Happy Saturday!
I want to talk about growing your personal brand on Twitter and LinkedIn today. Before you roll your eyes like I spent 31 years doing, just hear me out first, ok? Gosh, what is it with you today?
Two things happened these last couple weeks that prompted me to want to write about this:
I’m going to condense all of the above plus my 6 years of experience writing on Twitter in 6 steps and tell you everything I can remember before I fall asleep.
I’m working on very little sleep and spent the day at the hospital. But my wife is healthy so I have no complaints! I can’t skip a week at #00021, right?
Before I get into it, I want to know your opinion. Did you see this poll?
I really think there could be something to this idea.
People call in to Dave Ramsey’s show for 2 reasons:
I think it would be so cool and fun to do the same thing with you all, but for entrepreneurship. It could be called…Koerner’s Corner! Just like this newsletter!
Thanks for picking the name by the way! I would have landed on Busy Juice if it weren’t for you! Not terrible, but not as good as Koerner’s Corner. You were right!
Maybe you call in and brag about your cement repair business’s 82% margins and I pepper you with questions about your best marketing channel, etc. It would feed my SMB addiction, in short. It can be entertaining to fellow business nerds.
Or maybe you call in and say, “Hey Chris. I make $170k as a commodities trader but I hate my career. I’m burned out. I really want to start a lawncare business. What do you think? Should I do it and how would I grow if I did?
And then I ask more probing questions and give you my real opinions.
It’s the equivalent of the “When and how should I retire?” question.
It would be on Twitter Spaces and Podcast form, and then I could have someone make it into YT Shorts, Tiktok, etc.
Is that idea viable? Would you watch or listen to that? Would you ever call in?
Could this be a big idea? Obviously Dave Ramsey is massive but personal finance is more broad.
Producers thought Shark Tank would be too niche but it became the biggest show on cable.
The Profit was on for 8 seasons.
What do you think?
Ok, back to Twitter growth tactics.
Why You Should Care
Look at this Google Trends chart:
That’s the amount of searches for the phrase “personal brand” over the last 20 years.
People are losing trust in governments and corporations. Period. End of story. People want to buy from people that they know and trust, and social media enables this at scale, for the first time in human history.
One day Feastables will overtake Hershey’s in market share.
Do you think people are going to start trusting corporations more, or less in the future? Exactly.
Phase 1 of “Influencer Marketing” had the influencers working for the corporations.
In Phase 2 the people are the corporations.
Will you be left behind if you don’t garner more followers? Of course not. But you’ll have a massive advantage if you do. That’s my argument. Now for the “how to.”
Even before step 1, do what Nik always says and that’s “Have a strategy.” The below steps should help craft your strategy, but only you can make your own strategy.
Part of that strategy is throwing spaghetti against a wall. It’s ok, because that is a strategy as long as you’re measuring how long it takes for spaghetti to fall, the moisture content, noodle thickness, etc.
How to Grow on Twitter
Step 1: Start with an anonymous account.
Yep, I know. I don’t care about Jake REI and scammers and optics. I don’t care. IT WORKS. It worked for me, Car Dealership Guy, Strip Mall Guy and countless others. And it will keep working even if people talk trash about anon accounts.
The haters are wrong. The haters are jealous that anon accounts grow faster than them. And why do they? Keep reading! That’s my point gosh dangit!
No one cares what John Smith has to say. John is judged by what is name is, or isn’t. He’s not Elon. Yawn. Boring. But if a Twitter name is “Cement Repair Guy” then the thought is “Hmm…this guy must be an expert at that. I’ll listen.”
If they don’t care about cement repair or small business and that’s what John Smith is gonna talk about then you don’t want them as a follower anyway!
If you want to put your real name in your bio then fine. But I don’t think it’s necessary until you hit 10k followers. You don’t have to stay anon on Zoom calls or via email. I never was. It’s just a way to grow faster and to be known for something.
Oh, and pay papa Elon $16/month for a verified account. It really makes a difference.
Step 2: Follow & reply
Follow 300-600 business accounts that you admire and set notifications for 20-40 of them. Get in their replies first thing with smart, thoughtful comments. That’s where your first followers will come from.
Pro tip, I monitor and respond to almost all comments on my posts for the first 15-30 mins. So if you have a question about anything, whether related to my post or not, just ask in that first 30 mins and I’ll answer. If I don’t, I’m sorry. DM me and call me on it! Tell me you are Club KC (Koerner’s Corner) and you’ll get special treatment.
The first 1,000 followers are the hardest, but this is how you’ll do it. You can also try following a bunch of targeted accounts and then unfollowing them a few days later if they don’t follow back. Aim for a 25% conversion rate. It’s kinda lame, but it works, and I did it back in the day. No shame.
NEVER EVER EVER BUY FOLLOWERS. Don’t boost your posts either. The harder way is the righter way, bad grammar and all.
Step 3: Mom’s spaghetti
Throw spaghetti against the wall for the first few months with your content. Here are the 4 things that must align for me in my Twitter strategy:
Find your 4.
It’s a bit like the Ikigai venn diagram, but with a twist:
Try everything (except drugs) until all 4 of those things are aligning.
Charlie Rich is an epic troll.
