What it feels like to reach 1000 Twitter followers
brianto2013 • 10 Nov 2021 •
In the words of the great He-Man " I have the power!!!"
… which is what I thought would happen when I reached the big one thousand.
In reality, it felt more like a calm wave that washed over in a day or so.
This got me thinking about our obsession with results.
Around the 200 follower mark or so, I started to get really serious about Twitter.
I invested in some guides and even bought my first CMS tool to start writing tweets ahead of time because I placed an arbitrary goal of 1000 as my Twitter mark.
After trying every hack there was in the book…
systems, formats, copy tricks…
DM-ing TONS of people…
I realized that not only was I getting burnt out, but Twitter stopped becoming fun.
I was more concerned about the destination than the journey
And when Twitter started feeling like a chore, I wanted to spend less and less time on the platform.
Not gonna lie, my growth was exploding, but it just wasn’t fun.
So-- I decided to take what I learned from all the hacks and develop my own “Lazy-man’s guide” to Twitter!
I was fine with nothing reaching a 1k in a month-- if it meant that I would have more fun.
The results/ followers will always come later.
And ever since I shifted from being obsessed with results, and more towards having fun it started raining opportunities!
My conclusion: There’s always a faster way to achieve a goal, but it doesn’t mean it’s the only way.
Sometimes the most “efficient” way is to just have fun with it.
Comments
Congratulations on your first post and realization. I knew @tao would react to this one. Is your goal to write every day?
@brianto2013 woohoo great to see your first post! That’s what i like about seeing longer form - I get to know your journey beyond the tweets. Didn’t know you went through that not-fun phase. Can definitely relate. I’m feeling it too, trying to moderate my time/effort on Twitter the past weeks so that I can sustain.
And isn’t it curious that every time we let go of our expectations, goals and just have fun, the results come faster?! Some weird inverse law of the universe going on there…
Yup.
When you have fun and just let go of the expectations you perform 10x better!
@tao thanks for the link I"ll definitely read through!
@therealbrandonwilson I already write everyday, but the tricky part is coming up with “good” useful content to publish on my twitter.
So I guess my goal would be to just keep up my writing chops!
I feel you, totally. You can read my Twitter journey here where I also burned out trying to generate a following to make money.
In the end, it just becomes about the grind, constantly using engagement groups, commenting a million times to get 1 RT and existing within the same bubble as others doing the same as you. I never got to 1k (550 at the moment) but I also gave up when it stopped being so much fun. Plus, focussing on “vanity metrics” like followers or likes is not useful or rewarding.
I am using an app to queue my weekly tweets up and keep the account going. You never know when it might become useful in the future.