How to Grow Your Twitter Audience from Scratch

Disclaimer: everything I'm about to write applies to my personal account but I believe could be relevant to you as well, either way take it with a grain of salt.

I tried to start and had a few false starts on Twitter in the past week or two. I finally decided this morning to go all in on twitter because I think it will return a lot of value in the coming months/years.

When I started the past week or two I got a few posts out, got almost no engagement and went and deleted my tweets for fear of someone finding them unpopular when they saw them in the future. I then thought about how I use twitter and realized the one and only true metric that matters is your follower count.

These people have an increased chance of being exposed to your future tweets and are a great signal to newcomers to your profile when they decide whether to follow you or not. Everything else you do on twitter (to a certain extent) is highly ephemeral and doesn't matter at all even 5 minute after you post it. For a bigger account like indie hackers, that time might be 24 - 48 hours but after that, for 99%+ of twitter users 99%+ of that content is lost forever.

It's not built for people to have easy access to your past tweets from months or years ago. And even more so, people viewing your profile CAN'T SEE YOUR REPLIES to other people.

With that in mind, I realized that

1. Obviously I have to be careful not to say anything super bad as is evidenced from recent "cancellations" of celebrities for past bad jokes. But for me that's irrelevant because I try really hard to keep all my online presence extremely positive regardless of anything else because in my opinion positivity >>>> than negativity.
2. Everything you do will immediately be gone. If you mess up or make a mistake, your good, in a few days, literally no one will see it because there's going to be so much new content flooding their feeds, it won't be relevant.

In conclusion, haha, if you even read all of this, just start. You almost literally, can not mess up on twitter when it comes to anything (except for point 1 above). Plus, just like anything else, as you do it more, you'll get better at it and people will just be looking at your past, most recent examples and will think you're a pro.

P.S. I'm practicing self promotion even though it's nauseating, cause all the, keep doing it and you'll get better at it. So, in that light, if you do want to practice replying/engaging/interacting with someone on Twitter, @yehudabrick is where you can find me 😊!