this, but I hope you took something away from it.
Ok, bye.
***Disclaimer***
To each his own! Many (maybe all) of us have done or at least considered doing one or more of these things at some point in our twitter lives. Although my general tone here is sarcastic and I do not choose to do Twitter this way, there isn’t anything inherently wrong with doing so. I really do believe that proceeding under these parameters will result in growing numbers and more “success” for your account. You know, if that’s something you’re interested in accomplishing. I would, however, also point out that the thing I value the most from my experience on Twitter is the relationships that I’ve made with incredibly witty, wonderful, kind people around the world who are not and never have been numbers to me.
