How to be good at Twitter

Welcome to Sex and the State, a newsletter about power. I’m a writer working on decriminalizing and destigmatizing all things sex. I synthesize empirical evidence, stories, and personal experience to interrogate existing power structures to propose new, hopefully better, ways of relating. To support my work, buy a subscription, follow me on OnlyFans, or just share this post!

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In the past few weeks two separate people have asked me for tips for using Twitter. This is a question I get on occasion. I’ve got 17,000 followers there. Follow me if you’d like, unless you’re a member of my family or easily offended, in which case absolutely do not follow me on Twitter. I’m not going to link but I’m easy to find.

I’ve been on Twitter for 12 years. Phew. I joined because internet marketing was my job at the time and part of that entailed using all the major social media platforms on behalf of our clients. I believe my early tweets were mostly SEO advice, and then slowly over time morphed into my thoughts on politics from an Anarcho-capialist perspective (I was young!).

I LOVE Twitter. I love the forced brevity. I love the mix of real-time conversation with asynchronous mini-blogging. I love being able to read an article and then fire off my take in a few seconds. I love the likelihood that if someone writes an article and I have questions or a rebuttal, chances are pretty good they’ll engage with me. I love that when I say something people with PhDs in whatever I’m mouthing off on will come into my replies and tell me what I’m wrong about or missing. I love crowdsourcing for ideas on things to read or do.

And I love that all this happens in public, where anyone who wants to follow along can learn from the conversation or engage with it themselves.

It’s a vast, free marketplace of ideas where new concepts are constantly emerging and being contested in close to real time.

Now, Twitter is obviously a double-edged sword. I’ve certainly been swarmed and harassed and threatened en masse by angry hordes. Sometimes because I said some truly dumb shit, but usually because my wording was very easy to misinterpret. And that’s the thing about Twitter. It’s not a place that can be counted on to interpret any ambiguity or nuance charitably and respond with genuine curiosity and good faith.

However, through strategic blocking and avoiding certain topics and refusing to engage with certain accounts and just being myself, I’ve developed a corner of Twitter who will mostly interpret any ambiguity or nuance charitably and respond with genuine curiosity and good faith.

The thing about how I use Twitter that may be important to know as you consider my advice is that I tweet for myself. I do get most of my newsletter and OnlyFans subscribers from Twitter. And I probably do tweet more often than I might otherwise if that weren’t a consideration. But as for what I tweet, and how I tweet, that shit is for me. So if you want advice on juicing your stats or finding your ideal target audience in any kind of results-oriented, KPI kind of advice, I’m probably not the best source on that.

Okay, all that aside, here’s my advice.

1. Use Tweetdeck

I heard Twitter might be bringing back the chronological timeline, where you see every tweet of everyone you follow in the order they tweeted. But right now, when you use Twitter by default they use an algorithm to sort the tweets you see and the order in which you see them. I’m not saying ditch the algorithm entirely. I still use default Twitter on my phone. But on desktop you want the chronological timeline, imo. If not for your specific purposes just to limit the damage the algorithm is doing to society at large.

2. Find your people

Who are you already reading, watching, listening to? Do you have any favorite think tanks or activists?

See if they’re on Twitter and either follow them or add them to a list and set that list up as a column on your Tweetdeck. Check out who they’re conversing with regularly and list or follow them too if you like what they’re saying.

Also see if any of your real-life friends are on Twitter and follow/list them as well.

Get into the habit of listing/following and tagging people who created a thing if you tweet about that thing. Ex: “I just watched this awesome video of @blahblah talking about animal copulation methods. (link) I wonder if yada yada.” They may respond to you, which gets you in front of their audience, who may have similar interests to yours.

3. Write a good bio

Part of finding the people you want to talk to on Twitter is writing a good bio. Like any good landing page, you want to include a clear and compelling value proposition, social proof, and a call-to-action.

Here’s my bio. It’s not great, but it has the three elements:

“Your fave triple threat: Wonk, comedienne, OF thot. Bylines in TechCrunch, The Week, VICE, Daily Beast, etc. Newsletter: http://cathyreisenwitz.substack.com”

Your value proposition is what people will gain from reading your tweets. In my case it’s wonky discussions of public policy, occasionally amusing tweets, and the fact that I’m a sex worker. The last part is also a CTA since it lets people know they can see my nudes if they’re so inclined.

