Post: #1

So tl;dr how does the Twitter game work and how to grow it? Let's brainstorm

I jumped on the Twitter thing recently, just for fun mostly, but it might be a good skill set to develop for any future ventures. Been also scratching my head on how "the game" of Twitter works. Anybody who's used it knows it's a hilarious unwieldy confusing platform in a way. Tweets and retweets and hidden tweets and conversation topics and replies and shoutouts all get mixed up into some weird uncomprehensible stew. The platform is shit, but it allows for topics to quickly become widely spread and gives even the simple civilian person a platform to spread their views if they play the game correctly.

Types
Now as far as I see it, there are 2 types of twitter accounts: a promotional platform if you have some kind of product/business which you're trying to push or a personal speaking platform for the average civilian person that doesn't have a product per se. There can also be a mix of both forms.

Examples for the former type would be: Roosh, any company, a journalist, someone with a blog, YouTubers, One-Trick-Pony accounts that repost like pictures of cats, landscapes, hot girls etc. They seem to be the most conductive to grow a following organically and expand their reach, but also more restrictive. There's a feedback loop that helps those accounts to grow. Roosh has his e-books. People buy the books, become fans of the account. Other see the fans, stumble unto the account, buy books, become fans etc. the following grows partly by itself. But then again, for such accounts you have to curate your views and what you post because you have to think about your business to not scare away potential customers.

The personal accounts of average people can just post whatever. They can post a wide range of topics and retweets because they have no product to worry about, or focus on a narrow range like: Trump exclusive news, Islamization, GameGate, trolly memes, pro-[theirCountry] topics, just random weird twitter memes etc. But then the central problem arises: how would people find them? WHY would people follow them? They're not famous for anything or for any product, how can they become known? More reach means more people are able to stumble on them and thus their tweets increase in importance.

So here, let's just brainstorm the strategies for the second type of account to grow, maybe some guys also have some tips and tricks since I'm also new to this Twitter stuff

Post: #2

Ok so how to grow?

Hashtags
Not sure how important they are. I mean attaching them to your tweets, sure, but if you jump into popular trending hashtags it seems that they move with such great speed that any one tweet you post will get drowned out in a massive flood of other tweets. Not sure if any person actually actively browses hashtags, it seems more to be a bandwagon to jump on them to help categorize your tweets for people at a glance. What hashtags are helpful for, it seems, is.....

Beefing
Getting into slapfights and trolling people seems to be a good way to expose yourself and your views to completely random people. Pick a popular hashtag, browse the tweets for fitting targets, select ones that have a lot of followers and maybe already got a conversation going on in their tweet and insert yourself into the conversation, actively replying to people or posting divisive tweets. The easiest way to get noticed seems to be to post something very controversial with a pic to force a reaction, or to concern/outright troll people with humor. Humor and controversy are what people notice, the measured, mellow, "normal" replies get overlooked

An easy way to find targets for conversations might be to just outright follow a bunch of the usual suspects: big online magazines, certain journalists, the typical SJW malcontents and shitlords to get a steady supply of battle playgrounds

Tweeting itself
Just making tweets on your account without, even funny or informative ones, seems pointless when your account is small. Who and how will even find them if you're not getting followed already? And even if you are but have <1k followers, the chance that your one magnum opus tweets gets noticed in their timeline flood of 200+ tweets a second is small. And you're not interesting or important enough yet for people to specifically go to your account and scroll through your tweets. The best tactic seemed to be to great one punchy tweet with an interesting article link/video/pic, copy the tweet adress and send it directly via a mention to channels that have big amounts of followers and similar views, in the hopes that they'll retweet them and thus expose you to their large following. If the topic you tweeted is engaging enough, it can spread like wildfire and gain you a couple followers here and there. What exactly will peak a wide interest of people is almost random. Even if you're an edgelord, concern trolling tweets à la THINK OF THE CHILDREN get the attention of the average normie. I may have landed just 3-4 tweets that instantly spread 100 or so times, but it's still just a random luck of the draw for me.

Post: #3

I'm a programmer and I thought I'd make a Twitter bot for a learning experience. The feed will periodically fetch rss posts and post them as tweets in a scheduled fashion. I've learned a few things from this.

A viral post boosts your Twitter followers by some but not a lot actually, at least these days. I would guess around a 5% boost. I had around 600 followers and a video featuring the former minister of finance for Greece boosted readership to around 630. It was retweeted maybe 30 or 40 times over the span of 24 hours.

People read their timeline and tweet when you do. That is, around their lunch break, after work, and in the evening. Tweets are a lot less effective middle of the night North America.

It's a lot harder to cut through the noise these days. In order for me to pop-up better, I've programmed the Twitter bot to fire from 3-6 tweets in succession. Terrible, I know.

