My takeaways building an audience from zero on Twitter within seven days.

I joined Twitter on the 30th of December last year, and since then, I've gained 45 followers and built meaningful relationships with a handful of people.

I joined Twitter to start building in public from absolute zero, meaning I started without an idea, an audience, or reputation.

I honestly don't know what I'm doing yet, but my growth on the platform has been steady so far, and within three days, I was averaging ten followers a day.

Here's everything I've taken away within these seven days.

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Talking in 1st person is all I've got.

When I joined, I started by giving advice and posting threads. Unfortunately, I got near zero engagement doing this.

Even though I've been blogging for years, I don't have the following nor the reputation to back up my claims, so these tweets performed poorly.

The threads I posted unsurprisingly have the lowest engagement among my tweets.

I guess that threads perform better as you grow because more people see them organically.

I officially started building in public on the 2nd of January, and once I posted about it, things started looking up.

Even though the engagement wasn't incredible, I started getting followers steadily.

Every time I posted about building in public, I got more followers. At this point, it started to click that giving advice/opinions was the wrong approach to take.

Just talking about myself and what I'm learning has worked great so far.

All three of the posts that brought me the most followers have been about my progress indie-hacking, and my most engaged post is about my freelancing experience last year.

Since I started taking a me-first approach, my tweets have improved considerably.

Analytics and experimenting are essential.

I love looking at data and using it to optimize for growth. I'm one of those people who constantly refreshes analytics dashboards 😅

The only reason why I've been able to optimize and find tweets that work so early on is that I've been actively monitoring stats from day 1.

I've been using Blackmagic to get analytics at a glance and to understand and visualize how my tweets perform. It's been an invaluable purchase so far.

Since I'm optimizing for followers, clicks on my profile have been my most valuable metric. By monitoring my best-performing tweets in this regard, I've created tweets that drive more follows.

I've also tried my best to experiment with different formats. Unfortunately, some have poorly performed so far, while others have exceeded my expectations.

I'm tracking all I learn with Blackmagic and Typefully, then adjusting accordingly.

Hashtags are extremely valuable at the beginning.

All my best-performing tweets have hashtags in them. I think it makes sense because I have almost no way of reaching people because of how small my account is.

Tweets can only do well if they're engaged with a lot (liked, retweeted, commented on, etc.). Without a following, I have almost no one who'd do this for me at the start and serve as a catalyst.

The tweets I post without hashtags or links are only liked by my followers, while tweets with hashtags meet new people.

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These have been the most significant takeaways from my progress on Twitter in the last week.

I'm currently experimenting with scheduling and posting more tweets daily (6-9 instead of my usual 2-4). So if anyone's interested, I'll probably make a post like this next week.

If you're interested in what I'm learning, a follow on Twitter or Indiehackers would be nice. As I mentioned earlier, I'm documenting what I learn building a SaaS and an audience from scratch daily, and I've learned so much in the 3 days since I started.

Cheers!