16 Practical Tips On How To Go Viral On Twitter

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You post a witty tweet. You share a clever meme. You create a hashtag for your new show. But no one seems to care. Social media can feel like a popularity contest, and Twitter can be the most challenging platform for getting noticed. Learning to go viral on Twitter is a great place to start if you want to enhance your social media engagement and improve your content performance. This guide will offer valuable insights and tips to help you achieve your goals.

Megaphone's viral on-demand platform is one tool that can help you go viral on Twitter. This solution can enhance your social media engagement and boost your content performance, reducing the stress of going viral.

Benefits of Marketing On Twitter

1. Direct Messaging: Building Authentic Relationships Behind the Scenes

Like its main competitors, Twitter has a direct messaging feature for private conversations between two users. However, the main difference is that the two accounts must mutually follow each other (unless one user has their inbox set to “open”) before they can contact one another.

This might seem like a hurdle for marketers who want to connect with influencers or other important industry players. However, reserving direct messaging for mutuals ensures your conversations are worthwhile, engaging, personalized, and authentic.

2. The Potential of Tags: Boost Engagement and Your Visibility

The @ symbol on Twitter goes a long way. It sends other users a notification that guarantees your tweet, or the tweet you wanted the @ recipient to see, gets viewed. Also, it’s easy to attribute a quote or an article you share on the platform.

Twitter has branched into content discovery, so users now see occasional tweets from people they might not even follow. This is more likely if multiple users in a network like a tweet. The algorithm then guesses you might also want to see content similar to what’s already in your network. With this feature, your tweets with engagement can end up in front of new eyes, thus increasing reach and engagement.

3. Frequency: Post Often and Make It Count

According to data averaged from multiple studies, Twitter is the only social network where marketers are recommended to post up to 15 times per day. Unlike its main competitors, Facebook and Instagram, Twitter is still heavily chronological. Tweets have such a short lifespan in the ongoing feed of posts that regular updates are necessary to stay relevant.

Marketers should take this opportunity to integrate a varied mix of content that entertains and educates their Twitter following and keeps them engaged. The platform allows text, images, video, live video, and polls that can all encourage conversation in different ways.

4. Showcase Your Brand Voice on Twitter

With a more robust posting schedule, Twitter is a network where a brand can develop its voice and public personality. Tweets can have an authoritative voice or even a sassy tone, depending on the industry.

Fast food companies have transformed branding with Twitter in an especially notable (and comedic) way, from the rap battle between Wendy’s and Wingstop to the clapbacks from Taco Bell. Even forgotten brands like MoonPie have been resurrected via Twitter; now MoonPie has a strong following of 279,000 that looks forward to its self-deprecating humor daily.

Your consistent brand voice is also archived for prospective customers using Twitter to research how you interact with your followers. Twitter’s open format leaves nothing to the imagination, and some have experienced the fallout when old, problematic tweets resurface at inopportune times.

5. Leverage Influencers and Expand Your Reach

In 2019, there’s no doubting the potential of the influencer, a modern-day social media celebrity. Marketers have found that influencer campaigns yield an average return of around $7.65 for every $1 spent. However, Instagram is oversaturated with individuals pushing products, making influencer campaigns much fresher on other social networking sites.

Twitter, in particular, has massive potential for marketers. That’s because there’s a 2x increase in purchase intent when consumers see tweets from brands and influencers. Also, 49% of Twitter users responded that they rely on recommendations from influencers, and 40% have purchased solely based on an influencer's tweet. The numbers don’t lie; they show an opportunity marketers can’t find elsewhere.

6. Drive Traffic With Your Profile

Social media profiles are the new homepage. [Tweet this] As mentioned earlier, Twitter is the place to develop and showcase a brand voice, so users will often visit a brand’s Twitter profile to get a better feel for the brand. About half the time, that visit will inspire further research because 47% of the people who visit a Twitter profile also visit the website linked to that profile.

Marketers should remember that brand voice should be consistent and smooth across channels. For example, a playful Twitter account shouldn’t lead to a landing page with overly serious language. Otherwise, consumers will be confused and leave the page without converting.

7. Use Follower Insights to Create a Target Persona

Twitter users are given native analytics within the platform, and they’re some of the best across social media sites. In particular, the Audiences tab helps marketers visualize their average followers.

Audiences are divided into four categories: demographics, Lifestyle, Consumer Behavior, and Mobile Footprint. The data delivers insight into your followers and their interests—as well as how they interact with brands—which is helpful to know before launching a campaign. With your follower persona in mind, you can aim directly for Twitter users who match the kind of people following you already.

