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What to think about Twitter

It seems to me that Twitter is best used for broadcasting your thoughts, images, and videos related to current events that are of interest to a wide audience. I feel like it might be accurate to describe it in other words as being a platform for micro-press-releases.
- The reason I say "wide audience" is that it seems to me that for a narrower audience you could have audience-specific features that would improve the experience. This is what people have been predicting would happen with social networks for 20+ years: you'd have a social network specific to each group, with group-specific features.
- Many people use it to relay some timeless insight they've had (i.e. not something specific to current events), but I feel like Twitter is not set up well to handle this use-case because, while it is certainly very easy to publish the idea, it is very difficult to effectively browse these ideas if you're looking specifically for insights on a particular issue / topic. Hash-tags and searching by keyword are very imperfect solutions.
  - Example tweet: https://twitter.com/mwseibel/status/1002296239164088320
    - Michael Seibel: "I started part time at YC over 5 years ago and have now seen about 1000 YC companies. The thing that never ceases to amaze me is the success that comes from the companies that figure out how to stay lean and stay alive over the course of years."
  - On the other hand, having things more structured (the way my wiki is, for example) might increase the cost of publishing (i.e. the person tweeting might be forced to first categorize their tweet, costing them time), which might result in fewer valuable ideas being published.
It seems similar to Facebook, except where the connections generally aren't based on real-world connections as much as intellectual ones (you generally follow people based on whether you like their ideas or not).
- Facebook actually copied the idea of a 'news feed' from Twitter, so it's really that Facebook resembles Twitter more than the other way around.

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My review:
- I highly, highly recommend this if you're going to be taking Twitter seriously (like, trying to build an audience).
- It's occasionally difficult to understand a word that he says, which is a little frustrating.
My notes:
- Preface: I'm writing down what I took from the course; you should obviously buy the course yourself to see if there's something he says that particularly resonates with you.
- CourseMaker - Summary of Daniel Vassallo's Twitter Course
- How to get your first 1000 followers (PDF)
  - His advice is basically what I'd already been doing with my blog: pay attention to what other people are asking for your thoughts on (because you've already thought a lot about a topic), and write up your answer as a blog post.
  - He says to keep it short; it should be a less-than-five-minute read. That's something I hadn't really been considering.
    - On the other hand, his first blog post was 1120 words, or around an 8-and-a-half-minute read. So clearly the "five minutes" is not a red line.
  - At the end you should add a single call-to-action "inviting" them to follow you on Twitter. I hadn't been doing that.
    - Example of the end of his Indie Hackers post:
      If you liked this article, check out:
      How I set myself up financially before I took the plunge.
      And what I’m doing now for a living.
      
      Now that I can use Twitter without being subject to Amazon’s social media policy, you can follow me there as I continue to document my journey.
      ---
      Originally published at danielvassallo.com on February 9, 2019.
    - Interestingly, Pieter has multiple calls-to-action at the end of his blog posts:
      - P.S. I'm on Twitter too if you'd like to follow more of my stories. And I wrote a book called MAKE about building startups without funding. See a list of my stories or contact me. To get an alert when I write a new blog post, you can subscribe below:
  - The most important part that I hadn't been doing, which he did, was to post it not only on your personal blog but also on other sites where people might find it interesting. In his case, he posted a link to his blog post on HN, and posted the entire text of the blog post on Indie Hackers and LinkedIn. He said he also posts to Reddit and Quora.
  - He says to keep trying and iterate; don't get discouraged if you aren't immediately successful at getting people to pay attention.
  - Another gold tip I hadn't thought of: when you post on these other platforms, make sure you answer "every single question".
  - Interestingly, he doesn't talk about keeping your timeline clean, avoiding retweeting other people, etc.
- Everyone Can Build a Twitter Audience (video)
  - Intro - About him
    - He worked at Amazon for 8 years, quit in January 2019 b/c he didn't like being an employee.
    - His first plan was to create and sell his own software.
    - He quickly got scared of the possibility that no one would pay attention to his software.
    - He'd been on Twitter as a lurker for years.
    - 18 days after his first blog post (which he cross-posted to HN, LinkedIn, and Indie Hackers) he was at ~2,300 followers.
    - 14 months later (at the time of making the video) he was at 24,000 followers.
    - He shows his current stats and summary stats of the past twelve months.
      - He was tweeting around 300-600 times per month, with a high of ~900. So that's like 10-30 tweets per day.
      - His new followers per month varied a lot, from like ~180 up to ~4,000.
  - Credibility
    - You need to have credibility to get people to pay attention to you.
    - The best way to get credibility is to "do something interesting in real life" and then describe it: what you learned, what you experienced. Something that your target audience would find interesting, would want to know more about.
