Tiny Twitter hacks I learned & love, part 6

Part 6 of tiny yet cool Twitter hacks that I’m slowly accumulating over all the daily practice and observing how others do it:

Read Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, Part 5.

• A simple Twitter strategy: If I had to start over on Twitter, this is what I’d do: Reply thoughtful replies. tweet once a day, make like-minded friends, reply, reply reply. That’s it.
• Tweet once a day, or twice max. I think there’s an optimal number for number of tweets per day (tweet threads don’t count), and anything more you start to spread out your impressions ‘quota’ across too many tweets. Twice a day is ideal I believe (Twitter meme lord @dagorenouf does this too). I used to tweet twice a day - one build in public tweet, and another for Lifelog, but since the Lifelog one no longer works, I stopped it since Sept 2022 last year. I like once a day now as that makes it simpler for me as a creator. There’s also a simple elegance to seeing someone’s profile feed that only tweets once a day - it’s looks clean, easy to read or scan through, and you get a sense quickly if the person is worth a follow. I’m most inspired by @theandreboso’s account in that regard.
• Alignment to authenticity: There’s something about being more aligned to your authentic self that feels really good. I started being serious on Twitter trying all sort of copywriting hacks and tricks, trying so hard to be smart, clever, witty, viral… but in the end, posting this tweet about what truly matters to me in my indie solopreneur journey felt so right that I want to tweet more of such stuff moving forward. Lower the noise on building an audience, crank up the volume on building my best self in public. Less about selling and marketing, more about genuine transparency and authenticity. Be real and human.
• Replies + likes > tweets. When it comes to the Twitter algorithm, tweeting alone isn’t enough. I tried it for the @golifelog Twitter account. Just 1 quote tweet a day, no interactions (likes/replies) to other accounts, for 1 month. The result was zero new followers, zero likes on any of my tweets. BUT after 1 month, once I started liking other tweets and replying occasionally, there’s new follows and likes. The lesson? The Twitter algo doesn’t show your tweets to your followers if you don’t engage with other accounts. It’s a social media network after all. The social aspect is the prime activity, not the broadcasting or content creation.
• Repurpose your best replies into tweets. A Twitter flywheel trick that had worked well for me: Since I reply way more than I tweet, I look through my replies to other people’s tweets, & repurpose the best ones for 99% of my tweets. As long as I keep replying, I won’t ever run out of tweets to tweet. So far this flywheel technique had been the most effective in helping me sustain my daily tweeting habit. In the past, I would have to sit down and spend a few hours per week looking through ideas and tweet hooks I collected, and write them specifically for my tweet queue. Now, no longer. I just scroll through my Tweets & replies feed, and copy-paste over good ones, oftentimes as is. My tweet queue now is almost 1 month long. Sometimes before it goes out I might tweak it a bit. I really enjoy this way of tweeting, because usually the tone of the tweets is more conversational, informal and not trying too hard (to be witty, clever or viral). Just feels more authentic. Which makes sense because the replies were part of a conversation to begin with.
• Platform risks. Since the Elon Musk take-over, platform risk on Twitter had never been more real. It’s good to start diversifying your distribution channels, and having Plan Bs. I started a mirror Mastodon account and Telegram channel as Plan Bs. I also had a Revue newsletter to collect emails, but Twitter had since shut it down so I’m over to Substack now… see?! Platform risk is real!
• Channel-offer fit. I’ve always struggled to understand why Twitter, despite me having the most followers here versus any other social media platform, doesn’t seem to help me with my products much. I get eyeballs for sure, but it doesn’t quite convert. It was that way for Lifelog. And similar observation for Carrd plugins too. And my experiments in other platforms like LinkedIn, Facebook and Reddit were schooling me about how followers ≠ revenue. Like how there’s simply a better fit between the offer I’m offering on LinkedIn to the audience I have there, compared to the not-so-good fit between the offerings on Twitter to my Twitter audience. That’s why I earn 90% of my revenue from LinkedIn even though it has 5x lesser followers. The main point here isn’t that LinkedIn is better than Twitter. The reverse can be true, if your product/offer fits Twitter. I see this happen to so many indie makers. One of my top fav accounts @dagorenouf, used Twitter to market his logo design startup but it grew slowly to $3k/month over years. And then once he launched his Twitter course, it hit 800 sales in 3 months all via word of mouth, earning $51k - many times the amount compared to his logo startup. That’s because the course had a way higher channel-offer fit! So my lesson? Don’t listen to the BS that gurus say about growing a huge audience in order to monetize. Sell the right thing to the right audience and right channel. Buy intent is more important than attention and impressions. Followers ain’t revenue.

What other tiny Twitter hacks do you know?