Nathan Wailes - Blog - GitHub - LinkedIn - Patreon - Reddit - Stack Overflow - Twitter - YouTube
Twitter (Business Tool)
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.
My criticisms of Twitter
It seems to me that the user isn't given enough control over their feed, and so my feed seems to be largely filled by frequent posters, and I don't actually get to see what infrequent posters have said unless I go to their profile. I'd prefer a second feed that just showed everyone you're following and what their most-recent tweet was (or most-recent 2 or 3 tweets).
I solved this problem by using Twitter's "Lists" feature, which I wasn't aware of when I wrote the comment above. I feel like Twitter should make that feature more obvious in their web app, maybe by having it featured somehow on the 'Home' feed page. They could have a side-box that said "Custom feeds" (or, I guess, "Lists", to use their term) and if you didn't have any, it would have a button that said "Create / Add custom feed" or something like that.
The information you're getting from people is kind of random. You aren't being fed only those ideas which are relevant to some decision you immediately face.
It's also a mix of different kinds of information.
There's no automated system for enforcing politeness (AFAIK), and so apparently a lot of the comments are not politely phrased.
The 140-character limit seems like a pretty good precedent for having restrictions on the content that people post. You could have users elect to either participate or not participate in certain restrictions, and then other users could limit tweets that they saw based on whether that tweet came from someone who had those restrictions enabled. Or they could kind of do what YouTube does, and have users flag the tweet as mean-spirited / racist / inflammatory / etc. and allow users to hide such content from their feed / DMs.
It seems like a bunch of people on Twitter treat it like a game, where the aim is to see how many people you can get to follow you. That seems like it might lead to bad behavior.
It may not be necessary to spend time with Twitter if your main goal from using the platform is to be able to have some product you create promoted to people. You can instead simply DM / email people who have followings that would find that product useful. That's what the Instagram guys did.
Counter: For many users, that is not the main reason they use Twitter; for example, it can be a great way to develop friendships with high-quality individuals who can later help you.
Others' Criticisms of Twitter
(No longer an issue?) Twitter doesn't always display all replies to a tweet
This article states that, at the time of writing, you would only see @ replies that were typed out manually, and not those that were created by hitting the 'Reply' button. I don't think this is still the case.
This article is complaining about a different issue, where it seems random which tweets show up and which ones don't.
2014.10.29 - antirez.com - This is why I can’t have conversations using Twitter
Summary:
Many people on Twitter will read your tweet and form an opinion about it...
without first taking the time to fully understand the context in which you sent it.
without first taking the time to double-check that they are not "putting words in your mouth" / misreading what you said.
based on another user's interpretation of what you meant.
The large number of people on Twitter makes this problem more serious that it would be if the community was smaller (like, say, a forum).
"what you get is the wrong message retweeted one million times"
In the comments:
Twitter is a useless medium for having any sort of nuanced, conversational interaction. You're guaranteed to eventually fall into a misunderstanding with someone that can't be addressed without posting 10 tweets in a row and looking crazy. It certainly works much better as a broadcast medium and for giving occasional shout-outs, high fives, and anything you know isn't going to go beyond a short, positive interaction (i.e. not discussions, refutations, arguments, corrections, etc.)
I took a month off of Twitter after a very prominent Twitter user retweeted a sarcastic observation I made to his half a million followers without any context.. for which I got a whole ton of shit from busybodies. After I returned, I basically vowed to keep things clean and unambiguous, to focus on using Twitter to achieve my aims, and to just block anyone I'm not interested in seeing immediately. It has worked quite well so far.I share the frustration. If I spend 15 minutes thinking and writing something, I want people to spend more than 15 seconds trying to understand what I'm saying.
Twitter is a very interesting medium because it makes it extremely easy to communicate with interesting people, but with the 140c limit it often results in misunderstandings. That makes it a terrible platform for heated debates about somewhat controversual topics
2015.02.16 - The Atlantic - The Unbearable Lightness of Tweeting
"I just thought, Wait a minute, if I'm going to start writing again, I have to go to the quiet place," he said. "And this is the least quiet place I've ever been in my life. … It's like taking the bar exam at Coachella.
"I've said before, when you declare yourself politically, you destroy yourself artistically. Because suddenly that's the litmus test for everything you do..."