      - This reminds me of how Pieter said that he got millionaires and billionaires to follow him by actually making stuff.
    - You don't have to only tweet about one topic.
    - If you're just starting out, just write about stuff you've already done rather than waiting until you've done new things.
    - Example: his first blog post
      - He thinks it would be interesting to other people who were interested in pursuing the lifestyle he was leaving behind (working for a big tech company to make a big salary).
      - He isn't sure exactly what kind of credibility he was establishing but he thinks maybe it was something like 'lifestyle design'.
    - Example: A friend of his wrote a blog post about his experience designing his own home
    - Example: 'I sell onions on the internet' - The blog post shows that the writer has an interesting perspective on business.
    - Example: The Gumroad guy blog post
    - He says it can be hard to explicitly state what the credibility is that the writer is earning, but he says that you know it when, after reading an article, you look forward to hearing more from that person, or you'd like to ask that person questions.
    - Once you have an audience, you can use the questions you get from them as ideas for new blog posts that can earn you credibility on new topics.
      - Example: after his first blog post he got personal-finance-related questions from his new followers; he started writing about it, and he thinks that earned him some credibility on that topic.
      - Example: He self-published a book and did a tweet thread about his experience after crossing $40k in sales.
        Interestingly, he posted to Reddit (r/Entrepreneur) as well, but didn't post a call-to-action to follow him, he just posts a link to the book. But he did link to three different tweets of his in the body of his post, as well as his HN/Indie Hackers/LinkedIn posts.
        His IH post is just an invitation to ask him questions with no call-to-action to follow him, just a link to the book at the end.
        His HN post is in the 'Tell HN' format; it's not just a link to his Gumroad. And he has a link to one of his tweets in it.
      - Example: He did an experiment paying for ads on Reddit for ten days, then did a tweet thread about it, and started getting questions about it.
    - You need to be pursuing some credibility on some topic.
  - Measures of Success
    - "The number of followers" isn't important by itself.
    - It's better to aim to increase "the number of people who want to hear what you have to say".
    - The engagement metrics that Twitter shows can be used as an imperfect way of gauging how many people want to hear what you have to say.
    - How to get more people who want to hear from you:
      - You need to be helping people: teaching them, entertaining them, encouraging them.
      - Your audience should also be getting to know you on a personal level; people like doing business with people whom they feel they know.
        Share how you think about things, what you like, how you make decisions, or other details about yourself.
        I think he would say that you avoid the kind of formal, faceless, corporate writing style that you might see a lot on LinkedIn blog posts.
    - One indicator that you're developing this kind of connection with your audience is when you start to see people mentioning you on Twitter when recommending your stuff to their friends.
    - Most social media advice on Twitter focuses mostly on "hard engagement" metrics like retweets.
    - He thinks a 'like' is a better metric than a retweet of whether people are interested in what you're tweeting because users are more likely to 'like' a post, but it's not perfect because sometimes people don't want to be misinterpreted as being happy about the tweet (e.g. if it's a tweet about a bad outcome).
    - For each tweet just ask yourself if you're either helping your audience or allowing them to get to know you.
    - When you're starting out you also want to be focusing on improving your number of impressions (how many people are seeing your tweets). He calls it your 'organic reach'.
    - He says if you're getting more impressions than your number of followers, that's a good sign that you're doing well.
    - He likes to use Twitter's analytics dashboard to get a sense of whether he's tweeting stuff that is getting recommended by Twitter's algorithm (because people are engaging with it).
  - The Funnel
    - Find your profile → Read your bio → Scroll your timeline → Follow you → Don't unfollow you later → Get value from you → Get to know you
    - FollowerWonk
      - "It helps" but "you don't need it"
      - He shows how there are spikes of new followers that he attributes to a tweet going viral or someone else with a lot of followers recommending him.
    - His new followers each month are between 1-4% of the number of profile visits he gets that month.
  - How to get people to find you
    - Blog posts that you cross-post to different social media sites.
      - He bolds the call-to-action (the link to his Twitter account).
      - He says something like "I'm going to be making more content like this on my Twitter account".
      - He thinks it's smarter to just have a single call-to-action (a single link).
      - He says it's a common mistake for people to not include a call-to-action / easy way to follow them.
    - Reply to people with lots of followers
      - You're aiming to add value to the conversation.
      - Generally you add value by providing an example or an additional data point.
      - You can also disagree with what they're writing.
      - You can use Tweetdeck to track all the comments being made by various accounts.
      - He says it's even better to just turn on notifications for the accounts you want to reply to.
        This is probably better for not losing a ton of time on Twitter every day.
