How to Go Viral on Twitter: 14 Highly Effective Strategies

With new platforms like TikTok and Discord climbing into the spotlight as the platforms easiest to grow a community on, it may seem that Twitter is no longer worth pushing for marketing yourself or your business. However, Twitter still is one of the best platforms to connect with other people and spark conversations. The platform rewards openness and active participation, meaning that whether you’re a brand or business looking to connect with consumers, an artist connecting with fans, or a regular person wanting to expand your network, Twitter is the place to do it.

Twitter’s short-length format has always been unique thanks to the opportunities it creates. With tweets limited to 280 characters, you need to condense what you have to say to the real essentials.

The most effective way to reach more people on Twitter is to have a tweet or thread go viral, being pushed to lots of people’s feeds because of it, and gaining you new followers in the process, making going viral easier the next time. But you may be puzzled in regards to how to go viral on Twitter. This is what this article aims to answer by presenting 14 strategies to add to your tweeting habits and go viral on Twitter.

What Is a Viral Tweet?

The phrase "tweet" is jargon for what users of Twitter do when they submit a message or text to their profile. Their tweet may become viral, just like this one did, if they're lucky.

Why do tweets go viral?

There’s no clear-cut definition of a viral tweet, but the general rule is that it has tens if not hundreds of thousands of likes, retweets, and replies. All of which help push the tweet out to more users, as the algorithm deems the tweet valuable and interesting for other users that aren’t followers of the author of the tweet.

As there is no clear-cut way of defining a viral tweet, there is no guaranteed map on how to go viral on Twitter. A tweet can go viral for many reasons. It can raise awareness of a relevant issue, be very educational, or just be truly funny. The underlying theme is that it has value to the reader and prompts responses and reactions. That being said, in this article, we will bring out a few strategies to implement in your tweeting habits that will increase your odds of going viral.

How to Go Viral on Twitter

1. Write valuable content

As obvious as it may seem, this always deserves repeating. No other answer to how to go viral on Twitter can come before good content. No matter what other strategy you may use, if your tweets aren’t good and they don’t provide any value, no one will want to retweet them. It’s easy to fall into the trap of trying to tweet selfishly and just promote, promote, promote, but that won’t help you connect with your followers. Instead, mix the acceptable self-promotion with tweets that have no hidden motive behind them and just provide readers with value. 

However, value doesn’t have to be only educational. Funny tweets, ones expressing your opinion, inviting conversation and dialogue are also valuable for people, as every person wants to laugh from time to time and also wants to connect with other people. A good rule of thumb is before posting your tweet, think about whether you’d be happy to see it on your own timeline and would you want to share it with your followers.

2. Ask for a retweet

It may sound too easy to work, but sometimes the simplest answers are the ones that work. Retweets are what will have the biggest impact on your tweets going viral because your tweet will now be posted on the retweeter’s profile and their followers will see your tweet on their feed.

Asking for a retweet can seem odd, especially for newer users, and you’re right to a degree. Asking for a retweet must be done in the right way, however, as just asking for a retweet in every tweet you post will just make you look desperate. Write a value-packed tweet and add a call to action like “RT if you found value in this tweet” or another similar call to action. People often have no problem doing what you ask of them, but they won’t think to do it without you asking. Casually asking for engagement is nothing to feel weird about and there’s no reason to not ask sometimes. Just make sure that your tweet is something actually worth retweeting, as discussed in the first point, and asking for retweets will be the perfect answer for how to go viral on Twitter.

3. Keep your tweets short

Twitter is already a very short-length-oriented platform, as the character limit for a tweet is 280 characters. That said, data shows that the tweets that perform best, are usually around 110 characters long. People just don’t want to read you going on and on about a topic if it could be expressed in a shorter and better-hitting way. Twitter threads are a big part of how to go viral on Twitter and we will discuss them later in the article, but singular tweets should be kept as concise as possible.

4. Time your tweets

No matter how great your tweet may be and how nicely you may ask for a retweet, if your followers don’t see the tweet, it won’t matter. If you already have any sort of following, it may be a good idea to look into your Twitter analytics to see, at what times are your followers most actively engaging with your tweets, and make sure to post at least some of your content at those times.

If you don’t yet have a large enough following to do this, you can just post at the times that have been found to provide the best results, this being around noon for both B2B tweets and B2C tweets.

5. Tweet more

You miss all the shots you don’t take. How to go viral on Twitter? - use the platform more. The more you tweet, the bigger the odds of one of those tweets landing with your audience and it taking off. Of course, there is a line to be mindful of. Unless you’re posting a thread or going off on a one-time tweet-storm, your followers won’t have the time or energy to read tweets coming in after every minute.

A superb amount of tweets would be about two to five tweets per day, plus replies and retweets of your own. This gives your followers enough time to read your tweets and engage with them. Another benefit of tweeting often is the age-old saying of practice makes perfect. The more you tweet, the faster you develop a sense of your style for tweeting, what you like to write about, and what is connecting with your audience. A great way to make tweeting a habit is to challenge yourself to tweet every day for 90 days. Pick a topic that you enjoy and that would provide value to your audience, and talk about it for 90 days.

