I finally got Twitter after years of not getting it

Twitter is great for threads posting science-related curiosities, you just need to follow the right people. Here are two awesome accounts of general interest

https://twitter.com/Rainmaker1973

https://twitter.com/gunsnrosesgirl3

It also makes sense to follow experts in one's field. Gabriel Peyré regularly posts computational math stuff of superb quality:

https://twitter.com/gabrielpeyre

Many years ago at a small private company that had access to thousands of Google analytics accounts ranging from recognizable name brands to people just trying to get started. You could actively watch small brands grow big over history and in all cases it was clear that twitter success (in terms of traffic from twitter and follower count) trailed brand development.

This was also not universally true of all social media. Facebook for example did precede growth in quite a few cases.

I also want to repeat the caveat that this was quite awhile back, so I wouldn't give it too much credence for today.

However my Twitter critique also grows out of several cycles of activity and inactivity over many years running a reasonably high traffic (for it's niche) blog and seeing these same observations. Twitter activity only caused minor bumps in traffic, and never correlated with a shift in the baseline readership.

Others here claim different experience, and it's quite possible they are correct. I have found personally that it's very easy to conflate the "feels good" of getting a lot of likes/follower/etc with the illusion that "this is working". Twitter is like a micro HN front page, only at least with HN you'll get a pretty ego inflating spike upon success (which is in practice is bad for marketing because it makes it easy to focus on the things that feel good over the things that work).

For better or worse the best source of consistent increases in traffic was (and from my experience still is) SEO. A high ranking post will have the highest probability of shifting your baseline traffic up.

I settled on a similar approach. I used to liberally follow all sorts of accounts that seemed even remotely relevant, but signal to noise was abysmal and there was way too much drama. Several times I was on the verge of quitting, even though Twitter was quite useful for promoting my own work and that of my students. But recently I decided to try a new approach and systematically unfollowed a lot of accounts. Now I stick to the following diet and it produces a much more healthy and interesting feed:

  1. No politicians  
  2. No journalists
  3. No institutions
  4. No companies
  5. No entertainment
  6. No anonymous accounts
  7. Some notable exceptions in all the categories above
  8. Mute words to taste

What's left is mostly genuinely interesting people who post about things they understand and truly care about.

I primarily browse the chronological timeline without retweets courtesy of a nice search function hack (you must be logged in for this to work):

https://twitter.com/search?q=filter%3Afollows%20exclude%3Are...

The algorithmic timeline has a bad reputation but it's actually useful for stuff you missed. But I only check it after looking at the chronological feed.

I also like and mostly follow these suggestions for using Twitter effectively: https://twitter.com/AlanLevinovitz/status/151946437478365184...

I'm genuinely curious if you've measured this, and how you determined the impact of twitter on your business.

It's certainly possible that other people have different success with twitter.

In my case I was looking over thousands of websites traffic history primarily concerned with long term patterns of growth based on activity among different social channels, SEO, news aggregators etc. The vast majority of sites primarily saw permanent growth in traffic as a function of SEO success. One high ranking article can get you a increase in average traffic that can last as long as you're on top. The only sites that didn't benefit from SEO are buzzfeed-style sites that exist solely from a constant stream of traffic coming from new articles in news aggregators. But Twitter doesn't generate a substantial burst in traffic that reddit or other sites do. Plus if you're popular on reddit, you will be reposted to twitter without any effort.

I should add that when I discovered this I was unhappy about it, as I was currently spending a lot of time on Twitter promoting my own project. I really enjoyed twitter at the time, and it felt like I was succeeding. I wanted all my tweeting to be a valuable activity. After doing the numbers I periodically would just stop using twitter for months with zero impact on website traffic.

He is constantly getting blocked after calling them out.

https://twitter.com/Grady_Booch/status/1526615686151217152