Hello,

Another busy week, but I wrote up a quick email below for any of you who want a useful thing to keep in mind when looking for more engagement on social media.

Also, there's stupid jokes.

How to fail at Twitter

A few weeks ago I wrote in this newsletter about my trip to Oslo. It was mostly just bullet points of a few things I had learned about the food and a couple tourist spots we visited.

The other day I used that same list to make a Twitter thread.

I didn't think about it too much since I wasn't writing from scratch, and I put it together while watching a film before going to bed. I had low expectations and didn't expect anything from it. I just wanted to try make myself repurpose something for once.

The next day it went mini-viral, as you can see from the stats at the bottom of this screenshot:

Feeling very pleased with myself suddenly, I decided to write another thread the as soon as possible. I wrote this new one from scratch. I decided to try summarising something I'd heard on Cal Newport's podcast, the sort of thing the people of Twitter often seem to like, i.e. useful & aspirational.

I also copied the opening hook from a thread that I'd seen go viral before.

I hit publish, thinking that with this new level of effort and care, I'd be sure to have a similar result as the Norway thread:

I was obviously quite wrong.

So what was the difference?

It was actually quite simple. I hadn't tagged anybody meaningful in the second thread.

("What about the New Yorker?" you ask. As if they would engage! I only really added their account for colour and to signal Newport's credentials.)

Newport himself famously avoids social media. There was no @CalNewport to tag. I sent that thread out without Twitter seeing a reason it should show it to my 500 followers who had better things to do.

The first thread meanwhile tagged @VisitOslo later in the thread, a popular tourist account with 48,000 followers who, you know, like stuff about Oslo. So once @VisitOslo saw it and retweeted it, it was put in front of an ideal audience for the topic and they engaged like crazy.

Relearning old lessons

Back when I worked at Culture.pl, we tried to tag relevant accounts all the time in our tweets. That is until a curious intern tested not bothering for a couple weeks and got much better engagement. We inferred that these untagged tweets actually got more retweets because some of the tagged accounts didn't want to be associated with the other accounts that were tagged (Polish culture is a weird sector). They felt happier to retweet when the tweet was neutrally untagged and not actually directly asked of them.

But that account also had nearly 20,000 followers at the time. Social media is a different game at that level, especially when you represent a public institution.

As a tiny account for an individual, you have to be tagging relevantly whenever you can. If you don't, nobody is going to see your post, as can be seen by my Newport thread with its 154 views.

I made a third thread a couple days later. This time I tagged quite relevantly, and a couple likes from one of the these tagged accounts let Twitter know it was worth showing to at least a few others:

Although the thread was mostly ironic (I offered 3 very stupid ideas), what most obviously stopped it from going viral was not mentioning Norwegian tacos.

Best Twitter Blue jokes

Sticking to Twitter, I am loving all the silliness about it at the moment.

Since Elon Musk announced people can pay $8 a month to have the social media platform give you a verified account blue checkmark, it's basically made the platform even more untrustworthy. Fantastic.

Here are some memes about it that made me a chuckle:

Podcast recommendation of the week

I was complaining in an earlier newsletter about all the remakes doing the rounds on the radio. Well, here is a great dissection of this trend, including why it's doing so well. Charlie Harding is so well spoken and passionate about music, he almost made it seem acceptable to me.

(N.B. It's a curated clip from a longer podcast, selected & introduced by Shawn Wang, a coder I started following after he was a Building A Second Brain mentor)

That's all for this week. I hope you found it acceptable. Thanks for reading!

Adam

Adam Zulawski

TranslatingMarek.com / Procrastilearning.com / More stuff

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