I was never really into social media and even when I first joined Steem I was not interested in investing time elsewhere. Overtime that viewpoint changed as I found my own voice here on Steem and what direction I wanted to take thing. I understood before it became the cool thing that I needed to branch out. Twitter is the best place to engage with gamers and gaming communities with the possibility of business deals going down in DMS. So that seemed like a logical step.
Year 1-- 2018
In a not very shocking surprise, my first year on Twitter was almost non-excitant. I joined with the intent to share my posts in hopes of drawing more attention to myself. That was long before so many of us were over there sharing content from Steem and working together.
In total that year I only tweeted three times. It was my plan to tweet a lot more. I had it in my head with how big Twitter is that I was going get a lot of likes and impressions from my very first Tweet. That ended up not being the case and I felt rather discouraged. I had a much warmer welcome when I joined Steem and it felt like Twitter gave me the cold shoulder.
I also had to make the choice where I wanted to invest my engagement time that I set aside outside of making content. So I mostly focused on Steem instead. Twitter took a bit of a backseat.
My first Tweet ever was linking to a post I wrote to answer a question for a group of new people. They wanted to know more about resteeming. I went over all the reasons why you might consider doing so and I shared my opinion on how many before it might be considered rude or annoying. That post itself was called To Resteem Or Not Resteem: Etiquette Of A Cat. Which I felt was a rather funny and playful name.
I know my next Tweet will shock many of you to the core. Would you believe it if I told you YouTube has had an issue in the past with content creators? I know it’s shocking. I ended up writing up a bit of a propaganda piece that I shared around. I have no idea if it had any impact what so ever but I gave it a try anyways—Affected by YouTube’s Recent Monetization Changes?
My last tweet that year was regarding Splinter Lands or at the time Steem Monsters. I have promoted that game a lot since then on Twitter.
By the end of my first year on Twitter, I was rather disappointed. I never put aside the time I was hoping to come up with and I got next to nothing back in return. I knew I was going have to put some effort in over there if I wanted to grow myself. This also meant I would have to comment a lot less on Steem to make the time for Twitter.
Year 2-- 2019
January 2019 was the first month I told myself I was going to do this and I went after it. My first month ended up being my worst but things at least improved over time. You would think it get easier to get followers but you really got engage and often times be the one to follow first.
After a few months, I still was not getting the kind of growth I wanted. Sure I could go and spam follows and follow a bunch of people back. That to me is not really growth as it is just inflating numbers. I even tested doing so on other accounts I made. I could tell it was a waste of time and Twitter even seemed to catch on to certain acts with pushback.
There was a point of time where I was asking in Discords I was active in if anyone had a Twitter account. I was offering to follow, like and resteem there Tweets regarding Steem. For the most part, very few took me up on that offer. Even when I got a Twitter name to follow they were rarely sharing anything about Steem. There were one or two expectations at that time but that was it.
Outside of promoting a lot of Splinterlands the other game I love playing is Path of Exile. Even to this day, you will see spurts of me sharing randomly about Path of Exile on Twitter. I also do remind people with a Tweet when the current SplinterLands season is about to end. For those wondering no that last kind of Tweet is not automated I sometimes almost forget myself as I’ve been known to share hours just before the season ends!
After I while I ended up finding a Steem community that was rather active on Twitter. They were using a bunch of puppet accounts to inflate their numbers. Along with some other stuff I was not happy about I ended up leaving that community.
I know beforehand there would be consequences for doing so. I was warned by some former members I would get blocked on Twitter and I’d be losing a lot of followers. I informed that leader to remove me from the auto voting list and I left. Over the next 2 weeks, I watch things unfold that were expected.
On top of that, even some accounts of influence unfollowed me who was not in that community. While they didn’t block me I might as well have been dead as they were no longer liking or commenting back. It took me being persistent for a while before I even got a single like back. Perhaps it was coincidence perhaps it was not.
During The Great Unfollowing that was going down on my Twitter account, I grinded like a crazy person. I was replacing unfollows almost as fast as they were coming in. I also found some people that were more in-line with my gaming content which is better in the long run for me anyways.
After that, I went back to my normal ways. Sometimes I was really active and other times I was putting in the bare minimum effort. Being a content creator is hardly about creating content it seems these days.
The biggest thing for me regarding Twitter is being able to re-share older content. Sure it could not be voted on anymore. The truth is outside of an odd upvote I don’t expect to get many votes from sharing my content on Twitter anyways. Quite a few people I engage with don’t have a Steem account and those that do are kind enough to give me a like on Twitter which is more than them being kind.
Nowadays if I really wanted to go hard I can get more impression in a single day then I did in my entire first year. Along with almost more then my lowest months sometimes. I’ve learned my way enough around Twitter to bring in some numbers. While I’m no expert I try and get better a little at a time.
If it was not for Steem I would not have made that Twitter account in the first place. I would not be out there running around with an “I heart Steem” next to my name. I also would not be trying to bring views back to my content and thus our platform.
It is also quite cool nowadays the number of people joining Twitter in mass. The amount of support that is going around. If you are not on Twitter yet sharing your content consider doing so. It is not as hard as it uses to be. There are also a number of people going out of their way to show people support. So you can get a much warmer welcome than I got by just using the Steem tag these days.
Information
Screenshots were taken and content was written by @Enjar. Screenshots are from my Twitter page