8. Advertising on Twitter is Cheap & Simple

Advertising on Twitter costs as little as one dollar per day, but its real strength is optimization. Twitter Ads guides marketers of all experience levels through the campaign creation by suggesting parameters to maximize impact. If the setting is selected, the platform will pace spending based on results to ensure marketers aren’t spending unnecessarily.

As you gain experience, you can also experiment with A/B testing using different campaign types or other settings. It’s customizable and incredibly user-friendly. The best part? Independent research shows that Twitter marketing campaigns can deliver a 40% higher return on investment when compared to other media channels.

9. Use Hashtags for Community Management

Hashtags are still the king of social media discovery tools, mainly when marketers use branded hashtags. Branded hashtags, created by brands to give consumers a way to share their experiences on social channels, comprise 70% of the total hashtag space.

Marketers can use these niche spaces to follow their brand communities online easily. Whether it’s to participate in a Twitter conversation or to find user-generated content for future tweets, there’s tremendous potential.

10. Go Viral on Twitter: A Random Chance Anyone Can Get

One of Twitter's best parts is its capability to spread a message like wildfire. Anyone who uses the platform regularly sees multiple tweets per day reach viral status because they’re funny, relatable, or newsworthy. Those tweets can come from anyone, no matter how few followers they have.

Brands can similarly go viral with a tweet, which immediately increases reach, traffic, and conversions. All it takes is a well-timed post that resonates. The sky—or, should we say, the 280-character count—is the limit.

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16 Practical Tips On How To Go Viral On Twitter

1. Leverage Megaphone to Boost Your Twitter Presence

Megaphone is a viral on-demand platform that can help you grow your Twitter presence authentically. The software connects you with influential creators in your niche to boost your impressions, followers, and leads without relying on paid ads. Key features include a sophisticated engagement network and diverse creator partnerships for sponsored posts, X-spaces, and newsletter ads (coming soon). Megaphone caters to startup founders, marketers, emerging creators, and ghostwriting agencies seeking to amplify their digital footprint and social proof. Go viral today with our viral on-demand platform.

2. Create Content Your Audience Can Relate To

Your tweet has to connect with people. Nobody will engage with your Twitter post if it doesn't strike a chord. Your tweets should always be about something your target audience may have experienced (personal stories), care about, agree with, or find humorous.

3. Know Who Your Audience Is

It’s not everyone. You want your tweets to hit home with the right Twitter users, so you’d better know what those people like. For instance, social listening lets you find out what your ideal audience members think, re-evaluate your brand’s strengths and weaknesses, supplement complex data from Twitter Analytics with genuine opinions, get customers’ views of your competitors, and find new campaign ideas. Target specific keywords and hashtags that suit your ideal buyer. See what those Twitter users are discussing and update your content strategy accordingly. This works for other social media platforms, too.

4. Ensure Your Timing Is Right

Timing can dramatically impact a tweet's success. The best time to post is when your audience is most active, as this is when you are most likely to take advantage of the engagement snowball effect.

5. Talk With Your Followers, Not at Them

You need to know the difference between “voice” and “tone. Think of voice as your brand’s personality – a core part of its identity – and tone as your brand’s mood from day to day. As they explain it: “Voice is a mission statement. The tone is the application of that mission.” The voice doesn’t change – this is how you always want your brand to be represented. But the tone changes with context. You also can’t always be selling. Twitter is a giant chat room.

The Twitter community is there for online discussions, jokes, or education. And you can’t spend all your time talking about yourself. Here are some suggestions to help you balance promotion with other content:

The 80/20 rule

20% of your content can be promotional, but 80% should be attractive, around trending topics, and engaging to your audience. The 5-3-2 ratio includes five relevant pieces from others, three non-promotional pieces from you, and two promotional posts.

The 4-1-1 rule

Four pieces from others – plus one retweet – for every promotional tweet I send. Focus on offering value to your Twitter followers – that’s what matters. Choose a ratio that makes sense to you, and try to keep to it.

6. Use Relevant Hashtags

Hashtags make tweets discoverable. Therefore, using them wisely will allow you to target your desired audience, as many will be looking for/interacting with content around the hashtag you choose. Take some time to research trending and niche-specific hashtags. Once you've identified valuable hashtags, you can build exciting posts around them, naturally including these hashtags within your tweet.

7. Know When to Tweet

Twitter is time-sensitive. Even with Twitter’s new algorithm, only the beginning of the user’s stream is affected. And it’s optional. That means you still rely mainly on timing to see your content. It may feel like the whole world is constantly online, but some times of the day are busier than others.

