The Number 1 Strategy for Twitter Growth

1% Better 6/8/23

The Number 1 Strategy for Twitter Growth

read time 4 minutes

Welcome to 1% Better. A weekly newsletter where I provide simple playbooks to grow your following, earn more revenue, and live a happy life.

Today at a Glance:

• I go over the number one strategy for growing your brand, building a network, and making social media way more fun: the reply guy strategy

• Actionable steps for implementing this strategy day to day

• The AI prompts that helped me build this newsletter

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The Number 1 Strategy for Twitter Growth

Twitter is one of the most difficult platforms to grow your audience on across all of the social networks.

Standing out is incredibly difficult. Putting out content that is valuable and well written is not enough to get you noticed a lot of the time.

There are many other factors that are involved with getting noticed, the most underrated of which is your network.

The higher quality the people are that interact with your content, the better it’ll perform. This means you need to be building a network of high quality Twitter accounts through replies and DMs .

Here is a simple blueprint for implementing a reply strategy and getting your growth off the ground:

What Makes a Good Reply

Here’s the biggest mistake most people make when replying to others: they resort to laziness. They go for quantity over quality. They go down their feed and reply to every tweet with 🔥 or 👀. They think it’s enough just to get seen.

This couldn’t be a bigger waste of time. You not only have to be seen, but you have to be noticed. You get noticed by treating your replies just like you do your normal tweets, by using your own, unique, authentic perspective to share value with your audience.

Every reply should be relevant to the original topic, but also come from your own unique stand point. It should be an extension of your brand.

Loved this reply from James Downs to one of my tweets. Was well thought out and came from his own, unique voice:

What Makes a Bad Reply

A bad reply can kill you. It can ensure that A) people don’t join your network and B) hurt your long term performance because you get deprioritized by the algorithm.

Here are some things to avoid when replying:

1. No naked emojis. This is the number one mistake people commit when attempting to build their network. They just throw a couple of emojis into a reply and hit send. Nobody finds this kind of engagement interesting or enlightening. You might as well have sent nothing.

2. No negativity. Most people, especially the ones you want in your network on Twitter, really don’t want to be brought down when looking at their tweets. They’ll quickly skip over or mute anyone who’s bringing down the vibe on their feed. Just best to avoid any sort of negativity.

3. No constant contrarianism. Not everyone is looking for a debate on their timeline. A lot of people are just there for casual conversation. Light back and forths are fine sometimes, but being the guy that’s constantly picking fights on people’s tweets are not where you want to be.

4. Sending too many replies. Twitter will shadow ban you if you are too active on the timeline. In the next section I’ll go over execution and what’s the best cadence to avoid getting banned.

Execution Strategy

Here are some ways to build an effective reply strategy that are fun, within the parameters of Twitter’s rules, and do a great job of boosting your network:

1. Time block. I’m a big believer that mindless scrolling on your timeline can get out of control quick, eat a ton of your time, and be overall unproductive.
   
   You need to move with a purpose on social media. With that being said, I like to time block my reply sessions. Typically I’ll do this 3 times a day for about 15 minutes each (these time blocks are constantly shifting depending on my schedule that day.)
   
   After every tweet I post, I time block 15 minutes to not only reply to the mentions on my tweets, but also to go down a Twitter List I created and interact with other people’s tweets (more on Lists shortly). By time blocking, you ensure you use your time efficiently, don’t do much mindless scrolling, and have a productive routine.

2. Use Twitter Lists. Twitter Lists are the most underutilized tool on the entire platform. Lists allow you to compile a group of accounts you’d like to interact with and make your entire feed that group.
   
   I’d recommend you make 2 lists. First list is people you interact with regularly. Anyone who replies to your tweets often who you’d like to maintain a relationship with. The second list is for accounts you aspire to be. These are bigger accounts/influencers with similar branding to you who you’d like to take their audience and make it your own.

3. Make your replies retweetable. Whenever posting a reply, reread it and ask yourself if the reply could stand alone. If it can, that means people will be more likely to retweet it and give you extra visibility.

4. Repurpose your replies into tweets. If your replies can stand alone, that means you can also turn them into standalone tweets, giving you more content options. I like to repurpose all of my content as many ways as I can. By repurposing replies into tweets, you’ll have a much larger arsenal of content you can use across your platforms.

5. Subscribe to key accounts. I don’t have a paid Twitter subscription (in its current state I believe it cheapens the brand), but I do subscribe to other people’s paid subscriptions. The reason I do this is because it boosts my replies on their tweets. For instance I pay $5 a month for Elon’s subscription. Now all of my replies appear near the top of his tweets, exploding my visibility.
   
   I’ve had replies to his account hit over 100,000 impressions. A lot of companies pay thousands for that kind of visibility. I pay 5 bucks.

Other Reply Hacks

1. Use Tweet Hunter to reply quickly. I’ve recently started using Tweet Hunter because of an awesome reply tool they have. Tweet Hunter gives you a clean UI where you can quickly and easily fire off replies to mentions, keywords, or Twitter Lists you’ve built. I get at least 5x the amount of replies off in my 15 minute time block than I did before. Would highly recommend trying that out. Sign up for Tweet Hunter here.

2. Send DMs to people you interact with often. Little known secret: the more you DM with someone, the more they appear on your timeline. Yes, DMing actually has an impact on your algorithm standings.
   
   Interact with someone often or want to interact with them more? Send them a DM. It’s more likely you’ll appear on each others timelines.

A well implemented reply strategy is critical for growth. I use this strategy and almost every big account you follow uses this strategy. Don’t overthink it. Build a list, start growing your network.

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AI Prompts I Used For This Newsletter

This prompt will take a newsletter or essay and turn it into a Twitter thread. I used this prompt to turn my newsletter into a Twitter thread in which I posted earlier in the week. This is a great way to repurpose content you write into other formats. Take the output of this prompt, edit it, and make it your own.

Begin Prompt

I am a newsletter writer who also maintains a Twitter account. I wrote the below newsletter on how to create and implement a replying strategy on Twitter. This newsletter covered why replying is important, the do's and dont's of replying, reply hacks, and routines to implement. Please take this newsletter and create me an outline for a Twitter thread. Make each concept in the newsletter summarized and covered in only one simple and easy to read tweet. Include a table of contents tweet towards the beginning and make the first tweet a powerful hook that will rope the reader in.

Newsletter:

{newsletter}

End Prompt

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I hope this guide and prompt were helpful for you! If you use the prompt feel free to email or DM me, would love to hear your experience with it.

Take care and have an excellent weekend!