On my personal Twitter account, my followers grew from 2,870 in March of this year to nearly 5,300 at the end of last month. I thought I’d explain how that happened.
So, for those of you who have been following my blog for a while—is there anyone out there like that?—you may have noticed that I haven’t been publishing on here that frequently lately. My career pivoted recently, which prompted me to switch from a weekly blogging schedule here to a monthly schedule.
This isn’t the first time I’v adjusted my blogging schedule. When I started working for myself in 2013, I switched from occasional blogging to weekly blogging. Then I switched to twice a week, with one writing post and one social media post. Then I added a third post a week regarding small business topics.
As work started picking up in the early years, I scaled back my blogging, first to twice a week, then to once a week, which is where I had been for quite a while, until just recently.
Anyhow, last year, all but two of my monthly social media clients had cancelled their contracts with me. I picked up a couple of others along the way, but then in March those monthly social media clients who were still around, one by one, contacted me to say they were cancelling their contracts.
I was functionally unemployed.
I work for myself, but it felt as though I had been laid off, and that’s a feeling I knew all too well.
I managed to pick up an editing client to edit the copy on their massive website, and couple of decent sized social media clients came along, but none of them were enough to pay all my bills or to even keep me busy with work to do. So I spent a lot of time looking for new clients (which was tough with everyone shut down because of COVID-19 and the recession) or part-time virtual work.
I also found myself spending quite a bit more time on Twitter.
One day, someone mentioned something in response to another tweet that interested me. I reached out to him about it, and with the information he responded with, I did some research on the issue. I quickly discovered a potential news story that no one else had covered, at least not in any significant way.
I thought, “Well, I have some time. I might as well research it.” And I ended up writing a news article that exposed some potential cronyism and nepotism in local politics.
I shared it on Twitter on a Thursday, and it received over 1,000 views. The next day, it passed over 4,000 views, and by the end of the weekend, it had received nearly 10,000 views. Its exposure led me to a radio interview and a podcast interview, and my follower count started creeping up.
I had been using my personal website for poetry and for writings on politics. I had set up a payment options to try and make a few bucks off my poetry. Well, some of the thousands of visitors who visited my website signed up as monthly payments and a few sent one-time donations.
And I realized that not only were there people who desires my political writing but also that there was a way for me to get paid to do it full-time.
So, I refocused my efforts from looking for clients and a job to creating political news, and a week after I produced that first story, I was producing daily news stories 6 days a week.
Of course, every story I wrote I shared on Twitter. Some of them didn’t get much traction, but a few did. in fact, the story that started it all isn’t even my most popular. Four other stories I’ve written have received more views that it has. The most popular has received 3 times as many views, and the site itself has seen over 200,000 view based on over 50 stories.
But it wasn’t just pumping out well-researched, quality content that engaged people that built up my Twitter following. I also tweeted several times a day with political-themed content. Sometimes it was a Twitter thread. Sometimes it was a quote tweet. Sometimes it was a thought that popped in my head.
I also engaged with what others were saying: retweeting their content, responding to them, participating in their conversations.
In that two months, I’ve appeared in 5 more podcast episodes, and my stuff has been shared on Twitter, Facebook, Tumblr, Instagram, and Reddit. (So much so, that I had to create a new third-party hosted website because the traffic kept crashing my original site.) And now people are treating me as a political thought leader. Good thing Google exists.
Organic reach isn’t dead. Since the end of March, my news website received 140,000 views referred by Facebook and over 33,000 from Twitter. Heck, my monthly enewsletter jumped by 100 new subscribers yesterday alone. And that was without spending a dime on advertising.
Now, before anyone thinks I got lucky, I should mention that I have been on Twitter for 13 years. I have been producing political content for probably a decade. All that changed for me was the frequency and comprehensiveness of my political content.
While organic reach isn’t dead, what has died is the ease by which you could get social reach. Gone are the days when you could post something on Facebook and you’d get a bunch of likes.
Now you have to work at it.
I spend several hours every day research, writing, and sharing news content that people want to read. I also spend several hours engaging with others on social media. And that’s not counting the years I put in building a personal political brand before March. Heck, I ran for political office nearly 20 years ago.
Organic reach happens still, but it takes work.
But remember these three things:
- Create engaging content others want to read.
- Publish it regularly.
- Engage with others on social media.
Do those 3 things consistently and be willing to put in the work, and you’ll probably see organic reach increase, too.