"There's no way to find any coherence when everything has to be parsed and decried."
the steady stream of just like, 'You suck, you suck, you suck' [on Twitter] — I don't really think I need to visit You Suck Land anymore."
"I so appreciate when people took the time to say something nice. But for my own self, it's like, at some point, you're just like a little compliment leech. That's not going to help your writing any more than people slamming on you."
I just had a little moment of clarity where I'm like, You know what? If I want to get stuff done, I need to not constantly hit this thing for a news item or a joke or some praise
"I think the articles that I found, I can find elsewhere," Whedon said. "I'll miss some jokes..."
the dirty secret of Twitter is “Nobody clicks”; his own typical “engagement rate” on a link he posts is 0.07 percent, and ever since Twitter gave us the button to look at the “analytics” for individual tweets I’ve come to the conclusion that Dash’s engagement rate is actually unusually high–or at least higher than mine.
“Twitter is like doing cut-rate cocaine at a boring party where a lot of the guests dislike you.”
the ancient social ritual of gathering a bunch of unrelated strangers in a space and letting them bounce witty anecdotes and observations off each other to see what develops.
Praise: I’ve made friends on Twitter that I’d count as good friends; I’ve spoken to people who met their spouses on Twitter.
Praise: The feeling of just not being alone, of being able to see other people reacting to things at the same time you are–that’s the most seductive and most addictive thing about social media.
Parties are a great way to network, to make new friends, to have fun. They’re also a great way to throw time down the drain hoping to do all of the above things but failing to do so
Joss Whedon points out that it’s the compliments, the retweets, the favs that kept him constantly reloading his Twitter app. (...) You become like the attractive person who goes out just to get validation that you are in fact attractive.
Yes, Joss got harassment on Twitter. (...) yes, the constant static of haters probably played a role.
I have had to deal with angry trolls crossing over to abusive phone calls, attempts to hack my accounts, being doxed, etc.
you do have to deal with a relentless steady stream of people deliberately trying to fuck with you and ruin your day–and even after you get high-profile enough that it stops being worth your time to engage, the constant low-level irritation of hitting Twitter’s notoriously unreliable “Block” button gets to you.
very little seems to come out of my tweets–the exception is when the mob is riled up, at which point I can expect every tweet I’ve ever made to get dogpiled and dissected
too much easy stimulation, too much rapid-fire shallow interaction, too much noise.
2016.02.18 - The Guardian - Why do normal people struggle with Twitter?
“It’s overwhelming,” says Feely, a Facebook and Instagram regular. “It’s just an enormous time-suck for the amount of information you get from it.”
there’s the Chicago grad student who said using Twitter makes him “feel regret”.
...British theater director who compared posting on the service to “throwing a pebble into a really unfriendly canyon”.
There's more I need to summarize.
2016.09.30 - Vanity Fair - Marc Andreessen Quit Twitter and Now He Feels “Free as a Bird”
How to use Twitter
Reasons to use Twitter
Problem-solving
If your tweets are read by people who, you can get a bunch of quick advice on a topic (quicker than SO, and more responses)
Inspiration / motivation
Getting your side of the story out
How to do various things
How to do an advanced search: http://loudplace.com/twitter-search/
How to undo a retweet / remove a retweet from your timeline:
Log in to your Twitter account and click the "Tweets" link below your name to view all your tweets. Retweets appear in the same section. Retweets have a green arrow in the upper-right corner of their box. Locate the retweet you wish to delete and then click the "Retweeted" link below the tweet to delete it. The "Retweeted" link changes to a "Retweet" link. (Source)
How to get notified when someone mentions the name of your website.
?
How to shorten links: they're shortened automatically. (Source)
How to see a user's early tweets:
Advanced Search, or using the search bar: "from:username since:YYYY-MM-DD until:YYYY-MM-DD"
Twitter - First Tweet - An official part of Twitter that shows you a specified user's first tweet. Pretty cool!
AllMyTweets - When I tried it out it only seemed to go back ~1 month
How to use the different parts of Twitter
'Home' / your main feed
You can use this to browse for interesting things, similar to how you browse your Facebook wall (which was based on Twitter's feed IIRC)
...but really it seems like you should ignore the home feed and just use list feeds instead, since there are a lot of people you'll want to follow for some reason or another who'll usually just fill up your feed with information you aren't interested in.