      - He explains that there's a big benefit from being one of the first to reply to a tweet, as you're more likely to get your tweet liked, which will make it one of the first to be visible, which will lead to more likes, so it's just a reinforcing loop.
      - He thinks this strategy was what got him from ~2,000 followers to ~6,000.
  - Bio
    - The most important thing is to give people a sense of why they should follow you. What are you going to be tweeting about? Why are you credible?
    - The pinned tweet should be...(??? I couldn't understand him but he seemed to be suggesting it should be something that should provide value and also display high value).
      - A good pinned tweet would be a tweet thread or blog post that both 1) has useful information and 2) has a lot of retweets and likes, as a way of displaying high value ("Lots of people are interested in what I have to say!").
    - He thinks the main thing people see when they click your profile is your bio and your pinned tweet.
  - Tweets
    - He thinks using hashtags in tweets doesn't help and could be distracting.
    - He says the Twitter algorithm only uses the number of likes of the first tweet in a thread to determine whether that first tweet should be promoted to more users; later tweets in a tweet thread are never promoted. This burned him with his tweet about his first blog post because the main tweet that got likes was the second one in a thread.
    - He thinks it might be better to rewrite your blog posts as tweet threads when posting to Twitter. "It's easier to get people to read a tweet thread than a blog post. (...) People like to stay on the same platform."
  - Whether to use your real name or a pseudonym, and whether to be totally anonymous
    - He brings up something I hadn't considered, which is that by not restricting yourself to using your real name and real photo, you give yourself more freedom to choose a name and photo that will maximize the likelihood that people will click on your profile, remember your name, etc. He gives an example of someone who has a catchy pseudonym and an interesting profile picture of a dead fox. So it's like how Hollywood actors use stage names that are easier for audiences to remember.
    - You can use a pseudonym and not be anonymous.
    - He brings up the obvious point that being anonymous makes sense if you don't want the content of your posts affecting your job.
    - He points out that being anonymous has the potential downside that people may feel more reluctant to recommend you to others if they don't feel like they have a connection to you or that you have something to hide.
  - How to Tweet
    - Understand that there are two types of tweets: you're either giving something to your audience or asking for something from your audience.
      - There's also a hybrid where you ask a question where you think your audience will be interested in each other's answers. But you need to have a lot of followers before this will work.
    - You need to give a lot of value to your audience before you can expect to be able to ask them to do something and have them actually do it.
    - As mentioned before, giving value can mean teaching them something, entertaining them, etc.
    - Things you can ask for include asking for advice, doing a poll, asking them to go to a link or buy your product.
    - His first tweet where he asked for something was when he was at around 6,000 followers; he asked for people to sign up for his mailing list.
    - Think about it as if you have a balance of goodwill that you build up by providing value, and when you ask for something from your audience you're drawing from that balance.
    - He recommends you minimize retweets unless it's clearly adding value. But he clarifies that it's because he finds a lot of retweets are asking for something from the person's audience.
      - He doesn't mention an idea I've heard elsewhere, which is that a retweet doesn't help as much to build a parasocial relationship with your audience.
  - Engagement
    - Bad examples: He looks at examples of accounts that have millions of followers but bad engagement. He notes that one account has a lot of retweets, while another (Tim Ferris') has a lot of 'asking' tweets. Tim also uses automation tools, which he says looks less authentic / human.
    - Good examples:
      - He holds out Sahil Lavingia (founder of Gumroad) as an example of an account with good engagement and someone who is tweeting well (value-providing stuff).
        Sahil's pinned tweet is a link to a Medium article where he summarizes what he's learned from 8 years of working on Gumroad.
        Sahil's timeline is filled with assertions.
        He shows an example of how he replied to a tweet by Sahil, basically agreeing with Sahil but adding a caveat, and then Sahil retweeted it, getting Daniel ~40,000 impressions and ~50+ new followers. He says this is a good example of how important it is to reply to other people when you're starting out. He shows how he had opened Tweetdeck, seen Sahil's tweet, and replied.
      - He shows Simon Sarris as another good example. He says Simon adds photos, which he thinks helps engagement, but also there's a high signal-to-noise ratio; all of his tweets are interesting.
  - Inspiration / what to tweet about
    - When he was starting out, at the end of the day, he would think about what interesting things happened that day.
      - Now he's better at recognizing interesting things immediately and tweeting about them immediately.
    - Think about what things took you a lot of effort to figure out.
    - Think about what things your friends and family ask you about life, business, etc.
    - Think about what decisions you're making, and whether that would be something of interest to your audience.
    - Go back and look at your old tweets, and think about whether you can add new context, or rephrase it in a better way.
      - New followers will be seeing the idea from you for the first time, while older followers benefit from the clarification in thinking.
