How to Grow Your Audience on Twitter

What’s your platform of choice? TikTok? YouTube? Twitter? After setting a simple goal to grow, ConvertKit CEO Nathan Barry decided to shift his efforts to one medium rather than spreading himself thin everywhere. The result was a dramatic increase in Twitter followers and high levels of engagement across his posts. So what was the secret to Nathan’s retweet increase? 

The truth is, you don’t have to get lucky with a viral tweet or achieve that coveted blue checkmark to grow on Twitter. Tweets that educate and tell a story garner great engagement all the same. Luckily, Twitter threads accomplish those goals in a way that’s shareable and digestible. And accumulating solid Twitter friends quick to engage with those posts makes threads even more attractive to the algorithmic powers that be. 

In this episode, Charli, Haley, and Miguel talk with Nathan about why threads can help creators grow their audience on Twitter, how to distinguish your thread content from other tweeters, and why you don’t need comedic genius and expert copywriting skills to rack up the favorites and grow a solid following. 

Key Takeaways

• [01:04] - Have you heard? 
  • [01:10] - Meta is discussing charging content creators an almost 50% cut to create VR content.
  • [03:20] - TikTok released a private beta for Effect House – an AR tool for TikTok. 
  • [03:51] - A large majority of Etsy sellers are going on strike because Etsy increased their seller’s fee from 5 to 6.5 percent. 
  • [06:30] - Sam Altman sourced image ideas for DALL-E on Twitter. DALL-E is an AI program that creates images from text descriptions. 
  • [08:41] - Elon Musk ultimately declined a position on Twitter’s board. 
• [10:48] - Today’s main topic: How to grow as a creator using Twitter threads. 
  • [11:43] - Why Twitter? Nathan understands Twitter more than other growth platforms. He ultimately chose to focus on Twitter versus diluting his efforts across multiple platforms.
  • [14:53] - Find a group of Twitter users with strong followings that have similar goals. Twitter’s algorithm favors quote tweets and engagements that happen within the first 10 minutes of a post. Having friends to consistently interact with your posts expedites your growth. 
  • [20:28] - You can ask for support without being a nuisance. Frame outreach as a desire for education versus a desire for favorites. Share your posts with creators and ask for advice. 
  • [24:14] - Threads have been a huge part of Nathan’s growth on Twitter because thread virality doesn’t require a perfectly written line of copy. He recommends repurposing blogs, telling stories, and using visuals. 
  • [35:56] - Adapt your threads to follow the format. In other words, each tweet should be a standalone tweet. 
  • [39:06] - Twitter and Twitter threads garner the most success when creators dedicate their time to Twitter or have spent time creating on other platforms and carry that content over to Twitter. 
• [40:12] - Today’s listener shoutout! Rachel Brown is growing a bookstagram account and recently started receiving advance reader copies from publishers.
• [41:26] - A sneak peek at next week’s episode. 

Quotes

[25:46] - “Threads are interesting because you can really teach something. Which, that’s my format. If you look at all my content it’s not entertainment content it’s all education content. The thread lends itself really well to that.” ~ Nathan Barry

[28:16] - “Something that I try to do is write threads that only I can write. It’s from my own experience, it’s from something that we’ve learned growing ConvertKit, or it’s from data that we have from the platform.” ~ Nathan Barry

[39:06] - “I think where [Twitter] works the best is, either two things: a creator who can dedicate a ton of time to it and say, this is my primary channel, this is what I’m really gonna emphasize. Or the creator who has spent a lot of time, the past 10 years, creating content on other platforms and has a strong point of view and life experience and all of that and wants to bring that over.” ~ Nathan Barry

Links

• Watch The Future Belongs to Creators on YouTube
• Nathan Barry
• Nathan on Twitter 
• Twitter
• Meta
• Horizon Worlds
• Twitch
• Microsoft Stream
• Facebook Gaming
• FarmVille 
• Welcome to the Effect House beta! 
• Etsy
• Sam Altman
• Y Combinator 
• OpenAI
• Sam’s DALL-E Thread
• DALL-E
• YouTube
• Elon Musk
• Instagram
• Nathan’s podcast
• Sahil Bloom
• Dicky Bush
• David Perell
• Matt Ragland
• Nick Huber
• WhatsApp 
• Katelyn Bourgoin
• Customer Camp
• Social Blade 
• Sarah Cooper
• The ladders of wealth creation
• The Billion Dollar Creator
• Wikipedia 
• Keynote 
• How we grew a local newsletter to 10,000 subscribers
• Nathan’s Twitter thread on growing a local newsletter
• Rachel’s bookstagram 
• Henry Thong
• Creator Sessions
• I Am A Creator.

Connect with our hosts

• Charli Prangley
• Miguel Pou
• Haley Janicek

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