8. Collaborate with Influencers

Influencer collaborations can amplify your tweet's reach. Leverage their communities to strategically place yourself (or your brand) before their vast following. Find influencers whose followers align with your target audience and explore collaborations to create a promotional/educational campaign.

9. Add Calls to Action

You want engaged Twitter followers. Every retweet is an opportunity to reach a whole new audience. But people don’t engage with a piece of content just because they feel like it. Tell them what you need from them.

Following trending topics on Twitter is excellent and essential for going viral on Twitter. Creating content based on trends with 'big potential' can make your tweets go viral.

11. Realize Less Isn’t More

Twitter is a “microblogging” site. It would make sense for Twitter content to be shorter than posts on other social networks. Not exactly. Even though Twitter places a premium on characters, the sweet spot for Twitter copy is between 70 and 100 characters.

12. Encourage User Participation

Although many marketers know this already, 'engagement breeds engagement,' and once you know this, you will never shy away from this again. Therefore, ask for retweets, likes, and replies, and don't feel bad about it, as not only is this a perfectly normal tactic, but the benefits are significant.

13. Use Images

Visual content triples the rate of retweets and nearly doubles the likes rate. And because images take up Twitter real estate, your message becomes more prominent with a picture. But what if you don’t have good, original photos to share? Create “quote pictures.”

14. Analyze Twitter Analytics

Remember the 'Know Your Audience' strategy from above? Well, this strategy is an extension of it. Analyzing Twitter analytics will allow you to identify what motivates your target audience, which is invaluable for crafting tweets that resonate with them and go viral.

15. Be Personal

When appropriate, name the person tweeting. It gives your tweets a more personal feel. Harvard Business Review says that “empathy” is the crucial indicator of whether a company “gets” Twitter.

16. Embrace Memes

Everyone loves a good laugh regardless of your industry, so why not use humor to your advantage? Nothing gets people laughing more than a good meme, so if you can link it to your brand somehow, this can be an incredibly effective way of generating mass attention for your tweet.

How To Get 1,000 Followers On Twitter Fast

1. Personalize Your Twitter Profile

To attract targeted Twitter followers, customize your profile. First, ensure a complete profile with your full name or company name and a handle that fits your brand. Create a keyword-friendly bio with a link to your website and a personal photo or company logo. To make sure your page stands out, customize the color scheme and use a header image to match your brand.

Next, promote your Twitter account on other platforms. Share your handle with friends and customers using social media platforms like Facebook and Instagram. Go beyond social, too—announce it in a newsletter, put it on business cards, advertisements, and marketing materials, and embed it on your website.

3. Keep Tabs on Your Competitors

Check out their followers, who they are, how often they tweet, and what they’re tweeting. What does their profile look like? How do they respond to their competition or customers, and what content do they post that gets the most attention? Follow them and retweet their content to get on their radar. This step is equally vital for people who wish to know how to increase their Twitter following.

4. Find Followers and Influencers

The general rule of thumb is that if you follow someone on Twitter, they will likely follow you back. Leverage the “Who to Follow” feature to find popular feeds, and upload your email contacts to Twitter to find people you already know. Find and follow influencers in your industry—if you’re in the food industry, for instance, find and follow famous chefs.

If they see that you’re following them, they may follow you back—and your tweets could end up in their feeds. Whatever you do to increase Twitter followers, try to do it organically. Even though you might be tempted to buy a list of followers, those lists are typically filled with bots that can’t buy your products or services and might be deleted by Twitter.

5. Stay Active and Engaged

Engaging with users is a surefire way to gain exposure and a more substantial following. Tweet regularly, reply to users who have mentioned or contacted you for customer support, like and retweet others’ posts, and add your comments regularly without being too excessive. When appropriate, suggest other Twitter users by including their handles, and consider using Tweet chats to interact in real-time with followers with similar interests.

6. Tweet at the Right Time

Find out when your users are on Twitter so they’ll see your tweets. Gain insights using Sprout Social, Hootsuite, or Buffer data to schedule timely posts that won't get buried in your followers’ feeds. The prevailing consensus is that the best time to post is between noon and 3 pm on weekdays, yet there are many other tips to consider. Also, stagger your tweets so you’re not overwhelming followers. Limiting your activity to a tweet every one or two hours can maximize your visibility without alienating your network.

