How I'd start over and grow on Twitter as a creator:

This is how I’d start over and grow on Twitter as a creator if the slate was wiped clean:

1. Reply thoughtful replies - Replying remains one of the best ways to grow your following. Notice it comes before #2 about tweeting. Because in the beginning no one will see your tweet. But by replying, you’re leveraging the audience of the account you’re replying to. If you reply something that adds to the conversation and people find valuable, they might check out your profile, and some might click follow. Don’t reply stuff like “Yes” or “Agree” or “No disagree” and call it a day. “Thoughtful” can mean many things: educational, entertaining, empathetic. The good thing about using “thoughtful” as a quality barometer - it’s an in-built mechanism to prevent burning out from replying too much. I once tried 80 replies a day but couldn’t even hit that many to reply to. Now I do like 10-20/day.

2. Tweet once a day - I’ll go for once a day because I’m coming from a habit-building, long game point of view. I think many creators start off strong, have grand ambitions of building an audience, want to do a lot, but fizzle out after a few months. Bonus: write 7 tweets within 1-2h once a week, and schedule them. Why batch write? Because it takes time to get into the groove when writing tweets. After you write one, you might as well ride the momentum and write 6 more. Writing just 1 tweet a day ends up taking more time over 7 days compared to batch writing all 7 at once. Caveat: I’m referring to solo creators, not startups with media teams.

3. Make like-minded friends - My latest definition of building an audience: Surrounding myself with people who help me build my best self in public. It’s like forming a mastermind group on Twitter, where we collectively benefit from the right kind of inspiration, accountability, influence to help us progress on our goals. By the way, if I want this, I need to do #1.

4. Reply, reply, reply - This repeat is intentional, for emphasis. Being the reply guy remains the best way for growth for newbies. Yes it does take energy to engage on Twitter, and can be a huge time suck… That’s why I try to do it at the end of the day after I’m done with my core tasks.

That’s it, thanks for attending my Twitter growth course.