How to Grow on Twitter (2025 Edition)

It is impossible to overstate how much value I have gotten from my Twitter account over the years.

A few opportunities my account has unlocked for me:

• I have used it to raise tens of millions of dollars for my venture fund simply by sending DM’s

• I used it to validate my startup Carry. I raised money from a lot of people I admire by sending them a message. The majority of our founding team came from the platform, and we continue to use it to acquire most of our customers.

• I have met hundreds of incredible people all over the world. This includes founders and investors I respect, travelers in the same city as I’m visiting and celebrities and athletes I’ve wanted to hang out with.

Imagine the power of being able to connect with almost anyone and have them want to hear from you.

This post outlines my best advice for anyone trying to grow a large Twitter audience in 2025.

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This post is divided into two parts.

Part 1 is strategy — the lessons that everyone should consider while growing an audience. Most of this section is generalizable to building an audience on other social networks as well.

Part 2 is a collection of tactical tips — these can be helpful, but are constantly evolving with the shape of the algorithm that decides what content to prioritize. This section crosses over less effectively to other platforms.

If you are reading this post later on (the Internet lives forever), everything I share here is current as of February 2025.

Table of Contents

• The Strategy

  • Share unique insights that only you have

  • Be a trusted aggregator of information

  • Do your homework

  • Repeat yourself. Again and again.

  • Be Spicy

• The Tactics

  • Iteration

  • Writing a Strong Hook

  • Quirks of the Algorithm

The Strategy

Share unique insights that only you have

There is so much content on the Internet.

The single biggest challenge you will face is standing out from the drivel produced by the masses.

Why should someone listen to you?

The best approach is to focus on sharing content and insights than literally no one else in the world can.

Think about the knowledge that exists at the intersection of your passions, your profession and your experiences. Share that information — the content that you can speak about better than everyone else.

My Twitter account only started breaking out when I started sharing very specific details about my first startup, Teachable.

My account did not grow materially for years, but when I opened up to “building in public” and shared unique information that a lot of other founders would not, I started growing rapidly.

I shared:

• Our revenue numbers

• Specific dollar amounts that our top creators were making

• Strategies we were using to grow paying customers

• How much I paid myself in salary

• What valuations we raised money at

This was differentiated content! And as a startup founder, I was one of the only people that had access to that information.

After running my startup, I pivoted to talking about the hard-won lessons I learnt as a result of my specific experiences. The “lessons learned based on your unique knowledge” is a very reusable trope for growing an account.

What if you are not the founder of a startup?

You still likely have interesting things you can talk about that lie at that intersection of your passions and experiences.

Some examples:

• If you are a seasoned traveler, write about the specific itinerary you may have used on a recent trip along with captivating pictures.

• Live in NYC or another major city in the news? Share your lived experience about a major issue that a lot of people are talking about

• Work in private aviation? Break down specific parts of your industry that could be interesting to outsiders.

Here are some examples of threads illustrating what I mean:

Don’t forget the old adage: If you want to be a great writer, go live an interesting life.

Be a trusted aggregator of information

When I started my second startup Carry, I set a challenge to our team to grow our user base without spending a single dollar on acquisition.

We had to learn how to acquire customers for free — and I put my Twitter account to work as our primary channel.

However, almost none of the people that followed me at the time were there for personal finance or tax content. I was not a subject matter expert — and in some ways, it felt like starting from scratch.

I decided to give it a shot anyways.

I spent all my free time trying to level up my personal finance knowledge, and I studied what the larger and more successful accounts in my new niche were doing.

I finally got comfortable enough to share detailed breakdowns of my learnings as I was going along:

A lot of people started finding value in these types of posts and my audience started growing rapidly.

Interestingly, if I had a throwaway post go viral, I gained almost no new followers, but if an information dense thread went viral, I’d gain hundreds or even thousands of new followers.

There was no “hack” to being successful with this approach beyond having high quality content. The only tactical piece is mastering writing a strong hook, but we’ll get to that later.

One of my favorite finance accounts, The Money Cruncher has grown from 0 to 100K+ followers in a little over a year by continually shipping better content than anyone else:

There is no secret sauce to his approach — his account is pseudo-anonymous and in a very crowded field.

However, he succeeded by consistently shipping better content than everyone else and built a massive audience in a short period of time.

Do your homework

The best way of learning how to grow an audience in your specific vertical is studying the accounts doing a really great job.

Two tools that you will find invaluable in this process:

1. SocialBlade

You can use SocialBlade to track how many followers any major account on X has — and how fast they are adding or losing followers.

These are the recent numbers on my account:

You can use this to spy on anyone else in your industry by simply entering their username.

If you see a big spike on a certain date, you can typically reverse engineer the post(s) that have driven that outcome.

It’s particularly interesting to study accounts that have been growing rapidly in recent times, since a lot of legacy accounts have large follower bases but have been rendered irrelevant by recent algorithm changes.

2. Logged out Twitter

If you go to any Twitter profile while completely logged out from the platform on a web browser, the website will show you that account’s “greatest hits”.

