How to gain initial followers on Twitter?

[Jonathan]

I currently have over 80,000 followers on Twitter for my sports team-based account, sharing the latest news, pics, videos, scores etc. However, despite having over 80,000 followers, it wasn't a quick process and has taken over 2 years.

I am looking to start another account for a completely different audience and I've been looking through Twitter and found lots of account who are following no one, either literally no one or other accounts in their network, yet have over 80,000 followers.

I understand that the success of these accounts is down to the popularity of the purpose of the account. They've come up with a good idea for an account and people have found them through RTs etc.

What I don't get is how they got their initial 500 followers. From my experience, after 500 followers, if the account is good, the RTs help you grow pretty quickly. Do you think they literally tweet to nobody for the first 50 tweets until they build up an audience or do you think they follow people for follow backs and then unfollow them all when they reach a significant amount?

Any and all answers are much appreciated and will help me so much!

[Cassandra]

If you have any friends who'd be willing to follow you, you can tweet to them. Otherwise you can definitely just send tweets out in general, just make sure you tag them with something so people can find you.