You tweet what people wish they tweeted by choosing your community, niche, tribe.
If your followers are a reflection of you in some form, they will gladly amplify you because you are their aspiration.
You are wording what they wish they worded. You are their messenger.
8/
9/ Your tweets should read like the poetry version of your domain.
Short, Elegant, Potent.
10/ Don't rush to prematurely select your niche, it's ok to have a cluster of loosely adjacent topics.
Allow your brand to emerge over time.
If you have something to sell be narrow.
If you have something to say be broad & bold.
You can fluctuate between these.
Your Followers to Following Ratio does matter in adding social proof to be seen as an "authority".
A: Followers 3,599 Following 4,297
B: Followers 2,300 Following 400
Even tho person B has fewer followers than A, B will be seen more as an authority.
To keep your following lean:
- Follow people, not companies, brands etc.
- Only Follow people who regularly tweet.
- Follow people who will engage with you.
- Use lists for interesting people you'd like to keep tabs on.
- Follow people who you wouldn't mind becoming more like.
Threads are the most effective way I've found to convert more followers.
Your thread should be focused, something you have direct experience with & continue more value per tweet in the thread, compared to the tweet standing off alone.
Threads are also the way you can lose followers.
I've LOST 10-20+ followers from an off thread.
Threads can clog up the timeline of other people, so they need to be valuable.
You can get muted or unfollowed if you overuse threads.
Mega Threads can be seen like a releasing movie production, album or launch.
They should be handled with care and if you have a smaller following. You should find followers with a large following who are willing to lend distribution w/ their following to share the thread.
If you need assistance from other accounts, don't directly ask for retweets.
Your thread should ideally be valuable to the account you hope can help.
If they enjoy it & have a history of retweeting, they will share it if they think their followers will like it as well.
17/ Build relationships before you build the following.
If you have multiple strong online relationships, overtime the following will come.
On Twitter, it does down in the DM.
Reach out to people and engage via DM.
Thank people if you've learned something from them.
Share resources and follow up from other tweets they've made in the past.
When you DM, message with the intent to give not ask.
After you've given a while, you'll be invited to ask.
Find people who can sponsor your growth on Twitter.
They will be your Twitter mentor of sorts.
Your sponsor loves the way you think & create and will help amplify your message.
Usually, a sponsor chooses you. You get chosen by working in public with consistent quality.
The Twitter feed & network have some dynamics that also affect your reach and that's Time โ๏ธ
When you tweet affects how many people potentially see your tweet.
For example here is a calculation of when my followers are most likely to engage with a tweet based on time of day standardized to my own time zone.
With this data, I can pick the appropriate date and time ranges to tweet.
The seasons also matter.
Most platforms have a seasonality effect on usage. With the Winter being the lowest usage due to holidays.
Similar to large productions you want to ship your best content for the right season.
A tweet's potential reach to propagate through the network is based on the engagement in the first 3 hrs or so since the tweet was made & is limited after about 18 hrs.
After about 3 days, the algorithm doesn't seem to push it any further, even retweets are dampened down.
Your following can go stale.
If you have 2k followers 1 yr ago and have 2k followers now, a large percentage of your followers may not use Twitter much & your tweets won't get reach.
If you get a large chunk of followers, your next few tweets should appease the interests of those who just followed you.
They are likely to promote your tweets for a short window of time while they remembered why they followed you.
After a couple weeks you can switch the topic.
Retweeting content is not a reason why people should follow you.
You need to create content and then people are likely to follow you.
Retweeting does seem to help your account engagement, to help see your other tweets in their feed, but if all they see is retweets, it's noise.
Delete retweets from your feed every 2-4 weeks, so people can find your content more easily when they browse your profile.
I'm considering building a tool to manage Twitter & may take on beta testers DM me
When building a following, your future followers are more likely to follow you if their favorite person is following you.
Your favorite person is likely to follow you if their next favorite person is following you.
Don't court the king, court the princes, the king will follow.
People follow personalities.
Be authentic and yet slightly more extreme than you would be in real life when you're online.
30/ Work in public, if the Public doesn't distract you from the work.
Otherwise, Share the process with the public, when the work is done.
Use the 3 Act Story to design the emotional intensity & pacing of pre-planned threads.
Adapt it to Twitter by starting strong & build the tension early in the first 5 tweets & end strong for a potential retweet or follow.
Every 5 tweets should have 1 tweet w/ retweet potential.
Think of hashtags on Twitter as a chatroom.
Use them rarely, if ever, unless that hashtag is a community that you identify with.
Usings # Hashtags are seen as outdated outside the context of tribe, trend, or ritual.
Good writing on Twitter is based on what your audience perceives as good enough.
To find out what that is you need to tweet every day, ideally in a place where others who are similar to you can see.
To maintain consistency, keep drafts in a simple notes app.
Another tip, If your thread gets too long start a separate/ new thread at a later date and link back to under the original, instead of continuing the chain under the original.
A new thread will have a new opportunity to propagate twitter & won't get hit w/ date penalty.
Thanks for following along more tips to come.
Tip: Utilize anticipation so people follow to see where the journey goes ๐
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An Annual Review Tech-Stack makes the process a lot easier.
The tools support the habits you want to cultivate in the long-term and provides tracking to help you manage and experiment with systems that can make your life better.
Here's a list of tools I've used ๐งต
I'm experimenting more with writing with my voice when I go through writer's block.
Using Audio Transcription
Ottter.ai is my tool of choice when it comes to voice transcriptions.
The transcriptions are accurate, searchable, highlightable, a summary of keywords is created and you can share the transcripts with others.
Computer Science > SWE > Back-End > Javascript > Node
I tend to group by:
Skills I need to Learn (motivation/obstacle)
Skills I want to Learn (motivation/curiosity)
Skills that should be prioritized
Skill-dependent Skills
Time-dependent Skills
People-dependent skills
Resource-dependent skills
Questions that I ask myself when & after reading ๐ค๐
What did I like?
What did I dislike?
What do I disagree with?
What was surprising?
What ideas or statements changed my belief?
1/ Question for you: What question would you addโ
2/ What problems are discussed?
What questions does the book try to answer?
What questions does the book answer well?
What can I teach from answers?
What did I learn from the answers?
What questions does the book fail to answer?
3/ What categories does this book fit into?
What keywords or topics come up a lot?
What where the key takeaways?
What is the book telling me to do (directive)?
What books inspired this book?
What other book would be this book's antagonist?