Ruminations

8/25/2020

TweetStorms

A TweetStorm is a chain of tweets linked together for the purpose of sharing advice and gaining a bigger audience. These tend to reach massive levels of engagement when done correctly. If each individual tweet of the TweetStorm is good and punchy, then the reader will often read the entire TweetStorm. And if they really enjoyed it, they’ll RT it to their audience. Its a thread. A TweetStorm is a Twitter Thread, but the name is much better. I stole the name “TweetStorm” from David Perrell.

This TweetStorm reached almost 100,000 people in the first 24 hours. You can read it here on Twitter or here on my website. Every day I’ll see people talk about how to grow on Twitter. They say: Put a circle around your bio, reply 30 times to bigger accounts. quote tweet, and engage with people every day. Ok, sure this stuff will work and it’s helpful advice. But the best thing you can do is to provide value. Most accounts on Twitter won’t tell you that though. Why? Because it’s easy to leave 30 low effort replies than to add actual value. Yesterday’s TweetStorm got me 499 followers yesterday, and I’ll have hundreds more today. Value Trumps Shortcuts.

There’s a lot of people who will put in minimal effort and try to game the system. This works for some. But the best way to grow is to be original, authentic and personable. If someone doesn’t have their own website, I assume they’re not that committed. A website shows effort. It shows expertise. It shows this person is committed to putting in effort and hopefully sharing value. Anyway, go check out my TweetStorm on 33 Lessons I’ve Learned in Life. You’ll see what I mean when I say you need to drop value.

3/02/2020

Time and Respect

There’s a constant issue facing anyone who successfully writes online. How do you balance engaging with your fanbase and spending time efficiently. This is something that I feel like I do poorly until I see how others tackle this problem. I still see a lot of people, usually smaller accounts, talk about not blocking people and not shying away from interaction. Too many of these people give away their time for free. Most people don’t respect time. In fact, you likely don’t even respect your own time.

So how do you manage your own time? Are you wasting your days in mindless group chats because you miss out on real interaction. Are you wasting other people’s time? I notice this in the DMs I get. People will ask pointless or easily googlable questions. I try and answer good questions. But as you begin to gain a larger and larger audience, it simply doesn’t make sense to be constantly available. So I find it’s best to take the questions that are good and interesting and turn them into emails or blog posts. Don’t waste people’s time with questions that you can find the answers to. Most importantly, don’t waste your own time.

 2/27/20

Funky shenanigans

are at play on Twitter. Maybe you’ve noticed that many accounts are being banned or suspended. ThaHustlerClub, ZubyMusic, Logocentrifugal. And many more. In fact, this is even affecting those who don’t follow these people and don’t get banned. How so? Because it is slowing down everyone’s growth. If you track who unfollows you, you’ll notice that most accounts you lose are due to users being banned.

This is all part of a bigger issue at play. There is a culture war being waged and right now the battlefield is grossly out of balance. Too many in Silicon Valley mean to impose their will whether their aims be political, social justice, or a mere grudge to bear. They wield the ability to stifle discussion, ban people from the modern day social square of social media. This creates context of important arguments. Real world opinions can be shifted by merely leveraging the “rightspeak” of chosen users.

Anyway, this is going to be a new section where I “ruminate” on thoughts that aren’t worthy of a blog post. I guess the fear of losing a twitter account inspired the idea to create something of a timeline on my own website. But here I can write longer than 280 characters.