Growing your Twitter audience?
Ray posted in the "Introduce Yourself" thread about how fun and easy it's been to grow his Twitter audience. I've barely been focusing on that at all with Indie Hackers, so before I embark on that journey, I'd like to hear from you guys what the best strategies and resources are!
Hi, Courtland!
I've been a lurker of Indie Hackers for some time and I'm happy to finally be able to contribute somehow.
My first suggestion is to automate your process for posting on social media. From the looks of it, it seems like you've started using Buffer (correct me if I'm wrong). The key to making sure your queue is loaded with all of your awesome content is preparation through scheduling.
My general rule of thumb is that I would like to set things up once for scheduling, so I follow a day of, the day after, 1 week, 1 month, 3 months, 6 months, and 1 year.
Using A Dark Room iOS an example:
day of: New Interview ft @amirrajan's A Dark Room iOS ($7500/mo). How he turned his labor of love project profitable: (link)
day after: .@amirrajan spills the beans on how, A Dark Room iOS, hit #1 in the App store. Don't Miss Out: (link)
one week: Check "Making a #1 iOS game" off your bucket list. @amirrajan discusses the good, the bad, and ugly in making it happen: (link)
one month: "Get something out there. Build something and ship it." - @amirrajan, A Dark Room iOS (link)
3 months: @amirrajan accidentally made a top selling app. Read how his "dumb luck" made him $800,000+: (link)
6 months: What's in @amirrajan's marketing toolkit? Transparency and Being Genuine helped make his game a top selling app: (link)
1 year: #tbt Turning your labor of love project into a profitable business. @amirrajan breaks it down: (link)
You have a huge backlog of content at your fingertips, plus you're creating more as time progresses. You'll be churning out these tweets and promoting the content in no time. This is one way of getting your Twitter audience.
Besides just sharing your own material, turn Indie Hackers, into the one source place for getting the latest in tech, startups, etc. I would set up a Feedly and curate the newsfeeds till it spits out content that's relevant to Indie Hackers. I saw you did that with a few of your tweets, but to keep Indie Hackers true and niche, I'd limit those posts.
Another way is just pure engagement with your audience or followers. Clearly, we can see the energy you have for Indie Hackers, there's no doubt about it. Leveraging your enthusiasm is what keeps folks coming for more and supporting your project. Heck, that's why I take a few minutes out of my schedule to read your emails and interviews. There's a lot of noise out there - you are the reason why your project stands out amongst other platforms.
Lastly, just continue sharing and creating content that's consistent and strive for quality. The interviews you have posted are all awesome. People will recognize it and will follow you :-)
Another place to check out is Online Geniuses. They are a fantastic resource for all online marketing related topics. I follow them daily and they always share gold in slack or through their newsletter.
Hope this helps a little bit and love what you're sharing so far!
Wow, this advice is amazing!! Thanks so much Annette! 🙏
My favorite part is also the spacing and re-use of content. It's a really smart way to use Buffer. I end up getting a lot of "Your Buffer is empty!" emails from them haha, so anything I can do to build up a backlog is awesome.
Btw, you're really good at coming up with good variations on copy. I'm horrible at it, although slowly getting better.
Will take a look at Online Geniuses!
Courtland -
You've been doing a fantastic job with your copy and content for tweets. Keep up the good work. Practice always makes perfect so definitely keep at it!
I look forward to seeing more tweets from IndieHackers and thanks for the shout out!
That's a really nice strategy. I like how it spaces out and re-uses content over a long long time. I'm definitely using this in the future!
Yes - for sure! Content takes up a lot of time and effort, you definitely want to use it as many times as you can :-) The spacing makes it less spammy and saves you time in promoting at a later time.
Automate ALL THE THINGS. ;)
@annette, I realize I'm super late to the party, but this is awesome advice! Like many others, I too was posting my content once to social media and then leaving it to die.
I then started recycling posts, but realized how much effort it took to do manually. I was recently reading Courtland's solo-founder blog post and stumbled upon this thread. I think your advice is awesome, and I hope you don't mind, but I incorporated your dynamic schedule into my product that I'm building. Just wanted to give you a shout out as I think it's a great idea! 🙌
Screenshot: http://static.cloudcampaign.io/img/dynamic_interval_schedule.png
Thanks for the awesome feedback! I haven't logged into my IndieHackers account in awhile and was pleasantly surprised by your comment.
This is awesome :-) Thanks!
I like this idea, as apparently do a lot of people. My main question would be how you implement this?
You seemed to insinuate you use buffer, which I do as well. I'm not following how to properly implement a strategy like this utilizing buffer, being that buffer's main functionality is to feed items into a queue and take them off the top to post.
Do you bypass the normal functionality and manually queue all of these tweets? If so, do you place them all in at once, manually, or have another means of automating this?
Any insight you have would be wonderful :)
Thanks,
Adam
Hi Adam,
I should've specified that I use the paid version of Buffer. This allows me to schedule things way in advance which is a great feature they offer. It's definitely worth the money if you have a ton of content that you want to share, i.e. if you're creating something new every week and want it to be used more than once.
I know with the free version, it goes in order of how you add the content. I used the free version at first and thought it would suffice, but it became really annoying to move things around manually. Now, I just open it up in week or month view and pop them in the time frame that I choose.
How I Implemented My Strategy:
For my scheduling, I post 3x a day, 8:10am, 12:30pm, 8:57pm for all 7 days. My target demographic is strength coaches, athletic trainers, and sports professionals. I know with sport coaches/athletic trainers, they wake up super early so I schedule "breaking news" style tweets while they drink their protein shake or eat breakfast. 12:30pm is around the time lunch happens, so they're just scrolling just to scroll and that's when I sprinkle in some educational pieces, i.e. Learning at Lunch, so company podcasts, case studies, and etc. 8:57pm, people are winding down, so they check their phone and want to read things that don't require you to think, so I place "easy on the eyes and brains" pieces. Again, this is specific to my industry, so it definitely can vary for your company.
As for organizing all the content, I write out all the tweets I want to use on a separate Word doc. I review my Buffer content and schedule to see what I want to post and make sure I'm not posting the same types of pieces.
Also, establish some goals for your Twitter presence. Do you want to get people to buy your product? Educate the market? Or increase brand awareness?
Depending on your goals, your content editorial plan will vary. Ours is to educate the market and also be an industry leader in our sector. Hence why we focus a lot of case studies, podcasts, sharing white papers, and groundbreaking articles.
In our case, the original content dominates hence why I repurpose them for long extended periods of times.
Hope this answers your question and feel free to msg me if you want to bounce ideas or if I can help in any way.
-Annette