I'm growing my company's Twitter account in public
I've been running postmake.io on and off for the past couple of years now, and while it has been growing nicely, something that's been bothering me for a while is that I don't really have any social presence.
I've never grown an audience, especially on a social network. Knowing that I'll have to eventually grow one for Postmake, I've been reading up on how to go about growing a Twitter account. I believe I now have a good idea of what a good strategy looks like (I'll link to some great resources in a little).
You often hear about people building products in public, but rarely about growing an audience in public. Sure, there might be the occasional milestones, but you rarely here about what the exact approach was, what did and didn't work, and how progress went.
So for the next 30 days, I'll be doubling down on growing Postmake's Twitter account, and along the way I'll make daily updates about what I'm doing, how I'm doing it, and how it's going so far. I'll try to include growth stats and mention any resources I find.
The reason I'm doing this in public is two-fold:
- Initial traction: building something in public is a great way to kick-start interest and perhaps seed the initial following
- Accountability: I've been putting this off for a while now, so hopefully the pressure of making daily updates in public will help force me keep this up in a consistent pace
What I'll be doing
I think growing a new social account, regardless of the platform or whether it's a company or a personal brand, can be summed up in two short lines:
- provide value
- do it consistently
As part of this strategy, I've set up a couple of documents:
- a "reference" document: where I'll keep any resources, blogs, websites, and accounts with material I can use. This will be the primary way I'll "seed" my content machine
- a "dump" document: where I'll keep content ideas and drafts, along with a queue of ready-to-use posts (tweets in this case) I can publish at any time
I expect that every 2-3 days, I'll spend a couple of hours going through these documents, dumping any new ideas and drafts, and then turning them into publishable content, then scheduling the posts through a tool like Buffer.
I'll also set aside some time every day to keep an eye out for any relevant conversations I can interact with or provide value to.
This batching should help keep me focused on growth while also keeping up with the rest of my daily workload, especially since most people tend to use social media in a haphazard fashion.
Helpful Resources
There's a huge amount of great resources you can use to grow a Twitter account, but I found the following particularly helpful:
- https://joshspector.com/twitter-tips/
- https://www.indiehackers.com/post/how-did-you-grow-your-twitter-audience-7d90d6b42e
- https://gumroad.com/l/twitter-audience (I haven't gotten the course, but Daniel's twitter account is really helpful, ex: https://twitter.com/dvassallo/status/1236067288647733249
- https://www.indiehackers.com/product/marketing-examples
Currently, @postmakeio sits at 64 followers and 142 tweets. I'll keep this post updated with the daily updates I make, and I've also just pushed a twitter thread that I'll be using to push the updates and share stats:
Hopefully this goes well! If you have any tips you want to share, I'd love to hear them.
