🐦 My Twitter growth strategy explained

PTCC #008

In the mail 📧

• The story 🎒: Let’s talk Twitter strategy.

• Small ideas💡: Part-time creator ideas to ponder.

• Web highlights 🌍: Cool things this week.

• Tiny thought 🆕: On success.

Read time: 2 minutes

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THE STORY:

The Dead Simple 30-Minute Writing System Helps Me Publish Crazy Amounts of Content

It took me 2.5 years to master this

Photo by Alexander Shatov on Unsplash

If you pay attention to the news, you’ll have seen non-stop Twitter chat this week. It’s made me rethink my Twitter growth strategy and I wanted to tell you about it. Get your thoughts.

The system is this:

• Choose top performing article 

• Distill and refine into succinct tweet 

• Review all tweets for the week (on Saturday)

• Choose top performing tweet and iterate to improve

Recently I wrote this post that hit my number 1 spot overnight. I bundled that article into a tweet (and sometimes I do it the other way around tweet → article). That tweet is here:

My Twitter

This does one of two things:

• It gives me complete clarity of the ideas I’m trying to convey.

• Writing it out a second time gives me a renewed sense of focus (making it easier to improve). 

Then onto the fun bit. The reviewing of my tweets from the week. Here we have 5 tweets that score over and above anything else, you can see them featured below. 

My Twitter

The aim is to look for themes. To try and understand what the top 5 tweets have in common and what I can take forward into next week.

Here are my observations:

• Pictures work — 4/5 featured a photo in the main tweet, all photos were of my own work, not someone else’s, this is an important distinction. 

• Threads are hard work — it takes clicking off the main feed and giving A LOT of attention, that’s high-friction. More effort = less likely. 

• Show your work — I suspect because a lot of the content on Twitter is talking about stuff that people haven’t actually done, it resonates when people know that ‘you’ are the person actually achieving these things. 

• Bragging never works — ‘I know it’s not much’ tells my readers I’m not shouting from the rooftops blowing my own trumpet, I’m just showing my work.

• Emojis seem to work — 3/5 posts have emojis. 

• Less is more — The top 3 Tweets had less than 17 words.

But understanding is just a step in many steps. The worst thing you can do is go to all that effort and then not learn from it. If I now simply, noticed all that, and then went back to posting the complete opposite. 

The point is to iterate. Which means improvement. Here’s how I’ll do that.

My iteration

My next 5 tweets will be featuring all of those things mentioned above. I now have a framework (or a system) to write tweets from, it’s this:

• Add emojis

• Less than 17 words

• Add a picture — of my own work

• Be humble and educate, don’t brag

• Talk about ‘how I’ not ‘how someone else’

• Focus on singular tweets, or if writing a thread, the opener should be brief

Here’s some new content I’m considering putting out. Let’s see how it meets my new criteria. 

• Emoji (1 per post) ✓

• 16 words (under the 17) ✓

• Picture (yes) my own content ✓

• ‘How I’ not ‘how someone else’ ✓

• Non-bragging / annoying content ✓

I’ll let you know how it goes.

An update from this morning: it’s in the top 8 tweets of the week already.

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SMALL IDEAS:

• Playing forever - what actions would you take if you knew you were playing forever? How would you show up if this was your life’s work?

• Systematization of frustrations - take all the things that frustrate you in a day, write them down and then build a system around them.

• Play for quality - when you look at most content on the internet, you can spot the gaps. Find those gaps and capitalize on them.

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Across the web

• Adam Kay’s new book Undoctored is a must-read (this is not sponsored it’s just incredible).

• Watch Kevin Rose tell MFM podcast about his investment in Twitter (and his lol moment with Gary V), what he thinks of Mark Zuckerberg and how he made $100M/year on his watch blog.

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Tiny thought

Success isn’t remarkable. When you think about the people that win, when you put it together, it’s not surprising that they’ve won. It’s not like you’re scratching your head thinking how on Earth did they get there. Most of the time it smacks you in the face with its simplicity. Most successful people have won because they’ve been playing forever, they provide x10 the value that anyone else does or their product is just way better. Simple. But hard.