Becoming a Twitter master takes longer than you might want (especially if you’re only in it for the followers), because mastering Twitter requires a new way of seeing the world — it’s about a new way of living your life…
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I’ve been advising companies on social media for a very long time, and one of the first questions I always get is: How long will it take me to get X followers?
And my question is always, what would you do with X followers?
And often, the answer comes down to something along the lines of: feeding my vanity and my company’s thirst for socially validated metrics of success.
And it’s important to recognize that.
But if you really want to be good at Twitter, it’s not about coming up with a few really good tweets that go viral.
It’s much more boring than that. And much more interesting at the same time.
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There’s this romantic idea of mastery that, unfortunately, is perpetuated by our desire to “hack” everything in our lives, but which really underscores our lack of focus and commitment.
10-minute abs. 4-hour work week. And so on.
We lionize these stories of people who get rich quick, lose 30lbs in a week, or attain enlightenment after just one silent retreat.
They’re the TLDR of all the things you want in life.
And I get it: it’s alluring because it cuts out all the hard work. We want to fast-forward to success. But that’s not how it works.
How does it work?
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Last week, Leo Polovets, General Partner at Susa Ventures, spoke with the Renaissance Collective about building a personal brand on Twitter. He made some great observations about how to be successful on the platform.
One of the things he says is that “growing your audience is a long game of consistency, not the occasional viral tweet.”
And that really stuck with me, because it plays into the same framework of mastery that is proven and goes back millennia.
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There’s a Zen koan called A Taste of Banzo’s Sword that follows the transformation of a man named Matajuro, the son a master swordsman.
Matajuro’s father deems him unfit for swordsmanship, so Matajuro travels the land looking for a master who will teach him.
He reaches a small village where the locals tell him about a master named Banzo who lives in the mountains above town.
Matajuro goes in search of Banzo, and when he finally finds him, Banzo tells Matajuro he’s not interested in teaching him.
Matajuro implores Banzo to take him as his apprentice. He tells him he’ll do whatever it takes, every day, for as long as it takes.
Banzo considers, so Matajuro asks him: How long, exactly, would it take? Banzo replies: 10 years. Matajuro says, I don’t have 10 years. What if I trained twice as hard? How long would it take me then? Banzo says, in that case, 30 years.
Matajuro is utterly confused. He says, you just told me if I work hard, I could do it in 10 years. Now you’re telling me that if I work twice as hard, it’ll take much longer? Banzo replies, yes, because a man in such a hurry seldom masters anything.
And the lesson is that it’s not about how hard you work; it’s about how long you can stay committed to the practice of constant improvement.
And that’s true of Twitter as well.
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Mastering Twitter is not about getting to X followers in record time. It’s about going through your day and learning to see things—snippets of an article here, thoughts you’re having over your morning coffee there—that you earmark to share on Twitter.
It’s about changing the way that you read, with an eye towards encapsulating that knowledge and offering it to your audience in a way that’s relevant to them.
It’s how you share information over the platform. Multiple times a day. Week after week. Month after month. Creating this trail of wisdom or entertainment that people can recognize instantly when they look at your last three tweets.
So, have goals, but don’t take the learning and growth opportunity out of Twitter by giving up if you can’t get X followers by this date. They’ll come, but you have to build something that’s worth following. And to do that, you have to build the habit of writing for Twitter, and reading Twitter, and thinking in Twitter, and living Twitter.
It’s like a foreign language. If you’re not willing to put in the work to learn it yourself—but you know deep in your marketing budget that you need to operate in the country of Twitter—then hire someone who already lives there and speaks the language.
If you’re looking for strategies to improve your long, slow Twitter game, check out Renaissance Collective member Rob Sicat’s blog post summarizing the key takeaways from Leo’s talk.
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Many thanks to Leo Polovets for sharing your wisdom with our community. Thank you to Natalie Arora of Susa Ventures and Renaissance Collective member, Calanthia Mei, for organizing the event. And to Jen Yip for contributing thoughts and feedback to this piece.