How to build an audience using twitter
Hey guys, I see a lot of developers using Twitter to share their progress and/or cool stuff they are working on.
Knowing nothing about Twitter, how can I get some exposure to future tweets so that I can start building an audience on Twitter? Do hashtags work well, or what kind of strategies are you guys using? Perhaps one of you has made a tool to help with this?
I've built twitter followings for a number of companies (sadly never for myself 😂)...
Couple of pointers:
# of followers is not important -- so avoid any hacky sorts of growth strategy. You end up with large numbers that don't engage -- separately you won't have a following that has any identity, which means it's hard to grow in a meaningful direction.
Focus on quality over quantity -- eg. conversations or postings that have actual useful information. You want to stand for something. -- It's hard at first, but it means you attract the right sort of people (people who engage), who will in turn attract quality people... eventually, the snowball will start collecting snow.
5K of quality peeps is way better than 100K of cruft.
Think about it like any marketing exercise -- what do you want to stand for, who are you trying to reach, what is interesting. -- Then go find the conversations that are happening and engage. Once you have a quorum, you'll start seeing pickup on your posts.
hashtags + keywords -- they help, but again make sure they're relevant to what / who you want to reach (figure this out by studying posts). Some things twitter's algo picks up on better than most.
Lastly, pay attention to your analytics -- Impressions + engagement , w/ engagement being the more important one. It will seem like a pointless exercise early on, but eventually you start to see patterns in your posts. Expect 1 in 10 posts to "hit".
Good luck!
Sorry for the delay, but thanks for the detailed comment! I didn't know you could see analytics, is this only on professional accounts? I will check since I just posted a tweet.
Thanks again for the tips, will use them all in the future!
Should be on all tweets / accounts -- best thing to do is crack open an google sheet and log all your tweets at the ~24hour mark.
After a while you start to see patterns.
I wrote my own tooling to do this, as it becomes a bit tedious, but I'm sure there's something out there these days (other than paid stuff like hootsuite, etc...)
https://blackmagic.so/ does twitter analytics, also made by an inidiehacker.
When the NFT craze was going on, giveaways were an amazing tool to get followers fast. Probably still is today... you have no idea how many ppl are willing to follow you for $100 if you do it the right way... if you need help let me know.