Insights for content amplification on Twitter by community members

m3data · January 23, 2021, 12:42am

As part of some of the community marketing initiatives it would be great to learn more about how we can leverage the community to generate more engagement, awareness and followers. Specifically on Twitter.

One key question I’d like to learn more on is:
Why are community members not engaging in Twitter content?

Learning more about this can help us answer the question of:
How might we put the “ants” to work and provide a scent trail to amplify awareness and engagement?

There are a few hypothesis I have. There are likely many more that could be framed up ore accurately and outlined but I’ll keep this as simple as I can to get this discussion started.

1. People are not being prompted effectively to engage in the behaviour (like, comment, retweet/quote tweet).
2. People think the content conflicts with their personal “brand” and don’t engage even when prompted.
3. People give up because they are confused as to what to focus on as choices are too broad.
4. People don’t have a Twitter account so cannot engage.

I’ll illustrate using a scenario to help anchor this.

Let’s say it’s weekly update time and you’re anticipating the update. You race to get in early and read it (salivating for some like Pavlov’s Cat). You read the update and maybe post a reply. You scroll back through the comments and see @Sotros25 has shared a link to a twitter post.

Let’s say you click on it and engage (like, comment, retweet/quote tweet), why did you do this?

If you don’t, what do you believe is stopping you?

Knosis · January 23, 2021, 1:19am

Radix, a company SwissPrivateBanker works with is set for a Q2 launch. They joined Twitter Dec. 2020 they have 7,322 followers.
https://twitter.com/RadixEcosystem
Below is their promotional page.

We have 1,075 followers and we joined in 2014. I’m not suggesting we copy them but we should look at what they are doing that’s working. They are still ranked low on CoinMarketCap and have a lot of work to do.
I think we have a great story and product. Safe Network will change the world. People want to see positive change in the world. They need to feel like Safe Network can do this for them which I think it can. It’s not a lie or con we are here to dramatically change the world.

We are going to lower the cost of development. We are opening a digital frontier with Safe Access For Everyone. It’s never been done. Teams of programers world wide will jump on the opportunity to develop on scalable system like this. Gone will be the days where to scale your project you’d need venture, vulture capitalist approval.

Dimitar · January 23, 2021, 3:18am

Does anyone have experience with advertising on Twitter? I currently do not have extra money, because everything is still covid closed, but I would like to try advertising on Twitter and compare it with the ads on Facebook at the earliest opportunity.

Edit: I played around a bit and posted the following test ad aimed at our brothers from India:

Screenshot_2021-01-23_05-56-23

bones · January 23, 2021, 4:05am

I have no twitter acc.

Tomi · January 24, 2021, 9:08am

Hi to all, I have experience in social advertising but my time cost and the ads cost so If you wanna do something leave it to a pro. You have a excellent project but lack of business touch on it. I hope it will work because I am the one too who its gonna used it when it lunch.

Southside · January 25, 2021, 9:43pm

Did you get anyone to translate into the major Indian languages? Or are we working on the assumption that the geek target audience will speak English anyway?

I can ask a pal who may be able to translate to Gujerati and Urdu?

Dimitar · January 25, 2021, 9:48pm

I don’t have any extra money at the moment to pay for more translations and site hosting. If your friend can translate it for free it will be great.

Southside · January 25, 2021, 9:50pm

He is stuck in Bombay at the moment in bad health and skint. I will try to bribe him with a little MAID.

m3data · January 26, 2021, 11:58am

There are many things to be learned looking at what other communities are doing. One of the best I’ve see over the years is openmined. But openmined is niche (Privacy Preserving Federated Learning). It’s a hot topic. As i Radix being in DeFi. The enormity and sheer breadth of what the Safe Network is aiming for is part of the challenge.

I agree. We believe this. We’ve spent the time learning about it.

We gotta figure out how to tell that story in a consistent, compelling and meaningful way. Ultimately using the collective power of this community for the time being.

While I am not one for astroturfing we can harness the community to amplify messages. Be that on reddit, twitter, telegram or some other channel. Part of this discussion is about how we harness the community. Like make it super easy to amplify messages. I’m interested in twitter primarily to limit scope.

