I took a course called “Everyone can build a Twitter Audience” by Daniel Vassallo.
Having an audience is key when launching new products. Twitter is a great social media platform to build your audience.
Why you need to start at building your credibility?
Mistake: people talk about things without credibility.
People will only listen if you have credibility. This is called tweeting in the void.
How to gain credibility?
Not by listing your credentials.
You do it by doing something interesting in real life, then describing it to people. It’s mostly a matter of writing down what you’ve learned from your experiences.
You don’t need to be about one topic. This is a common myth.
If you have no followers, start to build credibility online.
You don’t need to imagine your target audience first. Just start talking about your credibility.
These are examples of blog posts that build credibility.
“Only intrinsic motivation lasts. Why I left my $500k Amazon job.”
“I sell onions on the internet”
“Reflecting on my failure to build a billion dollar company.
After reading these posts, you probably want to learn more from these people.
How to build your credibility?
“From Employee to Bootstrapper.” This built Daniel’s credibility in personal finance. It was a follow up to his first post that came naturally after people asked him questions about leaving Amazon.
The theme: Daniel does something, documents how he did it, why, and how it performed, then shares those results. This earns him credibility.
Tip: Do something, write about what you did, and share it.
How Twitter measures success?
It’s not followers.
It’s people wanting to hear what you have to say.
To succeed, people should get something from you and people should get to know you.
It’s hard to measure.
But you’ll know when it’s happening. People will start DMing you, asking you questions, and recommend you to other people.
Engagement metrics are a good proxy, but not perfect. A better indicator is the engagement to follower count ratio. The “like” itself is a good measure.
Organic reach is also important to see how many people are viewing your content.
The Twitter Funnel
- Find your profile
- Read your bio
- Scroll your timeline
- Follow you
- Not Unfollow you
- Get value from you
- Get to know you
How to make people find you?
Promote your credibility: Might need to do this outside of Twitter. Reddit, hackernews, quora, indiehackers, etc. Find communities that are related.
Call to action: In your content, like blog posts, always have a call to action to your twitter profile and ask people to follow you for more information of [your niche]. Don’t have too many CTAs. Having only one CTA is better than having many.
Reply to other people’s tweets: Follow interesting accounts in your niche, and reply to their tweets by adding value (more content, info, etc.). You can provide another example or data point to the person. To make this easier, you can use tweetdeck. Also, in the Twitter phone app, you can set automatic notifications of new posts from certain accounts. This helps you to be quicker in replying to other people.
How to create your bio?
Your bio should answer: “Why should someone follow you?” You should write what you tweet about. This sets the right expectations with your followers.
This means you should weave in your credibility in your bio.
Here’s a look at Daniel’s twitter bio:
For your pinned tweet, Daniel recommends writing your credibility story as a tweet thread, and pin your first tweet in that thread.
Should you use your real name?
Don’t obsess too much about it. You can still create a successful account if you make it anonymous. People on Twitter ten to trust real people. There are also advantages to building your profile as YOU to open up opportunities in networking.
How to tweet?
There are two types:
- Give something
- Ask for something
If you are just starting out, you need to be giving a LOT more than asking for something. Your goal should be to give something that stops people from scrolling.
Asking for something can benefit you directly, like questions, polls, buy by product, etc.
You should minimize retweets unless you’re adding clear value.
What to Tweet about?
Reflect at the end of the day about interesting things that happened.
Always respond to questions with as much depth as possible.
Tweet about things that took you a lot of effort to figure out.
You may want to talk about inspiration from talking to other people.
Talk about inspiration from your own decision making.
Repost with new content. See which posts performed well a few months ago, and repost with additional content on that topic.
What not to Tweet?
If you don’t find it interesting, then don’t tweet.
Be careful about authenticity. It can be boring and uninteresting. Depending on what you say, it can hurt your employment optionality.
Find the intersection of: what interests you, what interests your audience, and what you have credibility on.
What else not to do?
- Don’t buy followers.
- Don’t follow for follow. This should not be the game you play.
- Don’t tag a bunch of people hoping they’ll notice you.
- Don’t ask for retweets.
- Don’t get banned.
If you want to see all the examples and get the lessons, check out Daniel’s course on Gumroad. You’ll get access to the course, the presentation, and all of Daniel’s Twitter statistics.
Do you have questions? Want to chat about the post? Message me: