I recently discovered I’d been using Twitter completely wrong. So I changed my style and doubled my follower growth. Here’s how:

First of all, Twitter will never be X in my book. Whatever you call it, love it or hate, you can’t deny the impact. It remains the front-page of the internet, the overton window, the world’s town square.

I have recently begun spending more time again on Twitter, simply because of its incredible volume of high-value AI/startup content. For many people (founders, brands, marketers) being on Twitter in 2025 is absolutely imperative.

The downside of Twitter of course is that it’s notoriously hard to break through and achieve engagement as a small account (<1000 followers) compared to other platforms, which can be discouraging. I know it has been for me.

So about a month ago I decided to sit down and figure it out for myself. I downloaded my account analytics and went back through every single one of my tweets from the past year ranked by engagement (likes, impressions, new follows, etc.). Below is my super quick notes on what’s worked, what doesn’t, my recommendations:

Twitter Engagement Strategy 2025

Here are 4 big recommendations for people with under 1000 followers to improve your Twitter enaggement. First, a quick retrospective of my tweets:

• By the numbers, I tweeted `1500 times in the past year. About 1/3rd (500) of them were replies. Replies on average got 5x more impressions. Average impression on a standalone tweet was <200 lifetime

• Of all these tweets, 9 of them(!) achieved more than 1 new follower. Pretty much every one of those was a tweet at someone famous or a request for a service (ex: looking for logo designer, new CRM, etc.)

• Of my top 25 highest-engagement tweets, only 3 of them(!!) were standalones (ie non-reply tweets). Of those, 2 were short-form videos, and 1 was a self-ingratiating post about how good I am at stuff.

A lot of this was extremely surprsing to me. I never thought of replies as worth my time. But apparently they are a critical part of how Twitter’s algorithm connects your content with other accounts. Now, here’s my recommendations for how to instantly increase your Twitter following

1) Forget about getting >100 impressions on standalone tweets

• If you ask me, any non-reply standalone tweet, thread, or text purely text-based post, no matter how good or provocative or high signal, is simply not worth the time if you are optimizing for engagement.

• The value function for posting these is non existent if you don’t already have a following (yet this is where ppl spend most of their time)

• It may help you retain followers, but it generally won’t help you find new ones. Sure okay, you need something for ppl to see when they visit your profile, but really standalone tweets should only be a small % of your posts, maybe 10-25% (which is counterintuitive to most of us!)

2) Instead, get impressions by mastering replies

• My biggest realization is has been that the vat majority of my highest engagement posts have come in the replies. So again, these should be the majority of your posts.

• Here you can get impressions by posting memes, being funny, the general idea is that you provide supplemental value to the OG post and ride the coattails of impressions (example, example, example, example)

• An off-shoot of the reply is to simply @ a big name (person or brand) and give them a complement (and hope they repost or like:-). This has worked surprisingly well for me a number of times (here, here, here, here, here) I suppose most people want others to see complements about themselves.

3) Sprinkle in a few high-effort / life update posts if you must

• If you are too proud to be a reply-guy, you can get impressions on your own but it requires high effort, a standalone text-based tweet generally has a low probability of impressions

• The highest-impression standalone tweets I’ve had are typically either one of two things: 1) a video or 2) huge life announcement. These might do a few hundred/thousand impressions, which is much more than typical standalone text tweet (~50 impressions) but much less than a good reply (10K+)

• Some examples of high-effort video or thought leadership posts (sicko hard mode but effective if you can put in the work) → here, here

• Some examples of ‘big number’ life-update tweets, one here about how we moved to Chicago (also a video), one here about a really big day we had with our startup

4) Old reliable if all else fails: Bot Farm

• If all else fails, one thing that has always worked is tweeting some sort of service request like “I’m looking for a video editor / logo designer” - without fail you will get hundreds of likes and impressions, mostly from bots

• I haven’t really seen a sustainable way of doing this, and I’d avoid pressing this button unless you have a genuine need, but certainly a way to get impressions (examples here, here, here)

Anyways, hopefully that provides a bit of guidance for anyone new to Twitter/X and trying to come up with a strategy. I know I am still certainly figuring it out for myself, but finally seeing some repeatable growth following these steps for myself.

If anything I’d highly encourage anyone to simply go through your Twitter analytics and look at which types of posts do well, which dont, and lean into the ones that do best.

Safe travels!
Ramsey