Is Twitter a waste of time?

Absolutely not.

Almost every niche has a thriving community on Twitter, but you need to learn the proper etiquette on how to engage, and leverage the key influencers' audiences to build your own.

It's also a very varied tool, with different ways you can use to build up your audience and ultimately revenue:

1. Standard Twitter engagements for networking (mainly following established influencers in your niche and commenting high-value replies that can stand on their own merit... so you can steal over their followers)

2. Twitter DMs (direct marketing for very-targeted profiles) -- this is how I got my first 10 customers for Zlappo

3. Twitter search (put on notifications "how do I <problem that your product solve>?" and plug your product when appropriate)

4. Twitter hashtags (only useful when it's trending, but it really works when a relevant hashtag related to your product is trending, say if a competitor has a bad PR episode, and you leverage on that to funnel customers over to your side)

5. Twitter threads for monetization (plug your offers into meaty threads/tweetstorms that you post, those get shared and convert like crazy)

6. Twitter for recruiting affiliates, employees, etc. etc. (once you have a base audience)

There are so many ways that you can leverage on Twitter to grow your own audience and get new customers for your brand if you know what you're doing.

Don't count Twitter out yet!

*Disclaimer: I'm the author of a Twitter growth hacking blog and also founder of a Twitter growth tool.

Twitter is a wonderful tool. If you learn to use Twitter well, it can enrich your career, help you build an audience and even make friends.

I've written a blog post about it here: https://infodistillery.com/twitter-course/

But here are the key lessons in developing an audience that could help you/your business:

• Optimise for engagement over follower count. There are accounts with hundreds of thousands of followers or even millions, but many of their posts get less than 100 likes. Not to pick on him but Tim O’Reily (@timoreilly) is an example of that. You need engagement if you want any leverage.

• Build credibility. Do something interesting in life and share it with the rest of us. Say you organise an event, refurbish a house, leave a high paying job, anything really, write a blog post and share it online. Over time you build credibility and people value your opinion in that domain.

• Write tweet streams that add value. Summarise a book, article or podcast. Tell a story, talk about something you learned or something you’re struggling with.

• All tweets fall into 2 categories, “asking” tweets and “giving” tweets. Make sure you do a lot more giving tweets.

• Focus on thoughtful replies, this is how you develop relationships with people.

• Minimise retweets, if you want to retweet make sure you retweet with a comment.
  Add value to a thought leader’s (or person with a high follower count) tweet. (you get the most benefit when you are one of the first people to reply to it)

• lastly, despite other comments here, be cautious with hashtags because in many communities they are frowned upon.

Enjoy

Twitter is relevant depending on the niche that you're looking for. Tech, entrepreneurship/IH, product, VC all seem to have pretty large presences and a vocal community of people on it. So for example if this is the audience that you're looking for, then it's perfect.

Granted - a lot of the platform is inadvertently marketing. People are marketing themselves (and typically do this by providing value), and companies do a lot of this as well. Does it have as much of your general day to day users? I personally have found that not to be the case. Within my social network, barely anyone I know uses it to tweet about their social or day to day lives.

So it really depends on who you're looking to connect with.

Twitter is pretty much the only social media platform I maintain a presence in (LinkedIn I hardly use), and it's because I've found it so useful.

Yes, it can be a dumpster fire sometimes. I have some things in place to mitigate that:

• Prune my follow list. I follow less than 170 accounts — and that's for a reason. Following too many accounts makes my timeline noisy and I want to make sure I follow people I engage with and want to read from. I regularly go through and change my list.
• I mute words, phrases, and yes, entire accounts. It doesn't remove ALL of the noise but some of it.
• I try to keep conversations to specific topics, and I also have filters in my notifications so I don't get overwhelmed if a tweet goes "viral" (it happened to me twice in the last month; muting convos and filtering notifications helped a ton)
• I've gone on "Twitter fasts" in the past, sometimes for a few weeks and sometimes for months. I intend on laying low next week during the election.
• My audience is software developers and they tend to use Twitter heavily. For this reason, I'm going to remain on the platform.

In short, there is value to the platform, but your experience improves when you find ways to get out from under the noise. Best of luck!

We've used Twitter since about 2008, and over the years, it has changed a lot.

Here are a few things I'd say about Twitter in 2020:

1. Be Consistent - Show up every day. You need to be creating a lot of content; at least ten tweets a day.
2. Use hashtags - Find a hashtag for your community and focus on that 100%. We use #writingcommunty. I can't overstate how important this is for success.
3. Engage - Anytime some responds to one of your tweets, make sure you are stretching this engagement as far as possible. If possible, reply with open-ended questions to keep the conversation going.
4. Test - Test the type of tweets that work best for your community. It might be questions, but it also might be links or some other format. Just keep testing.
5. Being seen - Just because you are not getting engagement, doesn't mean you aren't being seen. If you are using the right hashtag, people will be watching and will see your tweets (remember point 1). It will take time, but this will build trust and engagement.
6. Google watches Twitter - If you are looking to get posts and articles ranking, then be aware that Google uses social engagement as a ranking sign. A link that is getting a lot of love will boost its ranking.

Twitter is notoriously hard for first timers. I tried using it several years ago and got no engagement. Felt like I was tweeting into the void - my ego was bruised so I left. I started again a couple of months ago and I'm kicking myself for not using it earlier - it's actually amazing! Spend less time tweeting and more time finding your niche and engaging with like minded individuals. Twitter is best for people looking for a supportive community you want to learn from and growth with.

If you're building a product to serve anyone in the tech industry, Twitter is essential.

I've been using Twitter as my core channel over the past few months and have attributed most of my revenue to-date through organic posts and Twitter DMs.

I'd recommend taking the time to experiment with different styles of content to uncover what drives the most engagement from your audience.

As others have said, it completely depends on your audience. Talking about my product from my personal Twitter account and running periodic sales has resulted in around 50% of my revenue.

It can be, just as much as any other arbitrary tool can be a waste of time. It depends on what your objectives are, and how you're using the tool to achieve those objectives.

I've personally grown quite a bit through the connections that I've made on Twitter (and was encouraged to join IndieHackers by one of those folks!)

No, I think it is amazing for networking, biz dev, and just discovering great content. But it does depend a lot on your industry/target audience. It definitely works better for some niches than others. :)

We worked with a partner that had 37,000 followers. We learned about what works (not much). Followers will not promote you unless there is an equal exchange. How does that scale?

It's not. I got a good following this year and it drives traffic.

WOW thanks everyone so much for all your comments!!!