My next idea is to make an alt-culture feed that scours Twitter timelines of a group of people, like say, Roosh, Cernovich, ramzpaul and other similar voices and rank them according to likes, responses and retweets and act as a repeater for the most popular tweets among that group.

Another idea I have would be the same as the other idea but one that mocks a bunch of sjw Twitter accounts. Sort of like #TheTriggering but on automated steroids.

Post: #4

I have two "active" Twitter accounts:

https://twitter.com/MasculineBooks
https://twitter.com/sethroselife

I have more followers already for the former account, despite having just a small fraction of total tweets. My logic behind that is people are more willing to follow an account with an interesting theme than just another random, faceless guy on the internet. For my Seth Rose account I tweet out witty lines and interesting articles, and still have a hard time making the needle budge, but with Masculine Books I get followers nearly everyday without doing anything.

What I would recommend is just looking at what successful guys are already doing on Twitter. Two of my favorite accounts are Cernovich's and Paul Joseph Watson (of Infowars). Both guys tweet a lot, dozens of tweets per day is the norm. They also tweet interesting, informative, and up-to-the-minute information. I've watched their Twitter accounts grow massively through organic growth alone. Impressive stuff.

Post: #5

(03-24-2016 10:28 AM)Seth_Rose Wrote:  I have two "active" Twitter accounts:

https://twitter.com/MasculineBooks
https://twitter.com/sethroselife

I have more followers already for the former account, despite having just a small fraction of total tweets. My logic behind that is people are more willing to follow an account with an interesting theme than just another random, faceless guy on the internet. For my Seth Rose account I tweet out witty lines and interesting articles, and still have a hard time making the needle budge, but with Masculine Books I get followers nearly everyday without doing anything.

What I would recommend is just looking at what successful guys are already doing on Twitter. Two of my favorite accounts are Cernovich's and Paul Joseph Watson (of Infowars). Both guys tweet a lot, dozens of tweets per day is the norm. They also tweet interesting, informative, and up-to-the-minute information. I've watched their Twitter accounts grow massively through organic growth alone. Impressive stuff.

My Twitter bot is https://twitter.com/infowar_

It will grab Infowars headlines and tweet them. Funnily enough, Paul Joseph Watson's videos will show up there too.

You make a salient point: people follow actual value. Cernovich makes blog postings and videos that contain real information; not marketing disguised as information. PJW must bust his butt making his YouTube videos. I do videography as a hobby and it is very time-consuming. It could take up to six hours to produce a six minute video.

Post: #6

(03-24-2016 10:28 AM)Seth_Rose Wrote:  I have two "active" Twitter accounts:

https://twitter.com/MasculineBooks
https://twitter.com/sethroselife

I have more followers already for the former account, despite having just a small fraction of total tweets. My logic behind that is people are more willing to follow an account with an interesting theme than just another random, faceless guy on the internet. For my Seth Rose account I tweet out witty lines and interesting articles, and still have a hard time making the needle budge, but with Masculine Books I get followers nearly everyday without doing anything.

What I would recommend is just looking at what successful guys are already doing on Twitter. Two of my favorite accounts are Cernovich's and Paul Joseph Watson (of Infowars). Both guys tweet a lot, dozens of tweets per day is the norm. They also tweet interesting, informative, and up-to-the-minute information. I've watched their Twitter accounts grow massively through organic growth alone. Impressive stuff.

Appreciate the perspective. I've been thinking over marketing strategy options for a website I'm going to start. I definitely want all organic followers on all platforms. As they say, "content is king".

Post: #7

Good insights. As already said, it's not surprising that accounts that got some kind of "hook" or "topic" that they revolve around start growing organically after a setup period on their very own as people gravitate automatically to it. "Oh you like landscape pics? Check out this account". "Oh you like ironic Republican tweets? check out @DemsRRealRacist". "Oh you like game? Check out Roosh, Chateau Heartiste etc."

But not every account can have a hook or consistent angle. There are some accounts that are just basically retweet and diverse news factories, even if for a specific range of topics. Many "normie" Trump accounts are just incessant Trump meme and news retweets that are also pretty huge.

I was wondering, do you guys use any tools? I've found Hootsuite and Crowfire. Hootsuite to pre-schedule tweets and having several streams of feeds on at the same time and Crowdfire to see recent new followers and who unfollowed you.

Also how do you manage the people you follow? Oftentimes, after you follow 50+ people your timeline starts to get cluttered and spammed. Do you just create many lists and check them out separately to see what news is coming in? Otherwise it's easy for interesting tweets to fall through the cracks, especially from accounts that don't spam much

Post: #8

Glad you brought this up.

How do you embed a tweet?

How I post an of a tweet here without uploading it? (screenshot doesn't seem to work)