7. Use Relevant Hashtags

Hashtags are one of the most effective ways to increase Twitter followers. Use them often—aim for at least two per tweet. Hashtags are how people find your tweets through search. Make sure to use ones that are relevant to your brand and audience. See what's trending, look at competitors’ tweets for ideas, or create a new one that might take off.

8. Add Videos and Images

Tweets with images and videos get more engagement. According to Buffer, adding a relevant, high-quality image to a tweet can increase engagement by around 150%, while tweets with videos are six times more likely to be retweeted. If you don’t have video, use images—but avoid using stock photography, and be mindful of copyright issues.

9. Find Good Content

Use Twitter polls, highlight customer stories and recent blog posts, and share brand and industry news and events. If you aim to increase Twitter followers, make sure that what you’re sharing is quality over quantity, and bring variety to your content. Put your best foot forward by pinning your most engaging tweets to the top of your profile. When users visit your page, that’s the first tweet they'll see.

10. Market Your Business

About 75 percent of B2B companies market themselves on Twitter. Aside from promoting your products and services, you can increase your following by running promotions like contests and giveaways. Who doesn’t love free stuff? Each participant is a potential new follower, and each follower may give their friends a heads up. You can also use Twitter ads. Advertising on Twitter is also an excellent way to increase followers, provides a low cost-per-click rate, and improves audience targeting based on engagement and keywords. When you promote a tweet, it’s more likely to get in front of the right audience.

Unpacking Megaphone: What is It and How Can It Help You Go Viral on Twitter?

Megaphone is a viral on-demand platform designed to boost your online presence authentically and organically. Our software connects you with influential creators in your niche, helping you grow impressions, followers, and leads without relying on paid ads. Key features include:

A sophisticated engagement network

Private engagement pod service (coming soon),

Diverse creator partnerships for sponsored posts, X spaces, and newsletter ads (coming soon).

Megaphone caters to startup founders, marketers, emerging creators, and ghostwriting agencies seeking to amplify their digital footprint and social proof. Our complex matching algorithm ensures you partner with your field's most suitable and valuable creators. Go viral today with our viral on-demand platform.

10 Top Twitter Influencers To Take Inspiration From

1. Elon Musk: The Unpredictable Influencer

Elon Musk tweets about tech, space, business, and memes. His content is bold and often unpredictable and covers a variety of niches. Musk interacts with followers frequently and is known for building solid narratives around his companies (Tesla, SpaceX, etc.) through social media.

2. Gary Vee: The Motivational Business Guru

Gary Vaynerchuk is a successful entrepreneur, author, and motivational speaker. His Twitter feed is about business, social media, and personal branding. Vaynerchuk’s content is highly motivational and focused on building businesses, personal branding, and leveraging social media. His consistent messaging around work ethic and modern digital trends is valuable for anyone in business or personal growth.

3. Naval Ravikant: The Philosophical Investor

Naval Ravikant is an angel investor and venture capitalist. He’s known for his work around startups and wealth creation, but his tweets cover various topics, including happiness and decision-making. Naval's tweets are short but filled with wisdom, particularly on topics like happiness, wealth, and startups. He shares deep philosophical insights concisely and impactfully, making it an excellent feed for thought leadership.

4. Arlan Hamilton: The Advocate for Diversity

Arlan Hamilton founded Backstage Capital, a venture capital firm investing in underrepresented entrepreneurs. Her Twitter feed is a combination of personal and professional content. Hamilton’s tweets inspire discussions about equality in the business world, entrepreneurship, and her journey in venture capital.

5. Tim Ferriss: The Productivity Hacker

Tim Ferriss is known for his work around optimizing life and productivity. He shares insights from his podcast interviews with high achievers and offers tips on improving lifestyle efficiency, business, and health.

6. Rihanna: The Creative Entrepreneur

While not the most frequent tweeter, Rihanna’s influence goes beyond her music. Her business acumen with brands like Fenty Beauty and Savage X Fenty inspires those looking to blend creativity and entrepreneurship.

7. Chrissy Teigen: The Relatable Celebrity

Chrissy Teigen is known for her witty and often humorous tweets. She interacts with her followers authentically and discusses various topics, from family life to pop culture, making her a relatable yet influential figure.

8. Kim Kardashian: The Business Mogul

Kim Kardashian has built a personal brand empire, and her tweets often showcase her business ventures, collaborations, and social justice initiatives. She has successfully transitioned from celebrity status to a respected entrepreneur.

9. Jack Butcher: The Visual Storyteller

Jack Butcher is known for his minimalist visual storytelling and business insights. He runs “Visualize Value,” a Twitter feed with succinct visual lessons on entrepreneurship, mindset, and marketing.