What would get us more followers on twitter? One tactic is if everyone that reads a weekly update likes, comments, retweets and quotes tweets the one from @safenetworktech account

Connect this to contextually relevant hashtags. For instance 28th Jan is Data Privacy Day (or Data Protection Day in the EU) - the weekly update is tweeted about from @safenetworktech and should use the hashtags #dataprivacyday #dataprotectionday - The last update had 69 replies and 1.9k view. Let’s say for example sake all 69 of the people that replied to the update post favourited, commented and retweeted the original tweet, and ~30 quoted the tweet. That is going to be processed by twitters’ algorithm based on the ranking signals like recency, relevance, engagement, rich media, and other rules. Tactics like this could get content trending. Certainly increasing brand awareness, likely followers and possibly engagement. Now there are assumptions here like everyone has a twitter account and the time, cognitive resources etc to do it. It is not a lot of work but there are reasons why this is not happening.

I am interested in how we can create tiny habits and simple workflows for people do a little work to amplify the story.

Nice work Dimitar! The Indian audience is super relevant in my view. I spoke to the CEO of HasGeek several months ago. The community is growing and there is lots of folks interested in data privacy and tech.

I have some experience leading teams doing twitter ads but that was years ago. Interested to learn how the experiment goes on twitter ads and the comparison in performance to FB.

davidpbrown · January 26, 2021, 12:54pm

Forum provides a good location for keeping up to date.

I occasionally retweet but aware that has little impact.

My experience of twitter is that better than preaching to the subscribed already crowd, is replying to some social media influencer who has 100k+ followers, gets many more views by default - and if they like and better retweet, that had more impact that any self post. The key to that is replying promptly on the back their posting - and being not off topic… so, no spamming.

It’s also easier to post and promote on the back of product that can do xyz and solve abc for other specific problems. Early days atm and even with a good beta, it’ll be a while before can expect more than curiousity engagement.

Scorch · January 26, 2021, 1:03pm

I have a twitter account, but almost never use it these days.

This is just speculation from here on, and I’m mostly speaking for myself, but feel free to chime in.

I think the types of people who follow Safe closely are in general not likely to support twitter, given it’s recent history of censorship/deplatforming and prefer other non-mainstream outlets. Or at least, in a community concerned with privacy, freedom of speech, and critical thought, twitter is diametrically opposed. I don’t deny that twitter has a place, but, in my mind, it suffers the problems that plague many of todays mainstream social media outlets. That is, it encourages echo-chambers, mob-mentality, and oversharing of personal information.

That’s just an opinion, but I can imagine I’m not the only one here who holds it.

davidpbrown · January 26, 2021, 1:30pm

but this is more about the types of people who might want to use Safe in future… which is everyone and then engaging the normal mainstream, important for a while.

The tipping point is where Safe Network starts to out perform the normal. It would be natural to prefer a Safe:twitter but until that is available,we cannot fail to note that word of mouth is through the big normal.

That talk of R value for Covid is a good analogy perhaps… we need the R above 1, so that comms about Safe is contagious and no-one can avoid becomes infected and aware of what is possible.

Dimitar · January 26, 2021, 1:50pm

I know of a super spreader with R16

See below my post

happybeing · January 26, 2021, 1:54pm

FYI I think Twitter is an excellent way to drive traffic and that is likely the main source of the visits from the links I’ve shared to this forum (tens of thousands of visits over time).

@davidpbrown is right that you can get extra visibility from replies, I’ve done this a lot on my personal account and sometimes on my technical account, but not only for Safe. On the personal account once in a while I get a lot of RTs for political posts but rarely if ever has that happened for tweets about Safe. I think it works much better when the topic you’re commenting on already has high visibility and enough people who feel strongly about it and who agree with your point, and for us that’s not the case. Timing is also important. You need to reply early and manage to catch the mood. It can work, but I don’t think it’s the best approach for Safe.

So I think posting your own stuff is valuable. My technical account went from a few hundred followers over several years to 2,000 in about a year after Tim replied to one of my tweets about the Solid on Safe work, and now I have that extra audience for all my own tweets.

Ironically it gets harder to build a following once there are a lot of people who are likely to respond to the “reply” tactic. So again this favours tweeting your own content (words or links, ideally with suitable hashtags) when there are less people ready to engage with it. I think you’ll find it much easier to gain followers for a topic before there are many people are ready to RT your replies or tweets. Once that happens it’s harder, and I think this is why my personal account has remained stuck at around 1,100 followers for a few years now.

There are definitely a lot of relevant folks on Twitter: development, decentralisation, privacy and security are very well represented, and I follow a couple of hundred of them.

