Three rookie Twitter mistakes I made
Following some revelations during last week, I decided to start focusing on marketing. When I say marketing, I mean our blog and my personal Twitter because I assume these will be useful for promoting products.
So I started with reading articles about increasing the audience on Twitter. Based on what I read, you need three things to be successful:
create good content,
engage with people,
be consistent,
Since then, I'm trying to tweet/retweet/comment multiple times a day. I was able to increase my audience by 20% during this week, but I made many mistakes, three bigger ones in particular:
I thought engaging with people can be anything. So one day, I replied to tweets with jokes – at least they were funny to me. Then I realized that I lost 3-4 followers, which is not a huge number, but in my case, that was 6-8% of my follower base.
Reflecting, I think people are not interested in such bs content, at least in the entrepreneur/business Twitter, which is reasonable.
Resolution: always engage in a constructive/positive way!
They say create visual content as well since that is much more engaging. So I made a video based on a TikTok post. I think the idea was nice and entertaining. I posted it, but there was much less engagement than I expected. Then my wife showed me that it looked awful on her mobile.
I ignored the delivery: the video aspect ratio was not suitable for Twitter. Also, the video controls hid the critical text, which makes it hard to understand it. Maybe the content wasn't that good, but the delivery made it bad.
Phone view issue: 
Video control issue:
Resolution: always make sure that the images and videos are shown as expected! Though I am not sure if spending too much time creating content is worth it. Since I only have a few followers.
The third one is interesting. I realized that people tend to feel hurt if you don't follow them back, and eventually, they unfollow you. Except if you're someone worthy to follow, but I am just no one on Twitter yet. I also lost a few followers due to this.
Resolution: always follow back. Eventually I have to clean my feed up, but atm it is not an issue.
What do you think? Do you have any advice? Or is there any other mistake I should avoid?
You’re already doing the most important thing — treating it like an experiment and reflecting on what works and what doesn’t.
A couple of thoughts based on your observations:
Engagement quality matters more than frequency.
Replying just to reply rarely works. The best engagement tends to come from adding a useful insight, asking a thoughtful question, or sharing a quick experience related to the post.
Content clarity beats production value.
Especially early on, simple posts with a clear idea often outperform polished visuals. Many successful founders grow their audience mostly through short insights rather than complex media.
Consistency compounds slowly.
A 20% growth in a week is actually strong when the base is small. The key is continuing to share useful ideas over time.
One thing I’ve noticed is that audiences tend to respond most when posts answer a practical question like:
What did you learn?
What worked or didn’t work?
What experiment did you run?
Those kinds of posts often resonate more than promotional content.
Curious to see how your experiments evolve over the next few months.
Looks to me like you've gotten as much out of your "mistakes" as you could have.
I feel like the lessons you've learned will only help you fortify your growth strategy. Thanks a lot for sharing them!
That being said though, Twitter can become a very time-consuming platform and in my opinion, it's very important not to spread yourself too thin if you decide to expand to other social media.
I guess one has to eventually come up with a plan with which they are certain they can be consistent.
This is why I'm still undecided on how to approach Twitter when it comes to the bot-protection service I'm working on. I feel like it has a lot of potential in initial phases of promoting a product.
It is very time consuming, for the last couple of days I had headaches every night, just by following the extreme amount of content on twitter :)
Unfortunately I don't know how to start out with twitter.
I checked your your website tho, and I'd suggest to run it with a graphics designer to give it a more professional look.
Hey @rideg!
Just wanted to follow up on your last remark and share the update!
Here's the updated version of the https://botmenot.com/ website.
The homepage hasn't been changed, but all the other pages have been!
Please take a look at it again, and let me know what you think about it!
Hope you like it!
I checked again. Honestly I don't see too much difference. But the most important thing on your website is the landing page. I'd still suggest to hire a graphics designer to make it look more polished. Also for me it is not clear why would it be good for me to be protected from bots? Do they hack my website or what? Maybe I am not your target audience.
I understand you totally.
Thanks for the suggestion, and, actually, it's in the workings right now!
You should create valuable content for people, that's it.
I see that you're ex-google/ex-snap, so I'd talk about specific things I've learned there that can be used for entrepreneurship. This is just one example but you get the point.
This might also be very useful for you:
https://www.socialmediatoday.com/news/twitter-launches-updated-agency-playbook-to-guide-marketers-on-tweet-ads/604557/
Yes that is I am trying to do, however I am in the middle of transitioning from a software engineer to business person and I am struggling a bit coming up stuff that i can share. But I think I just need to try harder :) Thanks for the link I am reading it rn.
Twitter is a long ride, yeah. More than you need to work constantly cos every day of your empty Twitter account will lead to a decrease in followers and general engagement.
I understand you greatly cos I've tried to boost my personal account but I really hadn't have time to do it regularly...
But way to go! Keep us informed about your results in a mo!
Thank you! I'll keep the community posted if I have more insights :)
First thanks for the sharing :)
My opinion is that you don't have to follow back, I guess those who wait for your follow-back won't care what you are working on haha.
Recently I start trying to post with hashtags like #startup #buildinpublic #programming etc. I haven't figured out which one is the best but I got retweets and likes for almost every tweet, not too many followers increased tho. Maybe you can try it as well next time :)
Thank you for reading it!
I've seen that #buildinpublic has a bot that retweets every post, I don't know about the other ones. It would be awesome to explore these keyword retweeting bots.
This comment was deleted 2 years ago
I think eventually (1K+ followers) I have to clean my feed up, but at the moment I prioritize getting followers.