Overview
Twitter is one of the best avenues for networking with other engineers remotely. It offers access to interesting people and ideas, allows us to stress-test our opinions, and connect to potential career opportunities. Learning how to engage on Twitter has the opportunity to dramatically impact your career and opportunities.
- Chasing follower counts is not the best way to create genuine interactions, and artificially inflating this number can be very detrimental to your credibility.
- Twitter is for connecting people in real life. Your goal should be to meet people that you’ll then meet later at conferences, jobs, etc.
- Be patient. It can take a long time for your thoughts and opinions to grow and be seen within the community, and a long time to curate your feed in a way that is useful for you.
Curating Your Feed
- You can view either the Home timeline (Top Tweets) or Latest Tweets. One is fed by the Twitter algorithm, the other is the most recent posts by everyone you follow.
- The typical advice for getting started with Twitter is to follow some good people in your community and follow who they follow.
- Find your colleagues and industry peers and follow them to start out.
- Look for people attending the same events you go to to follow.
- Have some sort of a guideline of who you want to follow. Follow people that are saying things you agree with, things you don’t agree with, and are saying the things that no one else is saying.
- Unfollow people that are spammy and noisy
- Use lists to categorize people by specific topics that they tweet about. You can add people to lists that you don’t follow to keep tabs on specific things, like competitors.
- Don’t follow more than 1,000 people, or else you will certainly miss out on a lot of the activity in your timeline.
- Periodically go through and unfollow people, either manually or with a tool like Tokimeki Unfollow.
- You can mute specific keywords in your settings if you’re tired of reading about something, like popular TV shows or politics.
Tweeting
How to share
- Tweet 1-2 times per day, no more than 3-5 times.
- There are arguments for and against timing your tweets. IMO timing probably doesn’t matter THAT much unless you are a brand that is scheduling tweets in advance.
- Don’t overuse hashtags. In fact, only use hashtags in very, very limited scenarios.
- If you mention someone, tag them with their twitter handle, which will increase the odds they will retweet and engage.
- Videos, photos, and GIFs are good for increasing the likelihood someone will look at your tweets. If you include a video, make sure it has captions.
What to share
- Ask a question, ask for feedback, ask for replies in GIFs or emojis
- Keep an eye on the trending tab to see the latest trends to chat about
- Avoid boring industry debates (no one cares about talking about deploying on fridays or whether dark mode or light mode is the best)
- Share what you’re doing off twitter. What you’re working on and learning. Share details where you can. Don’t be vague. Use a thread if you have to add more information.
- Share your wins and your losses. Highlight what brought you success and where you went wrong.
- Some ways to engage:
- Answer questions when people need help
- Offer insightful responses in discussions
- Tag people to connect them (in moderation)
- Ask good, thought-provoking questions that allow people to be thoughtful
- Offer code or design tips
- Share great projects, blog posts, and videos
- Summarize podcasts and talks
- Make lists of your learnings
Threads
There are multiple types of threads.
- Static Threads: A single idea with a start and an end
- Additive Threads: Describe a phenomenon and are added to overtime as evidence mounts to support it
- Threads of Posts: Collect a series of posts that are connected to a larger narrative
- Threads of Threads: A collection of threads, your own or others, to keep some sort of a record.
Avoiding Negativity
Stay 90% positive. Point out truly awesome things and elaborate on why they’re great. Be a beacon of awesome. Use the “Yes, and…” formula for responding to someone.
If you block and unblock someone, they will unfollow you and be less likely to engage with your tweets. This can be a better solution than muting them, since their negativity will still show to your followers on your posts and mentions.