Twitter is complicated AF.
I’ve been on the platform since 2009. A while back, I decided to make a conscious effort to try harder on Twitter because I love short-form content as it saves huge amounts of time. To drop wisdom in as few words as possible is like solving a Rubik’s cube. It feels strangely fulfilling.
I purchased a course from a well-known Twitter personality to open my mind to what’s possible. The course contained a book and about ten videos. The book was amazing. The videos were terrible and contained non-stop water chugging, long pauses, zero preparation, rants, repetitive ideas, and no face of the teacher to make the information personal.
So, I became a cranky old 35-year-old a-hole and left a one-star review of the course. He sent me an email and asked for my feedback. The course owner is clearly smart.
I gave him the brutal truth. Then he suggested we jump on a Zoom call. On the call he explained that he runs one of the largest groups for Twitter personalities where they share pro tips, ideas, and give each other feedback.
Here’s what I learned about Twitter that you can’t google, and will help you build an audience to promote your content and monetize if you choose.
The best times to post on Twitter
The time you post affects whether people will read your tweets. The same trick applies to all social media platforms.
9 am to 10 am New York time is the best part of the day to publish tweets. The second best time to post is 5 pm to 7 pm (aim for 6 pm). This aligns perfectly with my experience of publishing on LinkedIn for seven years. I asked a few content creators from other platforms and they agreed with these times.
A killer tweet schedule you can copy
The first tip I got is to *not* use a scheduling tool like Buffer to post tweets.
Why?
Twitter’s algorithm doesn’t want to promote automated tweets, over tweets published by real humans who are posting in real-time, and therefore, responding to their tweets in real-time. It makes sense. Follow this schedule to grow massively on Twitter.
- Post a tweet that is a question at 6 am New York time. Questions on Twitter generate lots of comments and help the algorithm give you a boost.
- Between 8 am to 9 am post your best tweet for the day which is usually a tweet thread (a series of numbered tweets that read like a blog post). The previous question you posted will help warm up the algorithm for this tweet thread.
- 2–3 hours later retweet (re-share) your morning tweet.
- Again, 2–3 hours later, retweet the same tweet.
- Remove the retweets at the end of the day.
The first hour of a tweet has the highest impact. The life of a tweet is 24 hours. Retweeting your morning tweet two more times in a day helps it reach its maximum potential. Without retweets a tweet simply fizzles off and dies much quicker. (I had no idea this is the case.)
This big-name Twitter personality also taught me that 3–4 tweets per day is the maximum you should post, with 2–3 hours between each tweet.
The hidden economy of retweets
Retweets are a hidden economy — it certainly fooled me. You can buy retweets from big accounts to build your audience faster.
You can also join Twitter groups and retweet each other’s tweets. If you do, the advice I was given is to do those retweets late at night. Then remove the retweets the next day. You can trade tweets in offline marketplaces. You can get people or businesses to pay you to retweet their content.
The cliche saying “we rise by lifting others” applies to Twitter. It’s faster to grow an audience on Twitter when you join with like-minded people.
The idea this Twitter personality gave me is to look at someone’s newsfeed as a business. Every tweet that’s not created by them is likely a business opportunity they got paid for. That explains why so many Twitter timelines are full of promotional junk. The temptation to receive money for a tweet/retweet is far too great for many people to resist.
My advice: don’t get paid money for tweets. Monetize your Twitter following offline with honest digital products that help people.
“Their Twitter timeline is their business. “
Final Thought
Now you know the exact tweet schedule some of the biggest accounts on Twitter with more than 100,000 followers use to build their audience.
Remember: retweeting your own tweets two more times extends their life so they can gain maximum exposure before they die. When a tweet dies you can revive it by replying to it with a follow-up tweet. Replying to your old tweets brings them back to the top of your timeline.
Share your wisdom on Twitter to build an audience. An audience is a community of people that can help you achieve your goals in life.
