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Twitter 101 for Indie Hackers

Twitter can give you your first customers, employees, or even investors.

But most indie hackers run away from it because it’s hard.

Not anymore!

This strategy + resources will handsomely improve your Twitter Game while also decreasing the amount of time you spend on it.

Why build an audience?

  • They'll be your first customers

  • Testimonials and Marketing from a known audience is the epitome of authenticity

  • Your personal Twitter account is much more valuable than your Business’ account because people buy from (likeminded) people

These 3 reasons are the principles that lay the foundation of the new audience-driven world.

The First Steps

Before starting to grow an audience, you need to optimize your profile for it.

So, the first step is to build a Good Profile.

What constitutes a Good Profile?

  • To The Point Bio
  • Good Header
  • Expertise/Story-based Pinned tweet

twitter bio

If you look at my profile, it has all the necessary information that convinces people to follow me.

There’s a decent profile picture
There’s an awesome header that shows people what I do on Twitter.
There’s a clutch bio that guides people about what I do on Twitter and in life.

There’s no reason for people to not follow me after this.

Your bio ideally should have:

  • What you tweet / how you help
  • Your purpose/ what you're building
  • Your area of expertise
  • CTA
  • Link in bio

If you need a more comprehensive guide to writing your bio, click here.

Your header ideally should have:

  • Your niche or a Great Tagline
  • Pictures representing your profile (sapling for growth🌱, dollar for money💲)
  • Call to action

If you're not into design, use Canva/Figma to copy-paste basic elements and make one,

Another important aspect of having a good Twitter Profile is the Pinned Tweet.

Your pinned tweet is your REAL BIO. It has to make people go "Woah, I don't wanna miss out on the goodness here."

It’s like your skills in the real world. Your degree is an important distinction but your skills are the REAL DEAL.

Choose a thread that performed best or which shows off your expertise.

Are you stuck about what tweet or thread to choose as your pinned tweet? Read this.

The Next Step: Consistency

Good. Now, you’ve set up your profile.

Now, it’s time to look at the things you need to do consistently.

Don’t worry, as promised it’ll require less time than earlier.

Here are things you need to do:

  • Craft tweets
  • Compile threads
  • Engage with other people's tweets

Before we jump there, you must choose a niche. Choosing a niche signals what topic your tweets will be mainly about.

Choose three topics that you like the BEST and tweet about them.

For example, let’s look at my niches.

SaaS, Entrepreneurship, SEO
(Business, Common niche, Expertise)

That’s how you can choose your niches too.

It’s also a good strategy to include these in your bio.

Consistent Tweeting

You have your niche figured out. Now, you can roll out your content.

Frequency = 3 tweets a day

You should use a scheduling tool to take care of this while you work on your business.

You can use Hypefury or any other tool.

You'll be batch writing your tweets at the start of the week or month; whatever suits you.

Now, this is the fun part:

All you need to do is write 21 sentences (per week) or 90 sentences (per month) about the three topics you chose earlier to write on.

But, where do you get ideas to write from?

You can take inspiration from:

  • Blogs, Videos, Podcasts: Listen, read and share anything that catches your attention.

  • Your life: Share your realizations and journey.

  • Swipe file: Have a collection of tweets from Twitter about your niche.

But, you don’t need to do all this work to generate ideas.

You can also use Hypefury’s Inspiration Panel to get 100s of viral, best-performing tweets across 10+ NICHES.

inspiration

Choose any of them and rewrite them.

You’ll be shipping out tweets every 3 mins. That translates to 10 tweets in 30 mins.

That's how easy and time-efficient it is.

However, let’s imagine you know the sources for your tweets but you can’t wrap around writing them.

There’s a solution for that as well.

Inspiration box has 100s of fill-in-the-blanks templates which makes this as easy as pie.

templates

In case you don't use Hypefury, you should check this thread for some templates you can use.

Showing up every day is a sign of accountability.

Ultimately, what will entice people to take notice of you and follow you?

That’s right. WRITING INSIGHTFUL & INFORMATIVE THREADS.

Great Threads

You should write one thread a week (minimum).

What will you write about?

