How Fixing This One Big Mistake Made My X (Twitter) Account Start Growing
I was struggling with my account on X (Twitter). After changing this one thing I finally started growing. But I also made a few more changes.
I did it all wrong.
Like pretty much everything I started without a proper initial research. same story:
run wild as if my life depends on it
hit the wall
sit on the floor
start thinking, analyzing, researching, and most of all: learning
Then get up and start walking. Baby steps.
X was another one of my learning journeys online.
My intention is to build the CREATIVETETCH HUB as a place for creators where we can help each other grow online. I wanted to be on X too so I decided to create an account there under the name of the HUB.
HUGE MISTAKE!
For months it stayed at 10-ish followers and almost no impressions of the posts. I was thinking it must be normal at the beginning.
WRONG!
One day I was reading on Medium when I saw my friend Carl Jeffers being banned once again. I rushed to X to talk to him, but I got no reply.
Then it hit me — how can he know it’s me when my profile says CREATIVETECH HUB??!!
That was my a-ha moment!
I immediately changed it to Yana G.Y., and had to wait for verification again, but it was worth it. It’s been less than one month now and I’m hitting my first milestone of 100 followers!
Ta-daa!
I know I know it’s nothing!
I take it slow there. So for me, it’s huge!
And it only started growing after I fixed this one big mistake and made it personal!
But there’s more to it. Real growth started when I changed my content strategy.
This is exactly what I did:
In the beginning, I was just sharing links to my Medium stories and the stories from other writers from my publication.
They were random topics. And the links were in the post.
WRONG!
X doesn’t like external links in the posts. But they’re totally on in the comments.
I now know it. Why would they? Every social media hates external links in posts for a few reasons:
they make money from advertising
to attract advertisers, they need people to spend time on the platform, not off of it.
See, they can hardly advertise something on top of some other advertisement. For that reason most platforms shadow-ban accounts that post only external links.
So I started making summaries of my posts and then posting the links in a thread. A thread is a post with a series of comments, which are connected to one another. The good thing is that you don’t have to post and then click and add endless comments. You’ll get lost…
Instead, you can do this all at once by using this sweet + button:
Then you’ll have something that looks like this:
This is the place for all links. I learned that from Tim Denning. Thanks, Tim! Invaluable!
Next, I changed the topics.
I decided to focus on writing targeting other writers there.
You don’t need a niche on social media, but you need to stay relevant to your audience
Like it or not you have to put everything through the eyes of your audience. You need some consistency there.
You can hardly grow if you post random stuff, say something about Wallmart, another thing about making money online, and then some poem. Who would like to follow that?
Next thing I learned was my texts. They were so meh…”read this I just posted on Medium” bla bla stuff
Instead, I made sure my posts are sparking curiosity.
Make them crispy sharp and short. Bullets work great.
You need to speak the X language. You need to sound super confident.
If you want a long post, make a thread. Do a catchy post and then write everything in the comments.
Don’t sell. Solve problems by telling personal stories.
Great salespeople don’t sell. They solve problems. Tell people how you solved a problem or how someone else did it.
It’s hard to sell on social media unless you run ads.
Why? You create a gap in the funnel!
Social media is in the awareness phase. You need to take this into consideration before asking for an action.
That’s also valid for X.
Your content needs to let people know you exist and how great you are. The only thing that worked for me was to share a freebie as a lead magnet and gather emails. Since the account is small, I still had to run ads.
Last but not least: hashtags. I use them sometimes, and only after the text.
Don’t add hashtags in the text, you’ll make it unreadable.
The attention span is now less than a second on social media. You need to grasp that. Don’t screw it up with hashtags.
That works. By now as I’m writing this post I already have 2 more followers. But I’m sure there’s more to it.
As always, I’ll share everything with you as I learn.
How do you know you got shadow-ban?
How do you turn on the pink coloured side bars?