Social Network Reborn
Changing the point of view
I quit all social media over the last few years.
LinkedIn is okay for finding jobs, but that's about it. Facebook might've been fun for connecting with people from the past. Seeing others enjoying their lives was great, but I felt like it was robbing me of time from living my own life.
So, I prioritized time with my loved ones over cheap dopamine. But then, why am I starting with Twitter and Substack?
Let's work backward from the end: Life expectancy in Spain for men is 81 years old. Retirement is at 67. If everything goes well, I'll be here for 46 more years, 32 of them working. That's 32 years, working 8 hours a day for other people and on other people's ideas.
But I also have my own ideas, and I want to work on them.
Even though my ideas may fail, I feel the happiest when I try them and sad when I don't. I'd love to succeed enough on some of those ideas to the point where they allow me to keep trying more ideas. If I get to focus on the things I want so I can live "my life" my way, that's the dream.
My desire to succeed in this journey pushed me to gather all the ingredients to reach my goals. I left my job in December 2022, continued working on some projects, and created a new project.
But the final ingredient I need to increase my odds of succeeding on the dream is an audience. And that's why I am back on social media but this time with a purpose.
Things I learned exploring Daniel Vassallo resources
Following the quest to understand audience expansion, Tony Dinh (I wrote about him in the last issue) credits part of his learning journey in increasing his audience to insights gleaned from Daniel Vassallo. Intrigued by this connection, my curiosity led me to explore what knowledge Daniel Vassallo imparts.
I saw that he distilled some of his learning into an online course titled “Everyone Can Build a Twitter Audience” and also created a small community known as Small Bets. Eager to unravel what’s within, I started researching the course.
Course research
This course has prompted some participants to express their thoughts through reviews or course summaries. So I started reading them by the order Google displays the results on December 2023 on my user.
Summary of the course by Christopher Samiullah - I especially liked this one.
Strategies that helped Grow My Twitter account by Sunil Kumar.
Learnings of the course
From the first three posts, I extracted much of the information. After that, the same ideas started to repeat. We can summarize the course with the following:
Quality over quantity: Twitter followers don’t matter, engagement does, a key metric will be the engagement (measured in comments, likes or retweets) per follower ratio metric.
Think about your Twitter funnel. Users will find your Profile > Read your bio > Scroll your timeline > Follow you > Not unfollow you > Get value from you > Get to know you. Optimize this funnel to give people credibility on why they should follow you.
Give more than you ask, give value in every tweet.
There are also smaller do’s and don’ts on this course, like threads are better than links, don’t chase retweets, etc. I won’t explain the whole list, I will recommend reading Christopher Samiullah’s summary for a good overview.
After delving into this content, I decided it was worth giving a try to the Small Bets community.
First Impressions of Small Bets
The community provides members with access to all live events (where an expert shares knowledge on his subject) and access to past and future recordings and you can give and receive feedback on your projects.
While I have yet to delve into the recorded past events, my live event experiences thus far have been rewarding. I have been to the “Emerging from the void on X” event by
which allowed me to have a clear approach to how to build an audience on X depending on the actual state of your X account. I’m currently attending “The Newsletter Launchpad” by and , which is helping me improve my writing and learn about the newsletter ecosystem.The events themselves allow you to learn about the different channels to extend your audience. Upcoming events will talk about LinkedIn by Justin Welsh, Substack by
and Confident Speaking & Storytelling by . I hope to learn and discover new fields that could get me ideas.