Learning Twitter in 2022

Pizza courtesy of Pizza for Ukraine!

Note: This is a work in progress. Rather than finish it in one go, I’m updating it live as a draft document as I learn new things about Twitter. Last update: 2022-06-15

I am, at heart, a long form blogger. Still – the cool kids, as they say – these days are all on twitter (and, yes, I know by saying it that way, I’m dating myself even further; so be it; it amuses me).

I find myself, here in 2022, wanting to get a better handle on Twitter. This will be a regularly updated blog post summarizing what I’ve learned.

Rule 0: You Are Screaming Into the Void

The first thing to understand is that Twitter as a whole is enormous and no one is going to notice, or even care, that you are there. There is very much an aspect of screaming into the void. And that’s ok. One of the benefits of an enormous pool is that as you make mistakes, no one notices.

Rule 1: You Are Going to Have to Work to Get Noticed

When a social media thing is new then can be easy to get established. When a social media already exists though, it is a lot of work to establish yourself. You need to throw away any expectations that you are going to be successful on Twitter quickly and get ready for a long grind of creating content.

Rule 2: Hash Tags

A hash tag is an identifier that describes your content. What I have noticed is that without hash tags, my content may as well not exist. Add hash tags to your tweet just by adding a hash mark or # to the end of your tweets. Look at the content universe you exist in to determine the right hash tags. For me, a Ruby on Rails developer, I tend to use #ruby #rails and #railsdev most of all.

Rule 3: @ sign Someone if It is Relevant

If what you are doing is relevant to someone in specific then include them with an @ sign.

Rule 4: Direct Messaging People on Twitter is Quite Real

Twitter is both a content universe and an inbox. Don’t ignore this.

Rule 5: Check Your Mentions

Rule 6: Keep At It

Rule 7: Decide On Your One Metric

I’m a huge believer in “one metric”. Knowing how things grow and change is hard and even harder when you try and follow everything. For example you could measure your Twitter presence by:

Followers
Retweets
Mentions
Etc

For me I picked Follower Count as my measure of success.

Rule 8: If you need to find YOUR OWN STUFF then search with your @tag

I’m @fuzzygroup so if I wanted to find posts I wrote about orion browser, I’d use:

@fuzzygroup orion

Twitter has a number of metrics:

Followers
Retweets
Likes
Mentions

Trying to pay attention to all of these at once is, for someone who isn’t metric oriented and isn’t a marketer, a kind of sucky experience. My choice was that I was going to use my Followers count as the metric. When I started this experiment, I had 207 followers. Now I have 209 followers. Progress???

Rule 9: Experiment and Learn from It

Rule 9: Don’t Just Tweet Your Own Stuff

Imagine Twitter as if it was a party. If you are only posting your own stuff, it is analogous to that dude bro at a party who only talks about himself. Figure out the intersection between your own content (for me that’s ruby / rails / cloud) and stuff that other people talk about. And then when you find something that’s in that intersection, that is what you should tweet / retweet / like.