  • Your story
  • Your subject of expertise
  • Your build in public journey.

Your story helps your audience to get to know you.

Talk about how you left your 9-5, how you failed in a business, and literally any of your success or failure moments.

The story thread also makes for a great pinned tweet.

Check out this amazing story thread.

Expertise
Twitter is all about value! Share your knowledge so that people who need it get helped.

Let people know you KNOW. Help with your expertise.

This thread got me 600+ followers, in one day.

Build in Public
You're an entrepreneur.

Your journey has highs and lows.

And people want to be a part of it.

When you share your vision and failures here, people see themselves as a part of your journey.

They become your first and LOYAL customers.

Look at this amazing #buildinpublic thread.

If you still want more thread ideas to write a thread on, give this informative thread a look.

There you have it.

All you need to do is - Write one thread every week.

60 mins brain dump.
30 mins scheduling and editing.

As soon as you schedule more time for thread writing, move on to 2 threads a week.

Let’s do a quick recap:

Till now you've spent at max 2 hours in writing a month load of tweets,
and 4 hrs/mos in threads

That's just 6 hours of work for 30 days.

Pretty easy.

Now let's nail the final and most important part -

Engaging

This is the only thing that you will need to do every day.

Hypefury and batch work will take care of tweets for the whole month while you work on your business.

But you will have to engage in/with:

  1. Big accounts in your niche
  2. Your range accounts
  3. DMs

How should you be doing this?

Set a time limit of 35 MINUTES.

Firstly, make a Twitter list of people you wanna engage with.

You spend:

  • 15 mins to engage with Big Accounts.
  • 15 mins to engage with accounts your size.
  • 5 mins to DM someone new every day.

If you want to know about how you should be engaging in comments, check out this wholesome thread about Adding Value.

When you DM people, you need to have a few things sorted:

  • Text like you talk
  • Complement
  • Give value first
  • If you wanna ask, ask SPECIFIC things
  • Strike up a real convo

Check out the DM Frameworks, for people wanting to stand out.

I hope you embrace this article and level up your Twitter Game.

Good Luck and if you have any questions.... Shoot!

  1. 11

    Nice article and you are doing a wonderful job.
    But from a critical point of view, I usually get repelled from these kind of Twitter accounts which urges me to follow and promise to share growth or dev hacks.

    In my mind, It's like "This man is going to try selling me something"

    1. 4

      There are definitely accounts that do this. But there’s also a quick remedy. The unfollow button. Sharing your story on how you’re building things is not something people get repelled from.

      I wouldn’t worry about repelling people. I’d focus on trying to share what you’re working on and finding your voice / what people want to read. The rest will follow.

    2. 3

      I agree, not only that but many times it feels like they are not trying to provide value or actually help, but just to build an audience. I don't care about motivational quotes or random tips that I've read 100x times before, I follow people on Twitter because I want to hear their own personal thoughts, anything that comes to their mind or any problem they encounter.

    3. 2

      I mean is that really a problem though if they are tweeting things you find useful?

      1. 1

        Not that big of a problem, but if you try too hard asking for followers, I might find that repulsive.
        But that depends on person to person.

        1. 2

          oh yeah, directly asking for followers that's a different story.

          definitely not in alignment with these more "natural" approaches

  2. 4

    That is such a detailed and comprehensive guide.

    Thank you for writing 🙏

  3. 3

    Interesting post. Thanks for sharing. Personally find Twitter to be a great place to come across interesting people & ideas if you're a builder.

  4. 3

    Love it my G!

    And love seeing your growth!

    Bookmarked this!

    1. 2

      Thanks Bro! Appreciate it!

  5. 2

    I know we're all trying to be positive and friendly here, but this kind of stuff just doesn't sit right with me. Autogenerating tweets? Tweeting 3 times a day? What exactly are you contributing to the world? I think by doing this you're adding to the already deafening noise of self-promotion drowning out genuinely interesting content online.

    Maybe I'll never be a successful indie hacker because I just can't bring myself to doing stuff like this. I'll write when I have something to say, not because I'm trying to keep some schedule or trying to build up a "following", i.e people who consume and enjoy AI generated content and platitudes.

