[AE.Personal] One weird trick for defeating the Twitter algorithm.
I've said this on Twitter a few times, but the nature of Twitter is that things get lost on it, even before and without any algorithmic manipulation. It's so easy to miss things and so hard to catch everything in the firehose of noise and information.
If you're a creator or you're looking to become one, let me share with you one weird trick for getting your stuff noticed under Twitter's current algorithmic ranking:
Quote tweet your stuff.
See, Twitter downgrades tweets that contain external (meaning, non-Twitter) links. This includes your Patreon, your OnlyFans, your newsletter, your PayPal or Ko-Fi tip jar, anything that is not an address hosted on twitter.com. These tweets are less likely to come up in the Home timeline and more likely to be hidden when they're replies to other tweets.
They're not invisible. They're not banned. They're not blocked. They're just... less likely to be served up.
The why of this has not been fully explained but definitely includes the facts that Twitter would prefer the flow of the timeline keeps people on Twitter and they would prefer that anybody who is making money on their platform pays them for the privilege by buying visibility in the form of promoted tweets.
So what are you to do as a creator trying to get visibility and get paid?
My go-to has been to write threads of at least a couple tweets trailing off my tweets with links in them. This works well because those extra tweets have no links, and each tweet increases the chance that somebody will see the thread and click on it, and get the one with the link in it.
But this past weekend I became aware of another workaround, and my early experiences after a couple days of experimenting are that this -- currently -- is a powerful weapon for breaking through the algorithm.
It's simple: quote tweet your own tweet. The quote tweet has no links in it. The quoted tweet has the link. The quote tweet is not algorithmically downgraded because it has no external links. The quoted tweet is carried along on the quote-tweet's visibility.
How powerful is this? Well, in two days I went from fearing I was completely washed up and no longer able to offer enough people enough value to make a living on social media any longer to realizing that it was the algorithm had changed, not my skills or value or other circumstances.
What a difference a payday makes.. and to paraphrase the film The Jerk, I wasn't worried about the money so much as I was worried about things, things that would require money, and that worry had been rapidly approaching a full-time occupation to me, cutting into my formerly-paying working, which only exacerbated things...
I digress. The truth is I've been treading water in a deepening hole for so long that a couple of good days on Twitter won't fundamentally change my financial status, but my outlook for the future is brighter because of this one change, and I wanted to share it with anyone else trying to get their work and their links and their other stuff out there in the social media hellscape.