You see Twitter accounts with thousands, or maybe even millions of followers, but how did they get there?
I set a goal for myself to see if being generally active on Twitter and trying different strategies can get me to 1,000 followers in a year.
However, this is not for my own vanity. What I want to do is record in detail what I did during this time, so that’s is no longer a mystery of why some Twitter accounts grow big while others go nowhere. It’s like discovering a recipe.
I imagine over time the strategy will change, depending on how many followers I have and the kinds of interactions going on. But that’s what I want to find out: what the process is like. It’s not just about the end goal.
I started this at 28 followers, and now I have 36. Not bad.
However, I am wasting a lot of time on the “For you” tab, scrolling past completely irrelevant posts. I don’t know how Twitter’s algorithms think that this content is engaging, like a man taking a photo of his face every day and asking what’s going on. Despite using the “not interested” button, those posts keep coming, or at least another of the same type replace the ones I manage to hide. Not a good use of time.
Because of this, I decided to stop looking at the “For you” tab and instead focus on curating my following list, and only use the “Following” tab which shows posts chronologically from accounts I follow.
I found the result to be much better. Accounts I follow repost others, which adds the variety that is lacking when it’s only up to me to decide what I see. However, unlike the Twitter algorithms which serve up what’s basically spam, the reposts have obviously been vetted by people I trust, as they’re the ones reposting.
Goodbye weird and useless posts.