The Twitter Algorithm is Broken. Here's What You Need to Do.
1% Better 2/9/23
Happy Thursday everyone! Twitter has changed dramatically the last few weeks. Elon and team have clearly tinkered with the algorithm and in my opinion broke it. In this post I go over what’s changed, and what you can do to adapt to these changes and continue to build your audience.
Before we get into that I’m going to quickly cover the content competition and this week’s winner. We had close to 100 submissions this week, with the winner publishing a heartfelt thread about his past.
Let’s get into it…
Contents:
1️⃣ Latest Youtube Short
2️⃣ Content Competition
3️⃣ The Twitter Algorithm is Broken. Here's What You Need to Do.
Interested in sponsoring a newsletter and getting your project in front of 19,000+ self-improvement, technology, finance, and Web 3 enthusiasts? Reach out to nftgod@nftgod.gives.
Latest Youtube Short:
Content Competition:
Week 2 of the content competition is in the books! This week’s winner receives an airdrop of the above NFT. An incredible piece of art by Monkster.
The winner of edition 2 of the 1% Club: Rewards NFT is…. J0nga!!!
J0nga wrote the deeply personal and moving thread below:
It was a well written, readable thread that clearly came from his heart. People ask me all the time if I believe AI will replace content creators. Can somebody tell me how AI could write a thread like the one above? The best content is based on past experiences and comes from the heart. AI can’t create deeply personal content based on past experiences.
Congratulations J0nga, I’ll be airdropping you this NFT.
Week 3 of the content competition begins NOW! Start submitting your content ASAP by tagging me on Twitter and hashtagging #1percentbetter. If you are in the 1% Club Discord, make sure to submit your content in the submit-your-content channel to be eligible for the NFT.
This week there are again no requirements, although I’d love to see some creative uses of the new 4,000 character limit on Twitter. Extra points if you use this new functionality.
REMINDER: to be eligible for the Rewards NFT you need to be a part of the 1% Club and in the Discord. To join the largest growth minded community on the web, feel free to upgrade below. It’s a community dedicated to harboring a growth mindset, finding new ways to build our brands, and constructing the businesses we’ve always dreamed of. I’m in the Discord every single day answering questions!
The Twitter Algorithm is Broken. Here's What You Need to Do.
Twitter has changed dramatically over the last 3 weeks. Engagement has been destroyed for some, but exploded for others. What has worked for years, works no more. Elon and his band of Tesla engineers has dug into the algorithm and changed EVERYTHING.
Personally, I’ve been impacted greatly. I’m a long form writer, so I write a ton of threads. Threads have clearly been deprioritized in this new algorithm. Every thread I’ve posted in the past 3 weeks has greatly underperformed. If you are looking to build an audience on Twitter, engagement and reach are important.
Here are all my observations on the new algorithm, and everything you should be doing to get the most out of it:
Threads don’t work like they used to. But there IS a workaround
Thread reach has been destroyed. The algorithm is clearly deprioritizing them. I suspect it might be because Twitter just rolled out 4,000 character Tweets and they are looking to push users to adopting this new functionality.
Here’s the issue: threads are still better in every way. I tested out 4,000 character tweets and I didn’t love the results:
The formatting stinks. 4,000 character tweets are significantly harder to read than threads. While threads are broken up nicely into bite sized chunks, extended tweets are basically just walls of text. Nobody likes walls of text.
Threads are still the way to go if you care about quality. What’s great is I found a workaround for the algorithm issue. I’ve been following many top copywriting accounts, and the pattern I’ve noticed is threads that are posted one tweet at a time, with a few minutes in between have been vastly outperforming standard threads where all tweets are posted at once.
Here’s how to play it: you need to write threads that can be read one tweet at a time. Go into your drafting tool (I use hypefury) and draft up a thread. Take the first tweet and manually put it into Twitter. Send it out. Then every few minutes, go back into your drafting tool, copy your next tweet, and reply to you previous tweet with it, turning the content into a thread.
You’re basically tweeting out the thread one tweet at a time with a small amount of time in between. From what I’ve seen, this is more favored by the new algorithm.
Outside links DESTROY engagement
Another point to note: links to outside websites have been heavily deprioritized. If you are going to include links to your newsletter, you NEED to wait a good amount of time before replying to one of your tweets and including the link. You can see an example of where I did this here (first reply to this tweet if you click in):
My strategy is to now reply to high performing tweets I post with a link to my newsletter. This will ensure outside links do not interfere with Tweet performance.
Going private increases engagement. DON’T do this.
A big trend from the last few weeks has been many accounts going private to increase engagement. The bad news: it’s true, going private does increase engagement. Here’s the thing though, if you go private, you’re not going to grow. If you’re anything like me, the goal is to increase your audience size. If your account is private, your content is not reaching the masses.
Social media was made to be SOCIAL. If all accounts are going private, clearly the system is broken. I don’t believe this trend will last long. Going private right now is a very short sighted move.
Don’t change your content strategy
I hate to say it but low quality content is winning right now. My feed has completely been taken over by engagement farming. 90% of tweets I see are just questions sent out in order to elicit engagement.
Don’t give in. Switching to low quality content will damage your brand. You’ll get some cheap engagement and dopamine hits, but you’ll tarnish the way your branding is viewed.
Algorithms change, great writing doesn’t. Short term thinking will cause 99% of people to sell out and start posting mind numbing content. Be the 1%.
Experiment on other platforms
If you are only building on Twitter, you are currently putting everything in the hands of a team who clearly is experimenting and breaking things. The whole platform has been down most of today. Elon doesn’t have full control over the situation.
It has never been more important to be multi-platform. Get on Instagram, Youtube, and TikTok. Start a newsletter (I love Substack). If you have a newsletter, you own your audience. Right now on Twitter, a team of engineers who keep breaking things owns your audience.
For inspiration, feel free to check out and subscribe to my newly built channels:
Keep a long term mindset
The algorithm has changed big time the last few weeks. A lot of these changes were clearly bad decisions. I think many of them will be walked back in the coming months. It doesn’t make much sense for a social media site to encourage accounts to go private.
Here’s the thing though: high quality content wins ALWAYS. It might not get rewarded in the short term, but in the long term it wins 100% of the time. My strategy isn’t changing much. I’m making small tinkers like spreading my threads out and posting links separately, but the core mission of creating high quality content doesn’t change.
Keep a long term mindset. Don’t give into the urge of engagement farming. Build a brand that isn’t impacted by unpredictable code.
How are you changing your strategy? Let me know down in the comments.
amazing thoughts and tips on how to deal with the new twitter algorithm, thank u for this. really see the downward of twitter engagement to my acc. hope they will get back it soon
I was noticing the changes in twitter, they definitely have not helped the creation of content, however this does not discourage us, eventually and in the long term the creation of content pays off