One month on Twitter

I started to play with Twitter in December 2021. I paid Twitter to promote tweets to get new followers, tweeted on different topics, and engaged with exciting individuals and professionals.

I want to honestly summarize my experience to return to it and reassess it.

Why did I decide to invest my time in Twitter?

The truth is that I did not know how to start my solopreneurship journey, but I have read books about building an audience and finding a niche before making a product. I thought what a good idea it was. I have never been so wrong.

I mostly got the idea wrong. It is not that easy, and this path has a lot of caveats.

A first niche

I picked up software engineering as my core topic, where I feel most experienced, and decided to share my experience. Some tweets gained me organic followers, and some tweets provoked exciting discussions.

I like this niche because I love software engineering. And I can create counter-intuitive and “unpopular opinion” tweets on this topic because I dived deep into this.

But frankly, there was a problem. I feel that I position myself like an expert with, you know, this monotonous voice announcing dogmas even if share something insighting (insightful and exciting).

The problem with this kind of tweets is that I can’t consistently share my experience. I need to remember many things suddenly, and it takes a lot of energy to write two or three sentences.

And, frankly, I do not like to be presented as an expert. The more I know about software engineering, the more I see new horizons, and the more I understand how far I am from being the top developer. And is it even possible when Linus Torvalds exists?

Tweets promotion

The craziest stupid thing that one can do is to promote regular simple tweets and expect real genuine engagement and organic growth.

And I am this stupid person who did this. I paid to promote my philosophical tweets to get more followers. How foolish was I?

Eventually, I got one hundred new followers, and I felt awful. I felt like cheater. They do not engage, and they seem to be bots. There is no real value in this kind of relationship. I can’t give value to them, and they can’t give anything to me.

A pivot to the fun

I tried to tweet in one niche and tried to promote tweets. I felt awful, did not create meaningful connections, did not bring any value, and did not receive value.

I abandoned my internal filters on tweeting and tweeted on the broader set of topics.

And I enabled my natural offline curiosity about people. I was afraid to ask general questions on Twitter, but I started to do it. I try to add value to the tweets or ask questions that bother me.

Suddenly, I find myself having fun on Twitter and communicating with people worldwide about exciting topics.

I can’t call these people my friends for now, but they are more than just strangers. Slowly, I learn their stories, who they are, what is behind their profile, and I receive meaningful insights.

It is enjoyable. But I started to see that I am getting addicted to Twitter, and I wouldn’t say I like this fact. I do not know now what I will do with this fact.

Current strategy

So, I understood that getting more followers is stupid and does not make me happy. And even I had one thousand followers, what would I do with them? I want to remember all my followers; I want to understand who they are and what they do for life.

And frankly, many amazing people are finding their way on Twitter.

My current strategy is to continue having fun and engage genuinely with people who can teach me something.

I do not use schedulers, recycle or retweet my old tweets for now. I primarily act by inspiration, but my goal is to be consistent.

Twitter teaches me to write my thoughts clearly and in short form.

Plan and future experiments

For now, I consider Twitter as a medium to share my learnings and to meet new people. I stopped thinking of it as another channel to get customers.

I want to focus my Twitter account on future endeavors like bootstrapping projects, indie hacking, writing, and books. I think it is enough.

I want to start helping people promote their projects and make an impact.

And I still want to tweet once a day.

Focus is essential because it can help me narrow down my thoughts and help people understand fast if they want to follow me.

You can follow me if you are interested in my journey.