What I learned from Quitting “The Twitter Churn” — Becoming a REAL Influencer
On February 13th, 20 19 I finished having my account locked from twitter as a result of doing “the churn”. It was difficult because I felt like I needed quick impulsive growth in order to grow my online presence in the Blockchain space. I began to read articles talking about the damage caused by the churn, which caused me to realize that real growth comes from real interaction (which is is the whole point of social media). I don’t want people to follow me who aren’t interested in what I have to say and won’t interact with the content that I curate or pass around, and I also don’t want to follow people who have content I am not interested in.
This spawned a simple idea. I started at 430 followers when I began this method. The goal was simple, follow 10 valuable curator’s of content in the Blockchain space a day after replying to one of their pieces of content with a question or a comment. The goal was to create dialogue and have a real conversation. The primary goal was not to gain a follower, that was a secondary goal. My primary goal was to learn something new and engage with people I had not met before. By the end of February I achieved 2000% increase in profile visits and engagements (stats are at the end of the blog).
Just stop and think about your real life social circles. On average we all know 100 people. Those 100 people know 100 people, and those 100 people also know 100 people. Do you know the power of what this means? You are 3 people away from knowing 100⁴ or 100,000,000 people people. Do you know how absurd that is? The level of potential we have if we simply engage with those around us and continue to expand our circles of people to the best of our ability? Social media is not about growing just a number, it is about growing your ability to share and learn with the world. People who abuse the system or have a different primary goal (I fully believe) will be unsatisfied with their experience.
For those you who are trying to increase engagement online and want to earn social media, I have to ask — do you really want your success built on bots? “I want success whatever way possible”. So be it, that is your choice. Yet I fully believe there is a large percentage of people (and sponsors/businesses) that prefer authentic engagement intertwined with tight niches and communities. We are already seeing a trend towards this.
So you want to learn. Good. What I have is a simple formula for a success. Thirty minutes a day is all I ask. You turn this into a habit, and before you know you are going to have organic reach that is going to blow you, your sponsors, colleagues, and business partners away. How? The simple truth is people are going about building their social media circles in the wrong way. There are 3 pieces that people are looking for on a platform like twitter. First, people are looking for content. Second, people are looking for conversation around that content. Third, people are looking for their voice to be heard.
What I began to do was curate quality content from quality blockchain websites — setting up tweets in advance consisting of content I had pre-read and approved in advance. Second, I started creating twitter lists of people I had a real dialogue with. I wanted to continue to engage with them and also engage with their followers that engage with them. The goal was to find truly active people that were having conversations about the Blockchain space. Finally, I began to daily ask questions to influences in the space — while simultaneously unfollowing bots/following active content creators.
The lesson learn was this. Bots are useless. They do nothing for you — they are a negative number; a drag on tracking real progress and growth in terms of your presence in a certain space.
So go ahead, continue the churn. Don’t learn from your mistakes. Game the system as hard as you can to increase the number next to your profile, but at the end of the day when you make a tweet, and you get 80 likes and 30 retweets and 100,000 impressions due primarily to bots, I have a sense you are going to feel rather empty in your self defined echo chamber. Not only that, businesses are more and more hyper aware of how little return they are getting on social media. When everyone is an influencer then no one is an influencer. Businesses are going to becoming more and more select with who they work with to reach their audience. I don’t believe numbers are the goal but they are an effective way of conveying growth. Below is an image of February, what I was able to do by blitzing real engagement with people.
Thank for reading! If you have any questions or would like to get in touch with me about me helping you grow your account with the full formula and set of steps I would be happy to help. If you are a business and are looking for consulting on finding actual quality influencers in the tech space I would be happy to get in touch with you. Please throw me a message on twitter or Medium!
- Carter L. Woetzel
- 3/1/2019
