Growing on Twitter

Twitter is a weird place. 

Depending on what corner you frequent, it can be politically toxic and angry, or it can be the start of a new career. 

I spend most of my Twitter hours at the intersection of Web3 and “Money Twitter.” 

What is Money Twitter you ask?

Money Twitter is made up of all the strivers that are using Twitter to make money. 

Monetization baby. You got to monetize!

Instead of posting random pics of coffee and mindless tweets about their dogs, the accounts on Money Twitter are hustling.

Tryna to make that dolla. 

An account that embodies the ethos of Money Twitter is JK Molina who famously says:

Spend a few hours on Money Twitter and your dopamine receptors are burnt to a crisp. 

The successful accounts on Money Twitter tend to have a few things in common: they understand copywriting and behavioral psychology.

“If you aren’t using AI, you're falling behind. Here are 7 AI apps to level up your game.”

“Elon has promised Twitter monetization. Life changing wealth is coming. Here’s how to prepare.”

"How to I grew my Twitter account to 117,235 followers in 5 months."

Sometimes I’ll mindlessly scroll my timeline. Before I know it, it's been 2 hours and I am ready to get my wallet out to buy the 37 different courses that will change my life. 

Twitter has solved all my problems. I am pumped and ready to dominate all obstacles in life. 

All the while my head feels fuzzy from the dopamine, which is already wearing off.

Growth By Any Means Necessary

The number one obsession on Twitter is growth. 

Grow your followers, your network, your skills!

Growth cures all. 

But it’s not slow and steady growth, it’s unsustainable, hyper viral growth. 

This obsession with growth means our expectations are unrealistic and we constantly feel like we are falling behind. 

When I started this account I thought to myself, “Ok, I want X number for followers within Y amount of time.”

After a few weeks I thought, “Oh shit, I’m not growing fast enough!”

But guess what?

That’s a bad strategy for the following reasons:

• The outcome depends on the algorithm which you have no control over.

• It’s rooted in scarcity mindset - as if other people gaining followers means there will be less for me.

• It treats “followers” as a commodity, like money, rather than human beings who are looking to learn or improve their lives.

Rather than thinking how many followers I hope to gain, I am now approaching it with the following mentality:

• I am building skills by writing everyday which will help me develop my ideas, gain topical authority and expand my network.

• Any followers that I gain are a result of consistently building a body of work and helping people.

The goal should be personal growth and by extension, follower growth. But building skills has to come first. 

Unfortunately, the hyper growth mentality on Twitter makes us want to skip the first part. We just want the outcome, we don’t want to do the work.  

Focusing on What’s Important

I recently came across a curious statistic. 

Only 2% of Twitter users have more than 1,000 followers. 

When I learned this statistic I was blown away. You mean to tell me not everyone has thousands of followers and is absolutely crushing it?

I tweeted this and it got a much better reaction that I was expecting. It made me think that other people were feeling the same way. 

I spoke with a few Twitter friends and they shared similar feelings of falling behind. 

Funny thing is, if you look at the actual numbers you can see most people are doing great. 

The problem is we don’t have a little number next to our profile that tallies up the skills we are building.

Instead of showing only followers and views, our Twitter account should also show the growth in our skills. 

Let’s change that. 

I have been using a simple habit tracker that I made in Google sheets that tracks three things:

1. Comments

2. DMs

3. Tweets

The conventional wisdom for Twitter growth is you need to do all three of those things to grow your account. How much of each you want to do is up to you. 

Here we are concerned with building skills, which means showing up everyday. 

Each day I will check the boxes of the tasks I complete and it will tally up each as one point. If I did't send DMs but I tweeted and left comments, I will have two points that day. 

To make the point system in the same range as followers, I added a 10x multiplier for each day’s points. The points are cumulative as you go along, much like follower count. 

Now I have a system where I can focus on how much I am growing my skills in addition to my followers. And I can also see how showing up everyday correlates with follower growth, which motivates me more to continue building my skills.  

You can steal the spreadsheet here.  

Just click on "File" and then "Make a copy" to save it to your drive. 

It’s not a perfect system, but it helps focus on what’s important. 

And checking a few boxes everyday feels like this:

Consumer to Producer

The first two years I was on Twitter I was a consumer. 

I had no interest in Tweeting. I was just here to learn about crypto. As such, I followed accounts, bookmarked tweets and learned about crypto projects.

At some point I realized it was time to build my Twitter skills and get in the game and start producing.  

I enjoy writing, I have some good experience in Web3, how hard can it be?

Enter imposter syndrome, procrastination, self-doubt and scarcity mindset.

We all go through it. 

The echo chamber that is social media has an insidious way of making you feel like you're falling behind. 

But in reality, you are doing just fine.

-Savant