The social proof is the indications that others have given you their seal of approval. For me it’s my bylines. How dumb could these tweets be if these publications allowed me onto their pages?

The CTA is the newsletter link. The obvious next move for anyone who likes my shit is to come here and enjoy it in longer form.

Do not link directly to any adult site directly from your social media bios, or really even your tweets. This will greatly increase the chances you’ll be downgraded in the algorithm, shadowbanned, or banned entirely. Fuck whorephobia.

4. Block, mute, and unfollow with abandon

Twitter can be a really mean place. It can also be a really nice place. What it will be for you will entirely depend on who you allow in your bubble. Obviously you don’t want to exclude anyone who disagrees with you. Then you’re cutting yourself off from one of the best parts of Twitter, which is people who know more than you letting you know when you’re wrong about stuff.

But for every three people who are going to be shitheads when they disagree with you, there’s at least one person who can correct you in a friendly, respectful way. Block those shitheads and genuinely thank each person who can correct you nicely. Go as far as to retweet them and correct your previous statement. The right kind of people will appreciate the fact that you’re here to learn and don’t want to spread misinformation.

And if you never want to be disagreed with, or you can’t respond kindly when people disagree with you, get off Twitter. Get off the internet. We don’t need any more people like that.

I also mute people who consistently make me angry in a way I don’t feel is productive. I have this ADHD thing where sometimes the gap between a stimulus and my response is basically non-existent. So there are people who every third tweet would prompt an angry response from me before I’d really had time to think it through. And then of course the Twitter algorithm would always put their tweets at the top because engagement is everything. Eventually I just had to mute them because it really wasn’t worth it to me to have to learn to exercise that level of self-control every time I opened Twitter on my phone.

Twitter is a big place. You can always unmute and unblock people later. But in the beginning, it’s all about curating an experience that’s pleasant and pro-growth.

5. Converse

Reply to people’s tweets! If someone says something you agree with, tell them. If someone says something you disagree with, tell them why (respectfully, and ideally with data and sources).

If someone responds to you, respond back. Make jokes. Tell stories. This is a conversation in a bar. The people you want to connect with aren’t just giving out proclamations from on high. There there to engage with people on their ideas.

6. Fight

Okay, so this is something I learned from my stat-pumping days on Twitter. If you want to quickly build a followership, the fastest, easiest way (at least if you’re me and love to fight) is to pick a fight with a large account who tweets about shit you care about.

The algorithms run on identiarian conflict content. It’s far-and-away the easiest mode to play in on Twitter. People share things to tell the world something. Usually, it’s something about them. Most of the time, the easiest way to get people to share your tweets is to make it so sharing your tweet tells the world which side they’re on in a given fight.

Personally, I hate this reality. Because what ends up happening is people take sides in fights they think they understand rather than trying to understand more complex, but more important topics. So we end up fighting about CRT or wokeness or defund the police or west elm caleb because our tribal alliances make it clear to us which “side” we’re on regardless of whether we actually understand what CRT or wokeness or defunding the police actually means.

A tweet saying “The wokelords are brainwashing our children with CRT!” is going to get a lot more engagement than a long thread with academic citations explaining what CRT actually is, and isn’t. And that’s not great for anyone, except Twitter, politicians, and the corporations getting away with wage theft because we’re all fighting about CRT.

7. Offer something valuable and unique

An almost equally effective, though more difficult, way to gain a following is to tweet something valuable. Duh.

This could be just a more eloquent way to put something a lot of people already think. One of my most-liked tweets was simply, “If you think masks are authoritarianism but extrajudicial killings aren’t, you may not understand authoritarianism.”

Nothing new there. But it just summed up fairly well how a lot of people were already feeling.

But when you summarize new research or share what you’ve learned in your work that isn’t common knowledge or challenge conventional wisdom with new evidence or put two ideas together that most people don’t realize are connected that’s another way to add value to the conversation and get people excited to share.

8. Don’t tolerate bad behavior

If your followers are harassing people or swarming people or being shitheads in their replies, block them. Don’t amass a following that’s making the world a worse place. That’s fucking gross.

I’m sure there’s tons more to say about this but that’s what I have for now. Happy tweeting.