6. Use both singular tweets and threads

While Twitter is more focused on short content with its limits set on the length of tweets, Twitter threads allow you to give more insight into a topic with multiple tweets. You’ll still have to keep it short, as too long of a thread will not be read, but you’ll get some more room to play around with. Using both regular tweets and threads in a balanced mix will help you both gradually build your following and increase your odds of going viral. Many twitter experts say that tweets get you short-term attention, while threads help you get real followers that help you consistently get big numbers.

A short tweet helps gather quick likes and retweets and make a first impression on consumers. A tweet’s two to three lines can be quickly read and if found interesting, the tweet will be liked and the reader will move on, sometimes not even noticing who the author is. How many likes do you need on Twitter to go viral? Anywhere from 50-100 likes is more than enough to kickstart your tweet.

Threads allow you to connect and establish trust with your audience, as people who read your entire thread are most likely very interested in the topic and care for your input and opinion. Threads are also a great way to spark conversation and dialogue.

A common suggestion for balancing tweets and threads is to post a thread once or twice per week and a few tweets every day.

7. Tweet about relevant topics and hashtags

While there is a lot of discussion about whether hashtags really do work for boosting engagement and virality, especially on other platforms, Twitter’s hashtags help your tweets be noticed in regards to specific topics, especially relevant news and niches. It’s usually agreed upon that the best etiquette for using hashtags is to have up to two or three per tweet. 

Make sure the hashtags you use truly reflect what you’re saying in your tweet, so people that are diving into that topic will actually find your tweet valuable. Hashtags can also help build a community and be a part of one, with many custom hashtags being used this way, especially in the new crypto and NFT space.

8. Use links

Data shows that tweets that include links to outside sources receive more engagement. Many studies indicate that news articles and other educational updates are the types of tweets that get retweeted the most. If you have a blog on your website, tweets are a perfect way to promote a new article to your followers and also provide value by bringing out a key quote from the article.

9. Use humor

Humor is contagious. The internet’s original functions from the beginning have been education and entertainment, and what kind of entertainment is better than one that makes us laugh. No matter what topic, a funny joke can go a long way in piquing people’s interests.

You don’t need to become a comedian overnight and make all of your tweets anecdotes, but injecting some lightheartedness shows your followers a different side of you that allows for a deeper connection, which in turn means more followers and engagement.

Funny tweets are the ones that go viral the most. Unless you’re speaking on a very specific niche topic, a truly funny joke will be receivable by anyone, making it an easy tweet to share with others in the form of retweets.

10. Focus on building relationships and an engaged following

Throughout this article, we’ve continuously repeated that the most important thing about tweeting is that your tweets need to bring value to the reader of the tweet. While it may seem clear and understandable, it can be hard to achieve, especially when the only thing you’re thinking of when tweeting, is that the tweet needs to go viral.

Changing your mindset from needing to go viral to wanting to build a relationship with your audience and consistently grow it, will benefit you a lot more in the long run. An engaged follower-base will make your great tweets go viral by themselves, without you needing to specifically focus on tailoring the tweets for virality.

Focus on making sure you engage with people on the platform in the comments of both your own tweets and other tweets connected with your niche. It’s those relationships that will pay you back big time in the long run.

11. Hire a marketing agency

If all of this seems like a lot, you’re not exactly sure where to start implementing all of this, and you’re not sure you have the time and energy for it, then hiring a marketing agency might be an option to consider. A marketing/social media management agency can help you with managing and effectively growing your presence on Twitter and other social media platforms.

The benefit of working with an agency instead of bringing in someone in-house is that you don’t need to waste any time on training and onboarding them to your team. An agency has its own team, that is carefully cultivated in order to bring the best results for clients. Working with an agency can help save you both time and money, as the agency will have experience in working in the field and can use that experience to grow your following faster than you could ever do on your own.

Another option for hacking your success on Twitter is to jump-start it by buying followers, retweets, and/or likes. This way you will be set up from the beginning and can use the bought asset to assert yourself as an authority, eliminating the main reason for people not following and trusting a new page: no social proof. Social proof is one of the main ways humans determine whether to trust a source or person, as most people prefer to go with the crowd. Having a big following also utilizes FOMO (fear of missing out), making people even more inclined to follow you themselves, as they don’t want to miss out on the content others are already actively following.

The important thing to note, however, is that if you aren’t consistently posting quality content, then no matter how many followers you may buy, new followers likely won’t stay around for long.

That said, buying followers is a very efficient way to speed up your growth on Twitter and can be a great answer for how to go viral on Twitter. Check out our offers to learn more.

12. Build an Authentic Following

You should try to make your profile worth following. Post engaging and interesting content that people are more likely to share with their peers. If you produce content like that on a regular basis, you will gradually receive more authentic followers.

13. Host a Giveaway

Running a Twitter giveaway is one of the finest methods to have your tweets go viral. Freebies are popular, but competitions may expand your audience to thousands of Twitter users quickly as well.

14. Use Hashtags to Go Viral on Twitter

To organize Tweets by keyword, use hashtags. People classify Tweets and make them easier to find in Twitter searches by adding the hashtag sign (#) before a pertinent term or phrase.

Conclusion

There are many ways how to get viral on Twitter and they all can have a major impact on how well your tweets are received and how viral they will go. Above all, however, is quality, valuable content. We’ve answered your question about how to go viral on Twitter, but nothing will happen, unless you take the points brought out in this article and put them into practice, and start posting tweets worthy of going viral.

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