  - What not to tweet about
    - Understand that you're going to be taking up people's time.
    - Try to ask yourself if you would be interested in hearing this information.
    - Be careful about being authentic:
      - It could be uninteresting (e.g. your favorite ice cream flavor).
      - It could hurt you outside of Twitter, e.g. your employment opportunities.
    - Remember you don't have an obligation to share everything.
    - Find the intersection of what interests you, what interests your audience, and what you have credibility on.
  - Other things to not do
    - Don't buy followers - You won't be building an audience this way
    - Don't trade follows (like, following back anyone who follows you, and following people to try to get them to follow you back) - You won't be building an audience this way
    - Don't tag a bunch of people
    - Don't be a nuisance
    - Don't focus on getting retweets - The easiest way to get a retweet is to praise someone, but these kinds of tweets tend to lead to very few profile clicks and new followers.
    - Don't ask for retweets, you're just being a nuisance
    - Don't get banned by Twitter - You have to worry about random Twitter employees misinterpreting something you say and then permanently banning you. He knows of "dozens" of accounts that had 50,000+ followers where this happened.
      - He says the biggest risk here is when one of your tweets goes viral and gets noticed by a different "tribe" of people on Twitter, and then they start going through your old tweets to try to find something that they can flag to get you banned.
    - Don't get addicted to getting more followers/likes/retweets. Be aware that you're going to get a dopamine hit from those things; don't let that derail you from your real life goals.
  - Recap of your starting strategy:
    - Write blog posts and cross-post them to different sites. Include a call-to-action to follow you on Twitter.
    - Turn on tweet notifications and reply to larger accounts' tweets.
    - Remember to provide value in your tweets far more than you ask for something of value from your audience.
    - Reply to every question / DM / email.
    - Don't be a nuisance / boring.
    - Keep your eyes out for opportunities to start building credibility on new subjects.
    - Adapt your behavior based on the engagement you're getting. Don't keep tweeting stuff that isn't interesting to your audience.
  - My Qs / thoughts:
    - His conception of 'credibility' seems a bit wishy-washy to me. It seems more accurate to say that he was building his audience around the topics that he was blogging about.
    - Is there anything else I should know about how/when to post my blog articles to the different sites?
      - Should I do anything to promote it? I remember reading that people would get their friends to send a few upvotes to their HN submission to give it a better chance of getting onto the front page.
      - If I can't post the content of the blog on the social media itself, should I prefer linking to a WordPress blog on my domain or to a Medium version of the post? Or does it not matter?
    - When (if ever) did you stop putting as much effort into the blog strategy for getting followers?
    - How precisely do you use follows? I feel like there may be a conflation happening in which, while a follow is meant to mean you find a person's feed more interesting than not, in reality it also is seen as a kind of endorsement ("I care what this person has to say"), and I wonder if large accounts would be reluctant to engage with me if I'm not following them (because I find their content on-average not of interest).
    - How precisely do you use likes? Do you ever go back through your liked tweets? Do you like followers' responses as a kind of 'thank you' / 'I saw that'?
    - Do you use bookmarks? If so, how do you use them differently from likes?
    - How should I think about tweet threads vs long tweets?
    - Should I avoid having an 'intent' link that puts up the 'follow' button front-and-center?
    - Your advice about avoiding retweeting is perhaps the most counter-intuitive idea from the course. I started retweeting to try to show people valuable information I came across on Twitter, but from watching your video and how other big accounts act on Twitter, I feel like the reason big accounts might avoid it is that 1) it requires browsing Twitter a lot to find the most-valuable information (time that could be better spent building your web app), 2) your audience may end up not remembering that you were the one that introduced them to the information, so you'd get no benefit from helping your audience.
    - Lists: Do you use them?
    - How much should I tweet? Like, how many times per day?
    - How often should I write a blog post? Once per week?
    - Would he submit a blog post to multiple subreddits?
    - Do you distinguish at all between replying to a big account's "main" tweet vs. replying to one of their replies? I feel like only the main tweets are worth keeping an eye on in terms of the number of eyeballs you'll get.
    - How much time do you spend on Twitter every day?
    - How should a person determine whether it's worth investing time into building a Twitter audience, and how much time it's worth spending on that? He is selling stuff directly to his audience; what if you don't have any plans to try to create and sell things directly to your audience? What if you have B2C app ideas that you want to work on? It seems like in that situation you might be better off spending that time working on the app and then just paying for ads or something.
- Twitter stats
  - The 'tweet stats' spreadsheet already shows thousands of impressions of his first tweets, which makes me wonder if he maybe deleted older tweets. But maybe he just got a lot of those impressions after later tweets went viral and people checked out his profile.

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