Photo by Afra Ramió on Unsplash
This looks like a fantastic set of tips from McKinley Valentine of The Whippet.* I say “looks like” because I haven’t tried the tips yet, but I’ll use them soon and write a followup about how it goes.
Main takeaways:
- Problem: “Twitter hates links to external content.” (E.g. links you share to your blog)
- Solution 1/?: A non-linky way to share your stuff that MV uses that gets an unscientific 17x as many retweets and about three times as many shares
- Solution 2/?: The low-down on how to use tweet-threads to share interesting highlights, “tickle” your original tweet, and even share the link you wanted to share in the first tweet but didn’t because you knew Twitter wouldn’t like it.
- Bonus extra 1/2: A bit on how to make your profile more useful to people who’re interested in what you’ve shared
- Bonus extra 2/2: Did you know about the no-strings attached, royalty free pictures on Unsplash?
So what?
- This kind of straight-into-the-nuts-and-bolts-of-it, incredibly useful but non-flashy** explanation is just what the internet needs
- And so are the incidental extras like the mention of Unsplash, which somehow I’d missed until now. These take the already very useful and well-written posts to the next level.
*Highlights of which have featured before, and which is bound to feature soon as a post of its own).
**By non-flashy, I mean stuff like this, which is characteristic of McKinley’s style:
If I go into Twitter analytics, I can see that 26 people clicked on my profile after reading the snippet+image tweet, while only 4 people clicked through after seeing the external link tweet.
I’ve deliberately chosen typical results, rather than unusually good or bad days. The difference is real. Within a week of switching to this new “snippets instead of links” strategy, I had 50 new followers and 30 new email sign-ups.
That’s not overnight fame and fortune, but it’s a meaningful jump, especially given I didn’t have to do a tonne of extra work — I just went through articles I’ve already written to find the tweet-worthy bits.
It’s not “How to get a million followers” – or even ten thousand or a thousand – it’s about the next meaningful jump.***
***… which is worth a post of its own