You can use this to find content in your niche that has popped off historically — and what posts other accounts have typically used to grow really large.

Be careful though: while imitation is flattery, plagiarism is not.

While it’s OK to look at other peoples content for inspiration, please do not swipe content that you have not written yourself.

This is a small industry, and it’s frowned upon to steal content — or even specific hooks written by someone else. (You know who are you are…)

Repeat yourself. Again and again.

Social media algorithms are remarkably predictable.

Whenever you have a post do well, chances are you can rewrite it periodically and have it perform just as well — again and again… and again.

It’s unfortunate that this works as well as it does, but over time you can develop a library of content that has been “tested” and will keep performing.

Here’s a rewritten version of the exact same thread I have posted three separate times, with even better results every single time:

Typically, this also means you can take a version of the same general idea and cross-post it (with minor platform specific changes) to Linkedin, Threads and other places and it should perform well there too.

A relatively new Twitter account, Banger Archive, has grown very fast by sharing previously viral posts with attribution to the original author:

How often is too often?

Once a year is totally fine, and you can likely push it almost to once a quarter. Any more and people start to get annoyed, and it leads to churning through a lot of followers.

Be Spicy

The opposite of love isn’t hate, it’s indifference.

The state of social media algorithms today prioritize content that gets people to react to them — and the algorithm sadly does not differentiate between positive and negative reactions.

Content that provokes strong emotions by the responder travels further and nets out to be good for business.

An example of someone who has grown a massive account behind this principle is Nick Huber, who frequently provokes his audience to get a massive reaction (and eventually acquires followers who end up giving him new business):

It can be very helpful to have some strongly held beliefs including a somewhat public “enemy” that you use your account to frequently rail against.

This doesn’t have to be mean or petty — and can apply to an entire industry, but it makes for opinionated and spicy content.

Ramit Sethi frequently calls out beliefs he doesn’t stand by — rich people over-optimizing taxes, people who have blind faith in real estate always being a good investment and other irrational money beliefs.

While this approach doesn’t always make Twitter the most pleasant platform, the algorithm magnifies content that produces a strong reaction.

Do with this information as you please.

The Tactics

Once you get the strategy piece down, it’s worth mastering the specific tactics to grow on the platform.

These are always subject to change — as Twitter keeps updating their algorithm, what works now may not keep working in the coming months.

These tactics also cannot always be carried over to other platforms as each social network uses a substantially different algorithm.

Iteration

There is no major penalty for creating content that doesn’t perform super well on Twitter.

In fact, the only way of improving at creating content — and learning what people like is by frequent iterations and testing out lots of ideas rapidly.

Unlike a long form article (like this one!), you can test several ideas a day out on Twitter and quickly adapt to see what’s resonating.

I can’t tell you how many times I’ve worked meticulously on a content idea only to see it flop horribly, while a throwaway thought posted on the shitter has popped off and driven me a ton of engagement and followers.

Writing a Strong Hook

The single most important tactical skill needed to grow on Twitter is mastering the art of a strong hook.

A hook is the first line of the post that draws you in and makes you stop scrolling — for longer threads, it’s what makes the reader click in and expand the post to read the rest of it.

There is no better way of mastering this skill than by studying what successful accounts do and then imitating it until you get it right.

I’m sharing a few hooks of mine in my niche that have historically done very well:

An ideal hook is catchy enough to draw you in — yet leave you wanting to learn more to uncover the promise it holds.

A thread containing the same content can perform dramatically differently based on the quality of the hook — and practicing this will pay off as your account starts growing.

Quirks of the Algorithm

Here are some quirks with the Twitter algorithm and ways of playing it to your advantage:

• Links are penalized

  A post that contains a link is deprioritized by the algorithm since Twitter wants to keep you on their website (interestingly, Linkedin and Threads do not do this). There are several ways of working around this including uploading an image so the post type is an image (vs a link) or including a link in the second post.

• Tweets that generate replies are promoted

  You will frequently see larger accounts hack this by posting what’s referred to as “engagement bait” aka a question or something else that leads a large number of people to respond.

• Premium accounts are prioritized

  If you are taking growing an account seriously, you should 100% pay the $10 or whatever it costs to get X Premium as you get an automatic boost in the algorithm that more than pays for itself

• Giveaways for engaging with a post perform well (but may eventually be banned)

  A popular format for gaining easy engagement is to create a valuable resource but only send it via DM after someone engages with your post by replying or resharing the post. You can use Tweethunter to automate this at scale, but this can generate a lot of engagement as people want the resource — and the engagement drives it further in the feed.

  Warning: This is a somewhat annoying tactic and may end up being banned eventually, so these posts aren’t without risk and should be using sparingly.

What other strategies or tactics am I missing from this list?

If you found this content cool, I’m teaching a live workshop tomorrow on How to Market Yourself on Twitter / X.

The workshop is $99 for the public, but if you are a Carry or Carry Lab member, you get free access. Simply sign up from inside your account!

You can use coupon code ANKURLAB to get $50 off an annual plan of Carry Lab (so it’s only $149!)

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