How I curate & grow my Twitter account
My Twitter profile has 12,600 followers, which isn’t that much by celebrity standards, but I’m excited about it for these reasons:
- I get to learn from a sizable crowd of people from all walks of life who share my interest in Bitcoin, investing, and new technological frontiers.
- The growth has been entirely organic, supplemented by a few articles, conference presentations, and the occasional interview.
- My followers are pretty successful! At least by financial standards: their minimum combined net worth is $3.9 billion (more about that later).
- And they talk back: with a daily 122 retweets and 38 replies, my ‘engagement rate’ is 2%, which is really good by social media standards.
- My account may be worth more than just the joy I get from it, though I haven’t tried selling anything through it. I use it to promote a free report on Bitcoin investing, which has now been read by 4,000 investors.
10 practices that work for me
I’m not saying that these are the only principles that work on Twitter. But I think they’ve worked for me, and for my purposes.
1. Make a good first impression
When people go to my Twitter profile page, I assume they do as I do when deciding whether to follow someone new: take a 2 second look at the profile pic and description, and then spend 10–20 seconds scrolling down to look at some of the tweets. I try to make the most of this brief moment: I use my real name, a (hopefully) welcoming profile picture, and a background image that conveys something of what my account is about.
As you can see, one of the things I want people to know is that I write about Bitcoin, A LOT :-)
2. Have a clear idea of the audience you’re trying to reach
For about a year, my account didn’t grow at all. In hindsight, my approach lacked focus— I’d switch between Dutch and English, for example. I didn’t tweet daily. Also my other interests would regularly seep in, making my followers feel confused about what this account was about.
So one day I sat down and decided what my audience was going to be: English speakers who are interested in investing, Bitcoin, tech startups, crisis economics, and long term trends. That’s when my audience started growing — the effect was pretty much immediate.
3. Tweets are headlines, I’m the newspaper
After first hearing it from Fred Wilson, this perspective helped me better understand what Twitter is about. A long string of headlines—that’s it!
And those headlines can reflect anything newsworthy: an interesting datapoint, a startling quote, a stimulating thought, … while competing against a waterfall of other headlines. So mine better be punchy!
Linking to interesting articles alone won’t grow your account, because only a very small percentage of your followers will actually ever click on the link. They want to look over your shoulder, read your summary, learn your takeaway of the article. (Sometimes that’s just a single word.)
4. Precise and concise
When it comes to writing, I learned a lot from Joe Sugarman. Here’s one of his axioms:
“In the editing process, you refine your copy to express exactly what you want to express with the fewest words.”
And ‘fewest words’ doesn’t mean 160 characters! The most iconic headlines usually contain less than ten words, and magazine covers often become memorable even without words, just using imagery and layout.
5. Paint pictures in people’s minds
Nothing sticks like a vivid image. People learn by connecting a new thing to something they already know. That’s why comparisons and metaphors are so powerful. Here’s an example:
6. Images, screenshots are vital
Of my tweets that generated most retweets, well over 70% were images or screenshots. If I’m linking to an article, report, or paper, I’ll try to find a powerful quote, diagram, or image that I can attach to the tweet. That way I provide my audience with a flash of info that they can absorb in seconds, knowing that I vetted the article and that this is what I thought was most valuable.
Here’s an example:
Over time I’ve invested in tools to allow me to quickly make images that fit with Twitter’s supported dimensions for in-stream-photos. Here’s a photoshop template I use pretty much daily. I take a screenshot (command-shift-4 on mac), drop the file into my template, do some resizing, perhaps add another image, “quick export as png” et voila.
I found that using these recommended dimensions works wonders: people are much more likely to retweet and interact with stuff that they can immediately see without having to click it open first.
That said, I’m less careful when on the road and using my cell phone — I prefer continuity in posting over perfection-inspired self-censorship.
7. Don’t trick people
Of course I want to stand out and be noticed, but I also want my audience to grow to trust me as a reliable source of information. And so I try to avoid posting misleading, clickbait-y tweets, as it leaves people feel mistrustful and less likely to keep following what I have to say.
8. Sass—embrace it!
I find that being bold, playful, and sometimes unapologetically judgmental helps convey that I’m an independent thinker, which helps me find an interesting audience to interact with. Also, I find that allowing myself to be playful helps bring out the best in me. It’s when I’m having fun that the ideas flow, that I’m willing to take more risks, and that I feel most productive.
It wasn’t always like this: when I first started taking Twitter more seriously, I was cautious about what I wrote under my account. I was actually hesitant to share jokes or politically charged items, thinking that people would unfollow because I was wasting their precious time or because they disagreed. I still think that restraint help ingrain in me the kind of audience I aim to write for, but I’ve grown more relaxed about just being myself.
9. Own up to your mistakes.
I don’t know if this helps my account grow at all actually. It’s just something that helped me sleep well, and became easier to do as I did it more often.
Twitter is a fast paced environment, and I’ll often post a tweet after just a few seconds of thought. As a result I make lots of mistakes. Taking responsibility feels good, and often people really appreciate it. Like here:
@Smaulgld : @theonevortex one shouldn’t be judged by mistakes but the reaction to mistakes. Appreciate @TuurDemeester prompt response
(Smaulgld made his account private. If he makes it public again, I’ll be able to grab a screenshot.)
10. Break the rules
I don’t have rules. Standards yes, but not rules. I try as much as possible to rely on my instincts, so that I’m not bound by a preconceived limitation of what I can and cannot write about. Occasionally I post very personal stuff, or political stuff, or goofy stuff , or shamelessly retweet an old tweet of mine — it’s my account, I do what I want!
Bonus 11. Quality PLUS quantity
Many blogs will advise you to tweet once a day, or twice—not too much so that people get ‘bored’ by you. I found pretty much the opposite: the more I tweet, the more followers I gain.
This may be a statistical anomaly, but for a period of seven months straight, I would pretty much gain one extra follower for every tweet I put out. I do think this only works if the quality of your tweets stays high. In my case, I try find the info that people will have a hard time finding anywhere else.
Now about that $3.9 billion…
According to Twitter, $3.9 billion is what the minimum combined wealth of all my followers put together is — an average of $310k, which is about 53% higher than the average Twitter user.
Here’s how I got those numbers: if you go to your Twitter analytics page, you’ll find a tab that says ‘audiences’, and then you’ll see a section called ‘net worth’. Here below is a screenshot:
So what Twitter does (I think), is that with the help of IBM it uses info from advertising companies to estimate what categories your followers fall into. In my case, it looks like 10.3% of my followers also appear in databases of those Twitter partners.
And so what I did to get to the $3.9 billion number, is take my number of followers, multiply them by the percentages for a particular category, and multiply that by the minimum dollar amount of each wealth category.
What works for you?
It’s so interesting and rewarding to directly interact with so many smart people from all over the world—I’m really glad I’ve invested in this platform, and I plan to keep honing my skills in this area further.
You’ve now seen some of the things that help me get what I want from the platform. I look forward to hearing any thoughts or questions you may have in the comments.
Also I’m curious: what works for you on Twitter?