    1. 1

      I agree with Martin, I am still starting my Twitter journey (in Europe is less popular for personal use), but I want to be myself and share things that happen / occur to me on the day, hence I would not be able to schedule them. I appreciate your product though and wishing you good luck Yannick!

    2. 1

      I think you still Nailed it Martin. If you can’t tweet 3x a day. Don’t. Consistency is important but adding something to the conversation instead of the billionth platitude is even more important.

      That’s also the reason why we show you inspiration because we know that’s the hardest part for some people. Coming up with something you can share.

  6. 2

    This is helpful. I changed my Twitter profile after reading this article. Thanks to you @YannickVeys

  7. 2

    I love this type of content

  8. 2

    Thanks for this post Yannick. Seems logical and true, but at the same time I also feel overwhelmed with all these similar tweets. I mean, almost as if there is no creativity left, everyone just recycling older stuff.

    I feel we really have an inflation of threads and it is becoming too much for me.

    1. 1

      There's definitely inflation of threads. But there's also still a lot of room for great threads. Don't fall into the trap of tweeting platitudes as a small account. It won't work. Just share your story. Comment on other Indiehackers and help each other.

      1. 1

        Cheers Yannick! I just posted something today, not really a thread, maybe you could have a look? ;)

        1. 1

          Feedback:

          Drop a comment and I'll DM you part two.

          Creates more engagement.

          The tweet itself doesn't look great because of the images. I would add one image per tweet.

  9. 2

    Thanks for the guide, I'm actually just starting to build an audience on TW for my latest project's Twitter account and I find these tips invaluable!

    1. 1

      nice man. i'm curious which accounts you're going to follow to interact with?

      1. 1

        Thinking about following some popular news sources from the field, and also some influential personal accounts. And probably some more on top of that.

  10. 2

    Totally worth reading, Yannick. Thanks for sharing.

  11. 2

    Great tips, man.

    Considering twitter growth from now on!

  12. 2

    Awesome insights, Yannick!

    I'm definitely using these :)

  13. 1

    This is super helpful for those starting out, me! Awesome article!

  14. 1

    Yannik, what a great tutorial! To use it on practice I’ve joined your list to Tweet every day, will cover Entrepreneurship, Product Management and Apple history (@spanarin). Follow me in my journey to 1K subscribers!

  15. 1

    first of all, I am thankful for this dope and insightful article. I like how your mentioned inputs are very easy to digest and actionable.

    Would like to see more of this in the indie hackers posts :)

  16. 1

    Hi, Yannick. Thank you for the advice! I recreated my Twitter header from your advice. Still need to work on a photo for the profile.

    Appreciate the advice, will look into implementing more of it in my Twitter journey.

    1. 2

      Well done!

      Add some example titles in the header. It will make it even more tangible for people.

      1. 1

        Great idea, will implement later today. Thank you!

  17. 1

    I'm very new to social media. I've never had it personally, but I, for better or worse, see it as almost necessary for modern companies. I do actually see some value in it. These insights have helped me understand they 'why the hell do people love this shit so much?' 🙏 for the information and helping me understand.

  18. 1

    Can you share more tips for the engagement part? 😅

    1. 2

      Search Indiehackers for a topic on following each other on Twitter. There are a lot of people active on Twitter. Follow them.

      Alternatively, start a new topic here that you want to follow like-minded people on Twitter. When you literally follow them on Twitter, on their journey, you'll have all the engagement you need.

  19. 1

    Love this.

    I fell off with Twitter a bit because I had too many focuses going on but I did see some good growth by following exactly this (and used Hypefury).

    One thing I'd love for you add onto is...

    Let's say your building something like Hypefury (I have a SaaS of my own), how often are your tweets actually related to your thing if you're not building public (or even if you are).

    Are you just relying on the CTA of your header and bio to drive traffic to your pages?

    1. 1

      I would say 90/10 or less (10 being your saas).

      People don't follow you for the product you own but for the stories you tell. Some of them can be about the product. Mostly they're not but are related to the same niche / industry.

  20. 1

    This is great info. Adding it to my list of things to do.

  21. 1

    This comment was deleted 2 years ago.

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