I’ve decided I’m going to participate in the #tweet365 challenge this year. This challenge involves posting at least one tweet on Twitter every day using the #tweet100 hashtag.
I’ve decided to take on this challenge because I want to try establishing a bigger online presence this year.
One of the people who I’ve been following this year is Kevon Cheung. I’ve been pretty inspired by two of his initiatives I stumbled upon this year: Build in Public Mastery and Making Twitter Friends. To be clear, I haven’t participated in the former and I’m still in the process of going through all the emails from the latter. However, I’ve really enjoyed seeing how Kevon connects and engages with various communities on Twitter.
Last year I participated in Building a Second Brain and Linking Your Thinking. One of my takeaways from these courses was that it’s valuable to share your thinking and work with others early on. This can help improve your thinking and work as you can get early feedback from others. And connecting with people with similar interests can help improve your learning and thinking. By having multiple people sharing what they’re individually learning in similar areas, you can accelerate your discovery of resonating thoughts. In this way, it reminds me in a way of parallelizing your thinking, or dividing and conquering a problem. (And then after writing this, I realized the the term I was looking for is crowdsourcing).
Because I’m also diving into coaching this year, having a bigger online presence may also help me discover new clients. Some of the people I connect with may be interested in exploring coaching, and I may be able to help them explore in our areas of mutual interest.
When I publish something on my blog or newsletter, most of the people who see my writing are existing readers. I am extremely grateful that I have these readers, and I have great conversations with many of them on a regular basis. However, Twitter has some social functions (eg. retweets, likes) that help to quickly increase the visibility of online writing. Additionally, for many people it’s a lower bar to follow someone on Twitter than it is to sign-up for email updates from a blog or newsletter. Because of this, I’m hoping that I can increase the number and diversity of conversations I have with other people this year about the things I’m interested in.
My consistency with using social media is not great. Below is a visualization of the number of tweets I made each month in 2021. The spike in May/June was from when I was participating in Building a Second Brain, and I had many great conversations with people from my cohort (in fact, I’m still in regular contact with many of them still today). That being said, I’d like to be more consistent with my engagement online. I’m hoping by participating in #tweet365 I can eliminate having these months of no/decreased engagement going forward.
Also, one of the themes I’ve picked up on from seeing posts from the Ship 30 For 30 course (I haven’t taken the course myself) is the idea of data-driven writing. Because tweets are so small, they can help isolate variables. You can get rapid feedback on the effectiveness of your writing. And tweets are free. So I’m curious about experimenting this year with this idea of data-driven writing.
As part of this, at least for a while, I’m planning on sharing the main body of my weekly newsletter in my blog. I still plan to produce my weekly long(er) form of writing, but I’d like to try focusing on this new experiment for now to get things started.
