3 and a Half Secrets to Getting Insane Traction on Twitter
If I knew this earlier, I would’ve grown faster.
Last year this time, I wanted to be a freelancer. You work at your own time and convenience and can work from anywhere in the world. How cool, right?
A few months into being self-employed, I realised I couldn’t sustain on freelancing because it’s a chore to find high paying clients and boring work sucks my happiness out of writing.
Twitter opened a world full of opportunities for me. And as I’m now realising, it has for many others too.
- Ev makes money and improves her online presence thanks to Twitter.
- Easlo has made over $25,000 in 8 months selling Notion templates.
- Jeremy Ginn has built a community of coaches and creators who enjoy writing. Nothing materialistic here, it's like a virtual family.
If it wasn’t for Twitter, I wouldn’t have been a creative entrepreneur. I would’ve still been on Upwork trying to get an opportunity and doing grunt work to handle my finances.
The latter would’ve disrupted the entire purpose of why I quit my 9 to 5 — for freedom and to stay true to my purpose of improving others.
Here’s what my growth looks:
And now I’ll tell you exactly how to get there. And why you should.
A One-Sentence Reason You Should Be On Twitter
If you have something that can add value to others, want to learn from others, and grow your personal brand — this is your place.
Now, jumping straight into how to get there authentically.
The ‘Secret Sauce’ to Grow Like Crazy
The sad thing about authentically growing is that it takes time. It’s much easier to join $20–250/month Twitter groups that function on the premise of liking and promoting each other.
But I strongly recommend building an audience instead of increasing your followers.
One makes you look flashy, but the other one is soulful.
It’s where people will be kind to you. They’ll want to support you without you asking for it, they’ll seek your guidance, you’ll learn from them, you’ll suddenly get pulled into groups that feel like family.
It’s where the good stuff is.
Here are the three things that can help you.
1. Curate Your Feed
The internet can be as negative or empowering as you make it.
Follow the good eggs, you’ll see good comments, and your feed will be about good vibes. The best part is that you can get discovered without being connected — solely because a mutual connection engaged with your content.
Twitter is great at this. Follow ten amazing people and you’ll see more amazing people they interact with.
2. Value
Are you a manager in a company for 5 years? Write about your expertise. Talk about your industry, work, best practices. If not expertise, talk about what you learn from books or podcasts. Write about your childhood, the lessons your father taught you over the holidays.
There’s a story inside everybody.
Okay, I’m no god.
When I’m uninspired or too lazy to repurpose my content, I refer to this free template of tweets I got off Product Hunt.
Also, my Twitter scheduler (more on this in the next section) has a section where you can see top-performing tweets across categories and get inspired to create.
3. Frequency
Now coming to the technical bit — tweet several times a day. I tweet at least 5–10 times a day. Sounds overwhelming, right? Because every time you open Twitter, you also end up scrolling.
Guess how much time I spend creating? About 90min/week on 50–60 tweets. Yes, that’s all!
Choose your priorities. My priority is time.
My Twitter game massively grew when I started scheduling my Tweets. I use Hypefury for this. It’s one of the few resources I pay for to save time.
‘Paying’ to schedule tweets has helped me earn thousands of dollars, not a bad trade-off, yeah?
Lastly, some Twitter etiquettes
This is the ‘half secret’.
If you’re doing all the above but don’t follow some basic etiquettes, it’ll be hard to build genuine relationships. The followers may come, but I highly recommend you focus on building relationships with people behind the screen.
That person behind the screen has a heart and a life full of stories. Talk to them, for who knows how that’ll turn out.
Here’s something I wish I knew when I started.
DM new followers
Not everybody and every time, because time is an essential resource. But whenever you can and to people you’d want to build a relationship with. Thank them for following you. Here’s an example of how it’s done:
Twitter Spaces
I have anywhere between 50–80 people follow me each time I host a Twitter space and a few when I speak in one.
Twitter Spaces are live audio conversations. You can join the ones where people talk about crap (they exist!), or educational ones where you can gain (+ sometimes add) value.
I only attend the latter and have taken down pages of notes. Learning live and for free by experts has never been this easy!
DM interesting people
Because why not?
I’ve had a conversation with the biggest writer on a particular platform and many people who have 25x or 1/5 followers than me. If your conversations have context, there’s so much you can learn from each other.
Sometimes, it’s not all work and you can just vibe and make a new friend.
After my surgery, a lot of ‘real life’ friends were too busy to check up on me but my online friends DMed me and were there. That made a world of a difference to me.
Lastly
The feedback I’ve got the most is that I’m honest. So I feel I should tell you to do the same?
You don’t have to be an expert, you just have to be you.
Being kind helps as well and connects you with other kind people. Samantha has hosted 100+ Twitter Spaces helped me with my first one for nothing in return. She was a pro, I was an amateur.
But see, it’s a great place to learn, grow, and help each other.
The results come slowly. But if you follow these strategies, you’ll grow faster than I did because I discovered them much later.
You got this!
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