In one second someone subconsciously decides whether to engage with your content or to scroll by. These tips are about optimising for that one second:
Two of the best at this are @stephsmith and @anthilemoon.
They'll never “just share” an article. 90% of each tweet is focused on building interest:
Characters are limited. Don’t waste them rewriting your article title. It’s already visible on your Twitter card.
People are too busy to click your content. But they've got time to retweet a video.
So edit a good video, show off your content, and your link gets more attention as a result:
99% of articles have just one title. But if your SEO title is keyword heavy there's nothing stopping you going for a more engaging social sharing title:
• “How Jeff Johnson sold Nike’s first shoes” - SEO title
• “How Nike sold its first shoes” - Social sharing title
“If they took the time to make an image then it must be good”
And it’s less work than you think. Hone one template, then you’re just tweaking the copy / colours for each new article:
Some people are conscious about what they retweet. My general rule of thumb is to stay away from blue text:
• Strip away hashtags
• Place URL at end of the tweet to hide it
Thanks you for reading. If you find this sort of thing useful, I write marketing case studies (likes this one) over on Marketing Examples. Been doing it for a while now, and there's lot of practical stuff up there for Indie Hackers.
I also post quick marketing tips on Twitter. Any questions, I'll be in the comments.
Such a huge post I would upvote this 1000 times if I could. Thank you.
Cheers Dan. Appreciate that.
Hey Harry, great content as always!
Just wondering how did you manage to format your IH post in such a way and add images between blocks of text? I am trying to add something like that but it seems like IH has very limited post formating options. @channingallen
Cheers @maximal. Indie Hackers uses Markdown in posts. So for example, The Nike Story I posted looks like this in edit mode =>
@harrydry Thanks a lot for that! you are awesome )
Thanks for sharing your thoughts.
I also would like to know some reasons behind them. Like #6 - what's wrong with hashtags? and if you will not use them, your post will not be visible if you don't have many followers.
Sure - Hashtags have merit if you're a running some sort of campaign: #VolvoContest or #EndAlz. They do, "increase reach" so to speak.
But retweets are a far more effective way of increasing reach than hashtags. And excessive hashtags will limit your retweets. A significant % of people are put off by excessive hashtagging.
I'm talking about Retweets of your own post. I'm not advocating retweets of other people's posts.
I respect your point of view, but we're going to have to agree on disagree on this one. I know lots of people who simply do not retweet things because there's hashtags attached to it. They think it's spam like.
Yeah, but I didn't mean hashtags for your own brand or whatever - because such hashtags don't help with the search. I meant only common, generic hashtags like #marketing, or #coding, or #startups - what actually improve your posts' visibility, and I don't think people would consider such hashtags as spam.
Very helpful tips. Will be referring back to this 👍
Cheers Paul - Thank you.
Expert level content. Super useful, concise, well explained.
Lovely comment - thank you.
Brevity is the key. This probably sounds super pretentious but whatever, I'll go there: Most articles these days I start with about 2 pages on Google Docs. And then it's a subtraction mission. I just try and boil each point into tweet length.
Love this strategy. This is similar to Derek Sivers' "Cut out everything that's not surprising": https://sivers.org/d22
Cheers Ryan. Big Sivers fan. Love that. I got the mentality from from a Kanye producer: "We gotta remove every second that doesn't add to the experience"
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Thanks Alex. Appreciate that. Thank youu!