Genuine content and genuine engagement, including asking for help works and even if you don’t get responses, your content is out there. Often when I’m searching for things my own repositories on github come top of the search results, and I suspect that’s in part due to my sharing them on Twitter.

The same approach works on Mastodon and I’ve gained followers there at a similar rate for my technical account, now over 200 in a few months. Far more geeks and devs there, and I’ve found them more responsive to my work on the Git Portal than Twitter even with a tenth of the followers.

There’s some overlap, but I think a large majority are only on one or the other so I share most things on both Twitter and Mastodon. Mostly my own stuff, but also some key posts from the forum when I think they merit it, and over time that has driven a lot of people here or to the main safenetwork.tech website.

I stopped using Facebook a few years ago (2016 I think). I can stomach Twitter for now but Facebook is too toxic for me.

Scorch · January 26, 2021, 2:29pm

That’s a very fair point that I didn’t see immediately. Let me amend my earlier statement then, because it was a bit shortsighted of me. I’ll do what I can in the future to repost and support MaidSafe on twitter, despite my own personal views on the platform. My reach is limited, but every voice counts

Southside · January 26, 2021, 3:14pm

We all have to hold our noses when interacting with Twitter but it can be a most effective tool for getting outside our own bubbles.

Warren · January 26, 2021, 5:53pm

I think Dave Lee is #heydave7 and has exposure on crypto discussions and is skeptical of BT despite interviewing its luminaries. But some have said it is premature prior to Flemming. The only sticking point I see aside from the dynamics of an associated but possibly severable by fork coin are the 10x storage granted for 100 months to get 1/10th forever storage but also at some point such storage may be purchased. People may not see that at first glance as a function of 4-8 copies geographically disperate. And speed relative to clearnet may be an issue but not relative to bt or its lightning.

I was reading that there are now ways to get the energy-co2 footprint down on block chain tech. How funny if that was known ahead of BTs launch and it was all just there to get people hooked with the triple ledger where the pseudo anonymity would then be stripped away by the USG and other big collaborating states. How funny their scenario that other states won’t cooperate with the USG.
They do cooperate when they align their trade blocks and to the extent they use taxes to cool state spending cycles against inflation while still spending to keep an inflationary bias and stimulate- to that extent they will cooperate on tax and hence currency.

Dimitar · January 27, 2021, 12:24am

m3data · January 27, 2021, 9:26am

Replying and jumping in on twitter threads that are relevant and incorporating a reference to Safe is a good tactic. But if it is not contextually relevant it comes across as spammy. It’s also a fair bit of work for people to do.

I’m trying to think about this from a behaviour design point of view and how some habits can be built.

Let’s say an objective to increase brand awareness on twitter via the safenetworktech account. We can look at the historical 28 avg for impressions. Then aim for a >100% increase on that average. The way to do this is to be increasing the frequency of exposure to consistently framed brand messages (logo, names, taglines, benefit statements etc).

What do we need to get that increase?
Yes, regular and diverse on brand content…this is another discussion. But relevant to the point I’m trying to make is that we need to amplify the signal with the content being tweeted by the main account.

How do we do that? We make it easy for those even with little motivation to engage in the target behaviour. Which is find the latest tweet from @safenetworktech account and engage.

These actions go up in cognitive effort required:

Favourite
Retweet
Comment
Quote tweet

What is the prompt to engage in the behaviour? This might vary for people. For instance I login to twitter at least once a day mostly for work, sometimes for a dopamine fix personally. I can prompt myself by having a sticky note on my computer.

I can build a habit into an existing routine or I could create a calendar event and do it at regular times.

I can do this personally and build a habit that becomes automatic over time. Other community members could do similar. Yes this is planned and formulaic as opposed to organic “oh wow that is cool content from @JoshPedersen…I want to retweet that” but it compounds. If more community members had similar habits we’d be getting more reach. Combined with the content generation happening we’ll build more followers.

Yes. Get a viral cooefficient or R value >1 - how do we get there? Lot’s of growth experiments.

Sotros25 · January 27, 2021, 6:13pm

Over the past few years, I’ve made it a habit to regularly search for the following terms on Twitter at least a few times a day for opportunities to support/enter into relevant conversations:

MaidSafe
$MAID
SafeNetwork

On occasion, I’ll also search for (but I’m wary as coming off as spamy, so I’m careful about how/if I enter the conversation):

Web3
Decentralized Internet
Privacy
dApps
Decentralized Data Storage

If others search for some of these terms at least once a day to find ways to engage, that would also be helpful