Twitter is, by far, the fastest way to build a high-quality audience.

Why?

It's quicker to write insightful tweets than it is to produce 10min YouTube videos or 1400-word blog posts.

Here's a thread of actionable tactics from studying the fastest-growing Twitter accounts.

THREAD: Read this if you're new to ads. Here's how to make each ad channel work.

E.g. Facebook, Instagram, Google, Snapchat, Pinterest.

(from our experience running ads for 400+ startups)

IMPORTANT. We're growth marketers. We believe that you should test most channels (in time). This is an 80/20 to help you prioritize which you might want to test FIRST based on your business.

2 types of ad targeting:

Behavior: Serves ads to people searching for your product. Better for conversion, but audience size is limited to ppl searching for you.

Profile: Uses social profiles/engagement to serve ads. Conversion is lower, but audience size is less restricted.

Top channels ordered by average cost/click for U.S. audiences (LinkedIn being most expensive)

1. LinkedIn
2. Twitter
3. Instagram
4. Facebook
5. Google Ads
6. Pinterest
7. Snapchat

We'll dive into each (and a few more)

LinkedIn offers uniquely granular company and employee targeting (firmographic targeting)

Clicks are expensive. Most companies won't be able to afford LinkedIn ads.

Good fit: B2B companies earning *thousands* per customer.

Poor fit: anyone earning < $10,000 USD in LTV

THREAD: How to grow your startup through referrals, and word of mouth.

(Actionable tactics from working with 400+ startups)

Here's the truth: Your startup most likely won't make a video and go viral like Dollar Shave Club.

So instead of trying to "go viral," focus on acquiring customers through fans who already love your product.

There are 3 ways to grow through your current customers:

1. Product-led growth: Your product is built for sharing.

2. Word of mouth: Users proactively recommend your product to friends.

3. Referrals: You create an incentivized reward program.

Let's dive into each 👇

Product-led growth.

It's powerful: You don't have to artificially incentivize users to refer—you simply empower them & get out of their way.

E.g. To pay someone with PayPal, the payment recipient needs to first join PayPal—they're incentivized to sign up to receive their cash.

Product-led growth is possible when ppl use your app to:

• Transact or collaborate w/ others (PayPal, Dropbox, Zoom, Slack). These products are only effective when others use them with you.

• Create content intended to be shared w/ others (Twitter, Instagram, YouTube, Cameo)

THREAD: How to get users to use your app 👇

Most SaaS apps lose 95% of new users within 90 days. That's insane.

They tend to lose those users during onboarding—when a first impression is made.

Here's how to avoid this.

After reading this thread, you'll know how to welcome users into your product in a way that motivates them into being lifelong customers.

Here's the 80/20 on onboarding:

Start by visualizing your user's journey toward experiencing value from your product—this is the reason users sought you out.

Then:

• Identify the obstacles that come up along the way
• Address those obstacles in your onboarding flow

How to identify obstacles:

Some obstacles will be known to you. They're onboarding steps that:

• Require a lot of work
• Are boring

Record these.

Other obstacles are hidden. To find them, observe users using your product:

• For SaaS apps: Record users' in-app activity using Hotjar
• For physical goods: Run a study. Watch customers use your product

User behavior reveals the NONobvious broken paths taken in onboarding

THREAD: How to make ads that get clicks.

(For Facebook and Instagram)

You'll learn:

• How to write ads for your audience
• Frameworks for messaging
• How to design ads

Copy & creative.

Copy = Text that is carefully crafted for a specific outcome.

Creative = Term for multimedia, such as images and videos.

Together, they determine the click-through rate (CTR) of your ads—a 25% difference in CTR can make or break paid acquisition.

Know your audience before creating ads.

The Ladder of Product Awareness (LPA) illustrates how aware and in-need an audience is for your product.

Focus on writing appealing copy to those higher up on the ladder, since it requires less time and energy to convert these people.

Steps to writing ad copy:

1. Identify the product's benefits and your audience's concerns.
2. Write a pitch addressing each.
3. Make the pitch compelling.
4. Make it concise.

Here's an example of an ad that checks all of the boxes.

You can use one of these copywriting frameworks to write purposeful ads:

1. Articulate the problem, solution, and benefit
2. Highlight your differentiation
3. Ask a pressing question
4. Match value props to audiences

One tweet on each 👇

We found 6 startups that are growing way faster than everyone else.