You can also use this to spot new tweets from people you're following as soon as they come in, which can help you be among the first to respond to them and thus (hopefully) get some of their followers to look at your profile.
Lists
Tactics for growing your following
Have good tweets
https://twitter.com/KevinSimler/status/919270321831550976
What I look for in ppl I follow:
1. Able to teach me new things
2. High signal:noise ratio
3. Polite & agreeable
4. Original thoughts > RTsThis was retweeted by @naval.
Submit blog posts to HN / Reddit that become highly-upvoted, and have a link to your Twitter at the bottom of the post.
Apparently levelsio got a bunch of followers this way.
Create something (a web app/service), submit it to Product Hunt / HN / Reddit, have it highly-upvoted, and link to your Twitter from the web app/service.
Apparently levelsio got a bunch of followers this way.
Have someone on Twitter with a lot of real followers (followers who would find your tweets helpful) retweet a useful tweet of yours.
I have seen levelsio getting retweeted by people with far more followers than him, and I suspect (but have no evidence) that it has helped him grow his following.
Get prominent / high-follower-count users to follow you, and when their followers look at your profile and see that the high-profile person follows you, they may be more willing to follow you.
You can get prominent users to follow you by replying to their tweets / helping them, and by having your list of tweets (as seen on your profile) be, on average, useful to that person.
Automate liking other people's tweets
2023 - It's not clear to me if this still works. I'd need to check if users get notified of favorites. I know that I don't see notifications of who my new followers are, for example.
Buying followers
How to
Why not to
2012(?) - iag.Me - 4 Reasons Why You Should Not Buy Followers
As mentioned here, long-time users of Twitter may notice if your tweets are not getting a 'normal' level of comments/likes/retweets given the number of followers that you have, and that may lead them to believe that you have purchased fake followers, which may make them think less of you, which may in turn make them less likely to follow you.
Exercises
Every day:
Reach out.
Look at the top of your feed.
Be one of the first 3(?) people to comment on something that someone with a lot of followers has posted.
Say something interesting, which will make people want to look at your profile.
What to say:
Ask a question other people may want to ask.
How to say it:
Be polite / respectful.
Post something.
If you write a blog post, make it a tweet as well.
Advice
Others' advice
https://www.postplanner.com/awesome-things-to-tweet-when-youre-out-of-ideas/
https://www.inc.com/hollis-thomases/twitter-tips-11-things-to-tweet-now.html
Profile
Header image
Ways I've seen people use this space:
Highlight/advertise a product or idea of theirs
Examples:
Elon Musk shows a series of images showing the terraforming of Mars into an Earth-like habitat. So he's in-effect advertising SpaceX.
Michael Dell has a photo of a Dell PowerFlex rack server.
Tom Francis has a screenshot from Gunpoint.
Nathan J Robinson has a photo of some Current Affairs magazines laid elegantly on a table with some classy-looking vintage décor (lamp, telephone, globe, books).
Nomad Capitalist shows a graphic that looks like it could've been part of a website landing page, highlighting their book, their motto ("Go where you're treated best"), their length-of-time-in-business (10 years), their office building(?), and with a bullet-list of the services they offer.
Ray Dalio shows a photo of his book ("Principles"), a one-sentence description of why you might want to read it, and the website where you can buy it.
Make a joke
Display some scenery that reflects where they currently are or where they'd like to be.
Show a cool photo or art that they like or that will give people a sense of what they're about.
Jeremy Howard has a cool photo of himself racing a motorcycle around a corner at a steep angle.
Michael Nielsen has what looks like a photo he took, wide-angle, showing a field at dusk with what appears to be lights faintly illuminating flowers.
Steve Stewart-Williams has a montage of evolution-themed images: a photo of Darwin, the evolution-of-man image, a dinosaur, a trilobite fossil.
Massimo has a photo of the cast of Star Trek at the unveiling of the Space Shuttle in the 70s.
Leaving it blank or a solid color
Examples: John Carmack, Michael Tracey
Explanation: This seems to be fine for people who don't feel a need to use the space in one of the ways I've listed above. So, they have nothing they care to promote (or they don't want to be seen as overly promotional), they don't care to have a nice photo, etc.
Dagobert Renouf - How to Dominate Twitter
Kyle Gawley said this was a helpful course.
Daniel Vassallo - Everyone Can Build a Twitter Audience
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.
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.