Robert Sterling can meme anything into existence.
Nick Huber likes pissing liberals off.
Trung enriches cultural insights with subtle trolling.
They’ve found their 4, but it took a long time. Those strategies aren’t a fit for me, but I appreciate them.
You can vary outside of your 4, but not for long. Every Tweet is a request for someone’s time. Don’t waste it with something low value or dumb, unless dumb is your whole brand.
I still make that mistake of going outside my 4, so I’ll delete a few tweets a week, at least. Maybe even one per day here lately, because I’m still throwing spaghetti. Why would you ever stop? Unless you got new cabinets.
Step 4: Live and die by the hook
The first line of your tweet is everything. Twitter Advanced Search is your friend. I use it literally every day. Find the viral hooks and learn why they went viral by reading the comments and the first lines. You can pull a viral hook from crypto Twitter or black twitter or food twitter and repurpose it. This paragraph is likely the most valuable one of these 2,492 words today.
Step 5: Look to the data
Export your Twitter metrics by day and by week and add them to a Google Sheet. Here’s a (heavily redacted) sample of mine. Feel free to copy the template. Focus on Column X on the “By Day” tab.
You want to optimize for new followers the most. Yeah, you can tweet about paying virtual assistants 36 cents a day and you’ll get views, but not followers. In fact, you’ll lose followers (ask me how I know).
Go to Settings > Premium > Analytics > Below:
In that same (un-redacted private version) sheet I have a dozen other tabs that keeps track of tweet and newsletter ideas, stories, etc. When I have an idea I add it to a tab and pull from it later.
Watch the engagement rate in the first 20 minutes of a tweet. It should start over 8% and then drop from there. The more the tweet spreads, the more it will drop, even as low as 2.2% over time, but that’s ok. Reversion to the mean.
If it starts around 5% it will usually be a dud.
Sometimes it will start over 20%, but that doesn’t mean it’ll for sure go viral, it just means it’s more likely to. The algo is weird, and it’s still changing.
Sometimes my tweet will have only 13k views the first hour but go viral. Sometimes it will start with 40k views and die out at 100k.
If a tweet is a dud, edit is and play with the hook to see if you can turn it around in the first hour.
If you edit doesn’t work then delete it. If the first 20% of your followers don’t like it then then other 80% won’t either, so why waste their attention?
Save their attention for things that move the needle the most for whatever it is you’re optimizing for.
Revisit old tweets and crunch numbers. Compare hooks and types of tweets against engagement rates and keep copying what works. Don’t copy others, copy yourself.
What works for others will rarely work for you. Draw inspiration from them and then adapt to fit your Ikigai.
Step 6: Quality, not quantity
This refers to both number of tweets and number of followers.
I have a friend with under 20k followers that nets 6 figures per month solely from his Twitter account. I also have friends with hundreds of thousands of followers that can’t buy avocado toast with it.
I could add 10 more steps here but I have a basketball game to go to, so there will be a part 2 one day.
How to Grow on LinkedIn
I’m only a few days into this part so far, so the length of this section will match the length of my experience, but it’s actually quite simple:
Copy/paste your Twitter content over to LinkedIn. That’s it.
My friend Jacob Shipley is a literal LinkedIn expert, and he told me that it’s much easier to transfer your Twitter skills over to LinkedIn than the other way around.
So do exactly that, like I have been doing this week! And it’s going well so far. Let’s follow each other! Tell me “Club KC” in your message and I’ll follow back.
I have old Twitter posts scheduled out on LinkedIn once per day for the next month. We’ll be seeing what works and leaning into more of that.
Optimize your profile before going hard, and pay for a $29 premium account so you can put a link in your bio like this:
You can also sign up for Phantom Buster to get some automations going. But don’t be that annoying guy on LinkedIn that we all know. Auto connect with people in your industry but don’t sell them anything in your connection note. Just say hi.
Your automations will get flagged if you don’t have a paid account BTW.
Conclusion
Does this stuff work? It did for me, it should for you, but you have to test it first.
I had a 41 day streak of having a 100k impression post streak that got broken yesterday. BOOO. So what do I know? I blame my wife and take zero accountability.
I have 38 different categories of tweets that I pull from now, but these took me years. Start with 1. Maybe it’s posting your financials publicly. That’s something you can do every week.
Maybe the other one is profiling one of your vendors, employees or customers. You can do that regularly, too.
Tell stories, be real, be yourself, and write like you talk. Forget everything you learned in English class and just let the words flow. If someone calls you out then that just feeds the algo. Let ‘em. ←See how that wasn’t a proper sentence? EXACTLY.
How will I monetize my following? I don’t know yet honestly. But you can bet that I will. You should also bet that anyone in business will, because we’re capitalists. We aren’t art aficionados showing off watercolors. We are writing about the art of making money, so by default we will all be selling stuff. Just don’t be annoying about it., and don’t be annoyed by it, either.
And don’t pull that launch lever too much, only when you really think it’ll be worth it. I can go into that on part two. If you have any ideas on how I can monetize with a community or something, reply and let me know!
Top Tweets of the Past Week
As always, thanks for reading! Love you all. KOERNER’S CORNER!
Chris Koerner
chrisjkoerner.com