We figured out their unconventional growth tactics.

This thread walks you through how to repeat them for yourself.

1/6 Experiment with timing.

Here's a clever example:

@brooklinen "leaked" a time-bounded discount and had one of their *best* revenue days of the year.

Great startups experiment not only with copy/creative, but also framing.

2/6 Get people to FEEL the problem your startup solves.

Here’s how Muzzle (notification hiding tool) uses their site to visualize the problem:

• Shows cringey notifications
• Makes them super vulgar
• Points out how Muzzle puts an end to this during Zoom calls

3/6 Poach potential customers from competitors:

• Create landing pages that compare you against them
• Address customers' biggest objections
• Show your product in action

Then, when people search for you versus your competitors, you'll show up on the Google results page.

4/6 Improve your attribution.

It's often unclear what drives a purchase.

So try this:

• Add a post-purchase survey asking customers how they found you
• Remove friction—limit choices. Make it super easy to quickly select the right one

Attribution helps you double down.

'Twas the night before Christmas, and all through the tweets
Not a user was stirring, not even in fleets
The drafts were all scheduled for the a.m. with care
In hopes that virality soon would be there

The children were all nestled all snug in their snaps
Their instas, their twitches, their lit tiktok apps;
And mamma in her Pinterest, and I in my LinkedIn,
Had just settled down (the edible had kicked in)

When out on the lawn there arose such a ruckus!
I cursed the doorbell stream app I'd deleted for 'Among Us'
Plus the wi-fi was down, so I leapt from my bed
Flung open the window and lifted it over my head.

I could see nothing, I was in no mood for jokes
Snowblinded by moonlight, climate change is no hoax
When what to my furious eyes did appear?
The outline of a sleigh, and eight tiny... I wanna say, deer?

With a round little driver, he was no kind of runt
It was either St. Nick or a damn YouTube stunt.
More rapid than retweets, they came on like vandals
And he whistled and shouted and called out their handles

THREAT THREAD: Today @United Airlines shared the travel itinerary of Senator @tedcruz with members of the media and as a result, the public at large. His flight information is being included in tweets to/from mainstream media including @CNN and @Acosta.

Thread on censorship

1) Twitter told us last night that the reason hundreds of thousands of people was removed

from the platform is because they have to confirm their phone number or email

Then those numbers would be represented in our follower count

My friend @EduCelebrity has been doing a #YearInReview tweet thread (check it out), in which he relives some of his best tweets from 2020.

I’m opting to do a #YearInPreview thread where I predict what will happen over the next 12 months in education...here we go...

January:

Teachers come back to school (virtually or in-person) fired up and ready to implement some great new ideas and strategies as part of their New Year’s resolutions.

Mid-January:

All new ideas flamed out as teachers begin their summer countdown. #YearInPreview

February:

Valentine’s Day parties include students exchanging virtual cards with each other via their virtual Valentine’s Day boxes. Joey’s mom hires a professional web designer so Joey’s virtual box is the best in the class and puts pictures of it on Instagram. #YearInPreview

March:

Depressed that St. Patrick’s Day has been cancelled (again), teachers put Irish Cream in their morning Starbucks and get rewarded by admin for their creativity...just kidding, they get fired. #YearInPreview

April:

Test prep is in full swing. Teachers try to prepare students they’ve never actually met, and whom have never participated in online instruction for a test that doesn’t matter. Principal asks if she’s ever contacted the parents to which she replies with a middle finger.

So - that was quite a twitter/media day for me, and welcome to my new followers; 3 threads coming up - introducing myself, explaining my background and COIs (this one); technical aspects of the new strain from my vantage; commentary on what is means for the future

(for the people who know me, skip the rest of this thread!)

A brief tweet portrait of me; I am deputy director general of @embl and co-direct (with Rolf Apweiler, not on twitter) one it's six sites, @emblebi which is based just south of Cambridge, UK.

is the European Molecular Biology Laboratory, a European treaty organisation that does science, similar to CERN. EMBL does molecular biology from high end atomic structural biology to development - and in the future, bridging to Ecosystems.

EMBL is Headquartered in beautiful Heidelberg, Germany and has 5 other sites; Hamburg (Germany also), Grenoble (France), EMBL-EBI at Hinxton (UK), Rome (Italy) and Barcelona (Spain).