Four weeks ago, based on things I had observed previously and some of the conversation here I realized how I was using Twitter was all wrong. It became clear that what I was doing was resulting in them thinking of my accounts as “low quality” and because of that I wasn’t getting the visibility that I was after.
To put it simply, they don’t want activity, they want interaction. I’d put up a few of my own posts, but then I’d retweet posts from “community members” that matched the theme of the account (I’ve got quite a few accounts). Because retweets with comments often get mangled when the account your retweeting is marked “sensitive content” I wasn’t adding any comment. Thanks to the QAnon/Trump folks, over the past 6+ months Twitter has taken a real disliking to retweets - even (kinda) turning off the feature late in the election process. Because I didn’t “add anything to the conversation” what I was doing was problematic / low quality in their eyes.
So 4 weeks ago I changed strategy. I had been “thanking” people for mentions by liking the post. I stopped that completely. And I stopped almost all retweets. Instead, now when I see something I would have retweeted in the past I do one of two things - I either like it and then reply with a short, positive comment like “Great cock!”. I might include some hashtags, but often I wouldn’t even do that. OR I’d tweet the picture of video using the method I described in a thread on XBiz.net.
Anyway, the like + comment looks like interaction to Twitter, and tweeting the pic/video with a meaningful comment looks like quality original content to them. The results were quite a bit better than how things were going before. I looked at the analytics about halfway through their 28 day reporting period and then at the end. Here’s the results…
An account with 35K followers
2 weeks, 2 days later
Tweets up 333%
Tweet impressions up 206%
Profile visits up 3.8%
Mentions up 8.3%
Follower graph shows noticeable uptick in slope of line
4 weeks later
Tweets up 150%
Tweet impressions up 340%
Profile visits up 14%
Mentions up 6.4%
An account with 12K followers
2 weeks, 2 days later
Tweets up 3,567%
Tweet impressions up 438%
Profile visits up 50%
Mentions up 142%
Follower graph shows slight uptick in slope of line
4 weeks later
Tweets up 1,857%
Tweet impressions up 606%
Profile Visits up 83%
Mentions up 159%
An account with 3,400 followers
2 weeks, 2 days later
Tweets up 160%
Tweet impressions up 11.4%
Profile visits up 30%
Mentions up 75%
Follower graph shows noticeable uptick in slope of line
4 weeks later
Tweets up 360%
Tweet impressions up 127%
Profile visits up 47%
Mentions up 70%
What’s important to note is that even though I was technically tweeting more, my total time spent doing stuff on Twitter was about the same.
When people talk about “shadow banning” I honestly think this is part of what’s going on - you’ll get shadow banned if Twitter considers your use of their platform to be “low quality” or (worse) spammy.
Bottom line - stop retweeting and you’ll see better results.