Andy Black
Help people. Get paid. Help more people.
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I’m not much for building audiences tbh. My subscriber count is small on Twitter, YouTube, and Facebook.So, it's been a while since I've posted a thread on this forum. It's also been a while since I've posted on my blog. Took a break from everything. In that break, I learned:
For a few days now, I've been following @Andy Black 's advice on how to grow and create an audience on twitter. Although, it does sometimes feel like I'm ACTION FAKING. For example, if I'm replying to a tweet, or going through somebody's profile, I'll excuse myself by saying "Oh, this is just a part of growing an audience on twitter, I HAVE TO SPEND MORE TIME HERE TO GROW MORE." Now, the questions I'm struggling with right now:
- Growing an audience is a great way to add value to more people
- Twitter is an amazing platform to do so
- If I can mix up productivity+web design..maybe I can find a niche within a niche?(web designers struggling with productivity)
- Is it worth it to grow an audience on twitter?
- Should I spend more time on twitter to get an audience faster?
- How do I differentiate between action faking/action taking here?
- What other platform can I grow an audience on?
For me, the power of Twitter is how easy it is to build 1-2-1 relationships with lots of interesting people. In Feb I met the guy who I now co-host a podcast with.
My advice would be to *not* have a goal to “build an audience”. An audience is a by-product of helping people, making friends, building relationships, creating win-wins, etc.
Tactically on Twitter, if someone had a brand new account, I’d advise them to:
- Get your goal right. Are you “building an audience”, or helping people, or building relationships? (I suspect you can do them all if you get the priority right.)
- Log in daily but limit the amount of time you spend on it.
- Do interesting stuff outside of Twitter, and write about it on Twitter.
- Optimise your profile so it’s obvious what you do, and why folks should follow you.
- Tweet only once a day, but every day.
- Retweet your tweet a few times throughout the day, but remove the retweet the next day so your timeline is clean.
- Retweet interesting stuff, but sparingly, and remove them the next day so your timeline is clean.
- Don’t bother creating threads, unless one of yours tweets does really well and it’s worth expanding on.
- Don’t use hashtags - they look ugly and desperate.
- Go easy on tagging loads of people. Shoutouts have been done to death.
- Follow accounts you’re interested in reading the content of.
- Mute accounts that offer no value (fortune cookie platitude accounts, etc). I also mute accounts that say “normalize”, “I don’t know who should hear this”, etc. (You’ll learn the phrases that indicate people are just copying each other.)
- Avoid Money Twitter and mute those folks too. I avoid Marketing Twitter too.
- Mute argumentative, opinionated a-holes. I don’t see so many of them. Must be the circles I move in.
- If you’re a techie, join in with Tech Twitter and the Indie Hacker community.
- Build relationships with people doing stuff. Get followers who are engagers in other peoples threads (reply to their comments, get into DM, get to Zoom, make friends).
- And finally... have fun!
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