How to Write a Viral Twitter Thread

A Thread Worth 1,000 Tweets

To write a good thread, you need to understand how Twitter growth works.

Twitter growth is not a continuous process. It’s not even an exponential process. It’s a series of small jumps that lead to big growth. That’s important to know because you don’t want to waste your effort on things that won’t move the needle.

If you’re running a business, there are many things you could do. But one of the highest ROI things isn’t focusing on operations, but instead focusing on things that actually make money or increase the value of your business.

Same thing with Twitter. You don’t want to focus on the little things that drive a 5% increase in performance. You want to focus on the things that actually drive a 50% increase in performance. You want to maximize your ROI. AKA you want to grow the most by writing the least.

For example:

You don’t want to focus on the lighting in your profile picture, the design of your banner, or even the specific word choices in your bio.

You want to focus on the things that actually drive growth. That’s

• Good threads
• Proving your competence
• And a bio that makes people want to act on something (like following you, sending you a DM, or sharing your profile)

Notice how consistent good tweets isn’t there. That’s intentional. Because Twitter growth works in jumps. And one thread could easily outperform 1000 tweets. Below is an analytics screenshot from a Twitter entrepreneur:

Notice how it works in jumps. Not in linear or exponential growth.

So how do you write 1 thread that gets you what 1000 tweets gets you?

Part 1: The Hook

You want to focus on a hook that raises the perceived value of the thread. That’s important because threads are everywhere on Twitter. Everyone knows how effective they are.

But with every good thing comes a bad thing. People are starting to mute the word “thread” and the thread emoji. They don’t open them as much. Some are annoyed by it.

Good news is that won’t be your problem if you follow what’s in this article.

Write your thread hook in a way that makes people think that if they don’t open it, they’re doing themselves a disservice. Make them feel like they’re missing out on something by not opening what you’re trying to show them.

How do you do that? You raise the perceived value of your thread.

Instead of saying something like “10 books that will 10x your productivity” which is a standard Twitter thread title, you could do something different.

Show people that they’re losing money by not reading your thread.

For example, you could say:

You could put in Tony Robbins, James Clear, or whoever your favorite productivity guru is.

See how the first thread hook didn’t have a high perceived value? It was just about productivity. The second thread hook talks about cutting your work time by 67%. That means you triple your productivity while making triple your income - it also drops a name everyone recognizes.

Here’s another example. Let’s say you want to write a thread about your service and how you deliver it. You could write a “how I deliver my copywriting service” thread.

But that’s not a good hook. Why? Because it doesn’t have a high perceived value.

Instead, you could say something like:

See how the perceived value of this hook is ridiculously high? It references knowledge worth $4,500 or more.

Your readers feel the pain of not reading the thread. Always think about how you can include something that makes your thread have a higher perceived value.

Here’s a few ways you could do this:

• Name drop by talking about something like “a strategy Jeff Bezos uses to communicate with his employees at Amazon. Amazon is worth $x billion dollars, copy his Y systems:”
• Analyze a popular Netflix series like F1’s Drive to Survive and talk about why it’s so engaging.
• Break down an ad everyone’s seen and talk about why it went viral, like the Most Interesting Man in the World campaign by Dos Equis, Porsche advertisements, or direct response copywriting from the 80’s.
• Give out a lesson for free that other people charge for
• Teach a lesson you’ve taken years to learn by distilling into a thread

The perceived value of the thread has to be high. You can’t escape that. That’s one way to write a viral thread hook. The hook is 50% of the thread’s performance. The other 50% is the content and the call to action. So let’s talk about that.

Part 2: The Content

Each tweet in your thread should be able to make sense as a standalone tweet. Include only one idea per tweet. That allows people to quote-tweet it in a way. So instead of having to share the top of the thread, they’ll share specific tweets from it - which in turn will lead to the entire thread being shared.

To help this, I suggest numbering each tweet. Say you’re sharing 21 tips to do something. Number each tweet 1), 2), 3), all the way up to 21). That’s how you should write the body.

A common mistake is people put too much focus on the hook and not enough focus on the body. Yes, if the hook isn’t good, people won’t read it. But if the content isn’t good, people won’t share it. So you have to do both.

How do you make it good? By giving people value in one of the “big three” areas:

• Health - this will help you get stronger, lose fat, or live longer
• Wealth - this will help you make more money, invest smarter, and create generational wealth
• Relationships - this will help you meet people, save your relationships, or make more friends

When you write a thread about these topics, you should make the hook and content so good that people would be insane not to read it. That leads us to the next topic.

Part 3: The Call to Action

The CTA depends on 3 things:

1. Do you want followers?

2. Do you want email subscribers?

3. Do you want sales?

It’s important to define your goal because you only ask for one thing.

The best marketing campaigns of all time only ask for one thing. So define what you want from your thread.

If you want engagement, then tell people “hey, if you engage with the top tweet, maybe I’ll write a follow up thread on this topic - but only if it gets X likes” at the end of your thread.

If you want email subscribers, add a lead magnet - a free download of a PDF, a video, or email sequence. Link to a page where they can get more in-depth content about the topic of your thread. You could also make your thread a “part 1” of whatever you’re teaching while “part 2” will only be available to people who join your email list.

If you want sales, craft your offer in a way that makes people want to say yes. Your offer should be something you can put in a tweet. Ask them to DM you. In the DMs, you’ll sell them - a good resource for this is $100m Offers by Alex Hormozi (it’s $0.99 on Amazon).

Summary

In conclusion, here’s how you write a good thread:

Step 1) Make the perceived value of reading the thread incredibly high

Step 2) Write the content in a way that each tweet can be distilled as its own concept

Step 3) Create a CTA tailored to what you want

Why do you want to write threads? Because they’re the easiest way to grow. Remember, Twitter growth isn’t linear or exponential - it happens in small jumps leading to big growth. Writing threads is how you get those jumps.

Want to see over 500 proven high-engagement thread starters so you can see what’s currently working so you don’t have to figure it out on your own?

Check out TweetHunter. One of our many resources is our thread delay, where each tweet in your thread can be delayed by 60 seconds. Why does that matter? If you post a thread all at once, Twitter only shows the first three tweets. If you delay each tweet by 60 seconds, Twitter will re-surface your thread at the top with every single tweet that gets added to it.

TweetHunter is also free to cancel at anytime. Try it free here!