To grow your Twitter following you need to be able to answer a single question:

Why should someone follow you?

Here are a few thoughts about how to answer it...

THREAD

1. Why should someone follow you?

The answer is the same for everyone…and completely unique to you.

Let's start with the universal answer.

People should follow you because you PROVIDE VALUE.

No one will invite you into their feed unless they're going to get value in return.

2. You also need to come up with a unique answer to explain why people should follow you.

This requires you to make two key decisions:

• What specific value will you provide in your tweets?

• Who seeks that value?

3. If you can't answer the two questions above, you can't define why someone should follow you.

And that means few people will.

Here's how I answer those questions for my Twitter account...

4. The specific value I provide is information to help people better produce, promote, and profit from their creations.

And the people who seek that value are creators.

Those statements guide my Twitter activity and they're the reason I've attracted (almost) 13k followers.

5. Figuring out how to answer, "Why should someone follow you?" is only half the battle.

You've then got to live up to it.

Here's how to do that...

6. How to communicate why people should follow you:

• Make your Twitter bio and pinned tweet communicate why someone should follow you.

(Not just who you are, but the value they'll get from you.)

• Make 90% of your tweets reflect the reason someone should follow you.

7. If you're not doing those things, people aren't going to follow you (unless you're already famous).

When you look at your account through this lens, you'll likely realize a lot of what you currently do on Twitter is actually holding you back.

For example...

8. Those viral videos you retweeted may be amazing, but unless the reason for people to follow you is to get viral videos, they're not helping you grow your audience.

9. That political rant you went on?

Good for you, but not good for getting you followers unless the reason people should follow you is for political commentary.

10. Your bio with all the emojis and the sarcastic comment? 

That doesn't promise value to a potential follower which is why people giggle at it and move on without following you when they see it.

11. There's no one way you "must" use Twitter  -  do whatever you want.

But recognize if you choose to tweet random stuff, use it to entertain yourself, or just vent your frustration, you're going to struggle to grow your following.

12. You can get lots of people to follow you on Twitter…but only if you give them a specific reason to do so.

Start by answering the question...

Why should someone follow you?

(I'll RT the best replies to help you get some more of the followers you deserve!)