1/ Meta thread about "Going Pro" on Twitter.

I've been a Twitter power user since 2008 or so. Long time.

I've watched it change from an impromptu conversation or watch party platform to a place for people to build their professional reputations and network.

2/ In many ways it's matured into a more effective professional platform than LinkedIn.

LinkedIn is (mostly) about collecting the professional contacts you've met.

Twitter is a place to meet new people.

That much hasn't changed.

https://t.co/3nemTwNAcX
3/ What also hasn't changed is its power for networking.

This is particularly useful if you break out of your echo chamber and talk, build relationships with people doing tangentially related things.

You're bricklaying and with patience it pays off.

https://t.co/nHZaE8vPpn
4/ What has changed is a growing population of people being *intentional* about the use of Twitter for their professional lives.

Observations on what's working for them:
5/ They "Build in public" - sharing behind the scenes perspectives on whatever it is you're doing professionally.

What do people not know about what you do?

Stick within your expertise, with focus, where people see you are an authority - that’s where you grow a following.
6/ They still syndicate the content that they create on other platforms (YouTube, websites, Stackshare, Gumroad) for Twitter, but it's no longer spray-and-pray or autoposting.

It's previews.
Snapshots.
Deeper Cuts.
Q&A.
Engaging with the audience that consumes your content.
7/ Their followers know their ask.

Principally they fall into one of 3 buckets

- Sales (informational products, subscriptions, books)
- Referrals (Business Development, LPs, acquisitions, employment)
- Email signups (from Substack to websites)
8/ They may not realize it, but they're engaged in content marketing.

All of the rules @randfish laid out in his excellent 2015 deck apply https://t.co/gCRv4b744p

- they inspire a community
- reinforce a belief
- refute an opposing argument
- start a passionate discussion
9/

- discuss what's in someone else's financial/ promotional interests
- leverage group inclusion dynamics
- make the sharer look smart/ important/ cool
10/ Informal conversation still happens, but it's mostly in replies.

Replies are still open season to be friendly, deepen relationships, and - the most important value prop of all to Twitter - a barrier-less way to ask questions of people that would otherwise be unreachable.
11/

No one cares about your personality (not enough for a follow).

They care about your expertise. And what they can learn.

That’s your highest point of authority, when you leverage what you know best.

(That's a big difference between 2008 and 2021 Twitter.)
12/ The key difference between being a "pro" on Twitter vs an amateur comes down to the audience you're writing for:

Pros are writing for a specific external audience.
Amateurs are writing for their friends or themselves.

Twitter is maturing, and it's fertile ground for pros.

More from Twitter

A big part of my tweets are inspired by other people's content.

I bookmark everything that looks interesting and go there when in need of inspiration.

This is a thread-recap of the best-saved tweets from 2020 (for me at least) and what you can steal from each one. 🧵👇


The year chart by @jakobgreenfeld

What to steal: the idea and the design

Create a chart with the key moments of your growth. It's a great reflective exercise for you and it can be a great learning experience for your


Let's collaborate by @aaraalto

What to steal: the idea.

Creating a blank piece of content (could be a sentence, a design, a video...) that your audience can later


Advice to first-time info product creators by @dvassallo

What to steal: the insight

This tweet was one of the sparks for me writing the Twitter Thief ($1,3k revenue says it's good


How to be a better writer by @JamesClear

What to steal: the insight

A world-class writer giving free writing lessons. The tweet is from 2019 but I discovered it this
This is why I'm not a critic of "cancel culture." It's crucial to impose social costs for the breech of key social norms. The lesson of overreaction is that we need to recalibrate judgment to get it right next time, not that we need a lot more bad judgment in the other direction.


Obviously, people will disagree about which norms are important, about how bad it is to violate them, and thus about how severe the social cost ought to be. That's just pluralism, man, and it's good.

It's important to openly talk through these substantive differences, which is why derailing these conversations with hand-waving moral panic about "cancel culture" is obnoxious and illiberal.

Screaming "cancel culture!" when somebody pays a social costs other people have been fighting hard to get others to see as necessary is often just a way to declare, with no argument, that the sanction in question was not only unnecessary but in breach of a more important norm.

It's impossible to uphold social norms without social sanctions, so obviously anti-cancelers are going to want to impose a social cost on people they see as imposing unjustly steep social costs on others.

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