affectsk

That's pretty much what I mean by "being relevant", just my way of putting it.

Socializing and learning stuff, but in a way that doesn't feel like I'm shouting into the void.

Gotta learn from the experts!

Enjoyed the article!

Phased attention and transient information is exactly how I see Twitter myself. Trying to stay on top of everything is out of question.

I think of Twitter as an ongoing party that I can drop by, see what's up, chat with a few friends, make a few new friends, have a little fun, move on until next time.

This approach only makes sense when you have a "community" of people on Twitter that you "belong" to. That's the part I was missing back when I tried it originally.

Yeah, I wouldn't rely on it as a primary marketing channel in most cases, especially if I had to build it from the ground up.

Conflating "feels good" with "this is working" is right on point, too.

I'm sure it works better as a marketing channel for specific niches, though (just like Instagram works best for certain types of brands).

Other than that, it's just a good place for all kinds of organic engagement in general if that's where your audience is. Not necessarily marketing.

I guess that's one benefit of not having started earlier!

Low-key yeah, I do want to figure out how to win, but I haven't gotten there yet.

Your way of "getting" it is perfectly fine, too - if that's what you want out of it. Right now I do enjoy reading people's personal stuff, but they have to be the people I care about at least to some extent.

So what I wanted out of Twitter was the ability to be heard, not just to listen. That's the part that I kinda figured out. Winning is a different story.

That's exactly how I feel about it! Couldn't have put it better myself.

Posting on Facebook, LinkedIn or even Instagram feels like making a statement. I can't just throw a random thought or a picture in there, it feels out of place.

On the other hand, Twitter is a lot more casual. It works perfectly for stuff you wouldn't think twice about. Thoughts, jokes, ideas, pictures. Doesn't matter.

And yes, it's perfect for socializing. Little difference between tweets and replies means you can easily spend most of your time not posting anything and just replying to other people's content and get value out of it.

If you're there to go viral then sure, outrage can work - just like it does anywhere else.

But I'd argue most people aren't there to go viral or cause a ruckus. And in that case you can have a great time on Twitter with a relatively small following.

(Not to say I would mind having more followers, of course - but it's not the goal)

It's primarily about what you want out of it.

The first few times I tried using Twitter to promote my stuff and failed miserably. If you're there purely for promotion you won't get far, and it's definitely not the best channel for that purpose. (Especially if it feels like a slog to you).

If you're there to interact with like-minded people AND share something you're working on in the process, that's a different story. Still takes effort, though.

Great tips, although I do like the algo - works great for discovery!

Other than that, it really is about how you curate it. Follow the people you're interested in, engage with the content you find useful, tell Twitter you don't like something by muting/blocking/notinterestedin-ing and you're good.

In that regard it's not unlike any other social media: if you don't tell it what you like, it'll show you what it things you want to see, which won't necessarily be something you'd want to see.

Yup, getting it off the ground was the hard part!

My experience was exactly the same as what you've had with your professional account. LinkedIn just made more sense for professional stuff, so I stayed there.

In my case having a separate Twitter account for hobbies didn't make too much sense either since I didn't really have any, haha.

It wasn't until I figured out how to combine my personal and professional stuff that I really "got it". And even then, it's still quite a bit of work if you want to stay visible.

I'm actually with you on this one!

In my case, the algo is pretty good at surfacing useful tweets and people: both new stuff that I find relevant, and tweets from the people I'm following that I missed.

So I generally use lists to interact with different groups of people I'm already interested (including the ones I'm following) and the homepage is great for discovery.

Yep, I've found that if you're really good at what you do and/or have a narrow enough niche you'll have a much easier time getting people to interact with you.

If you're just alright and/or don't have a narrow niche, you need to give them more reasons to follow/interact with you. This is my case. I don't consider myself an expert in anything, and being a generalist I'm interested in a lot of stuff.

So even if people don't find my tweets or articles unique or extraordinary, many of them tend to stick around because of my personality. At least I got that!

Yep, and the cool part is you don't need a lot to start feeling relevant.

At least I didn't. A few weeks of consistently showing up and interacting with the same people made them start recognizing me, and that was enough to stop feeling like I'm just tweeting into the void here.

Now a few months and a few hundred followers later I'm finally at a point where I can simply ask "my" Twitter for feedback or share a thought and actually get some engagement. That felt like going from 0 to 1, and it was the hardest part.

A few hundred followers is still nothing in the grand scheme of Twitter things, but it's enough not to feel irrelevant since they're genuine and actually engage with me.

As someone who's recently gotten into deliberate practice, I, too, started reading this worried I'm heading in the wrong direction.

And it left me with a similar feeling: the author suggests that acquiring tacit knowledge is more important than deliberate practice, when in fact deliberate practice is the most effective way to acquire tacit knowledge.

In the bicycle example, that would mean trying out different approaches, figuring out what works and what doesn't, and working with a coach (parent) to practice more effectively.

So, pitting these concepts against one another seems wrong, but keeping tacit knowledge in mind when applying deliberate practice might make it more efficient.