10. Yung Pueblo: The Growth Advocate

Yung Pueblo shares wisdom on emotional healing, self-improvement, and spirituality. His tweets resonate deeply with those looking for inspiration and a positive perspective on life.

Why Am I Not Getting Views on Twitter

1. Your Content Got Worse

This is the obvious one. Maybe your content just… got worse. People don’t like it anymore. Whatever trend you were riding before, a new wave has risen, and yours is receding. People leave your account in favor of others; they just don’t care about what you’re posting. It’s easy to reach some peak level of exposure and grow complacent; after all, all those big brands rarely seem to try all that hard to optimize anything. When was the last time you think @Dog_Rates had to care about the timing of their posts throughout the day?

The fact is, if you’re resting on your laurels, you’re eroding your foundation. Sooner or later, it will wash out from under you, and then you have some major work to do to repair it. Oh, and for the record, Dog Rates puts a lot of effort into their marketing, more than you might expect.

2. You’re Posting Less Often

To a certain extent, impressions are a numbers game. Your impressions are the number of people seeing your posts, usually divided by day, week, or month, depending on your analytics view. If you’re posting less often – going from three posts per day to two – you’re getting less content in front of people. Even if you only drawback one or two days a week, maybe just dropping the number of posts you make on the weekends, you’re still dropping that number.

Fewer posts mean fewer views on those posts, which means fewer impressions. It’s a simple algorithm, right? This isn’t the issue if you’re looking at per-post analytics. If your impressions per post drop, it’s likely for another reason.

3. Your Post Timing Changed

Since Twitter is essentially a temporal platform, with minimal algorithmic sorting of the content any user sees, timing is critical. You don’t have to contend with the algorithm so much as you have to compete with the habits of the masses. Thankfully, you can pretty quickly see when the peak hours are for your audience right inside Twitter’s analytics. Use that information to figure out when you should drop your posts, ideally just before the most significant number of people are online to see them. Post too late, and you’ll be at the bottom of tomorrow’s feed, where impressions go to die.

4. An Influencer Stopped Retweeting You

Some accounts attract high-profile fans; sometimes, those fans regularly retweet content they like. William Gibson is an excellent example of this. He’s a famous author with a quarter of a million followers, and most of his Twitter feed is retweets from various sources. If he likes a source, he’ll frequently tweet from it when it comes his way. What if an influencer ceases to like or follow your content or they determine their audience dislikes it? They stop sharing it. Once that happens, all the impressions you were getting from their retweets disappear.

5. People Removed Their Retweets

There’s an outrage culture on the internet centered around Twitter and Tumblr. The basic premise is that everyone has to be perfect: digging up an old tweet that showcases some position or opinion I may have held or even joked about can hurt my current reputation. It’s a dumb, reactionary position to take since people grow and change as they age, but it still exists. A side effect of this culture is that if someone digs six years ago into your past and finds an offensive joke I made, a lot of people will suddenly decide I’m trash. They can block you, they can report you, they can remove their old likes and retweets, and so on. Sometimes, this means many people will start checking out your feed to see if you’re still at it, which may give you more impressions. However, the loss of retweets can hurt your impression count in the short term.

Twitter may be a primarily chronological feed, but they aren’t entirely without sorting and filtering. They repeatedly try implementing a Facebook-like sorting algorithm, and backlash causes them to keep the option to turn it off.

7. Twitter’s Analytics Recording Changed

This is another case where Twitter making a change can impact your numbers. Sometimes, they change how they harvest data, define what counts as an impression, or even their sampling method for substantial accounts. One of the biggest causes of a change in impressions is a change in how Twitter detects and filters out bot traffic. They don’t want people artificially inflating their metrics based on paid engagement, so they try to filter out suspect data from accounts. If some portion of your impressions came from a fake account, whether it was paid for or not, when they disappear, you’ll notice.

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Go Viral Today with Our Viral on Demand Platform

Megaphone is a viral on-demand platform designed to boost your online presence authentically and organically. Their software connects you with influential creators in your niche, helping you grow impressions, followers, and leads without relying on paid ads. Key features include a sophisticated engagement network, a private engagement pod service (coming soon), and diverse creator partnerships for sponsored posts, X-spaces, and newsletter ads (coming soon).

Megaphone caters to startup founders, marketers, emerging creators, and ghostwriting agencies seeking to amplify their digital footprint and social proof. Their complex matching algorithm ensures you partner with your field's most suitable and valuable creators. Go viral today with this viral on-demand platform.