How to Use Twitter Effectively (feat. Arvid Kahl)

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This week, I have someone joining me who probably needs no introduction, but I will give one anyway. Arvid Kahl, you probably know him from Twitter or his book zero to sold about exiting the company he co-founded feedback Panda, or his book, the embedded entrepreneur, or perhaps his new Twitter course called find your following, or perhaps his blog or perhaps his podcast. So welcome it to software, social everyone's favorite German Canadian entrepreneur.

I have my life plan is to do one thing a year, like one product a year. Right. Just so I can focus my attention and do the things that I want to do. And turns out that this has now shrunk into one thing. Not intentionally, it just happened because I didn't want to spend like nine or 11 months in a year, not doing anything.

So it kinda, you know, you could throw on back to work when work is so enjoyable and it's done in the community, which is like, everybody's always interacting with me about the stuff that I love. So it's hard to not do things. You know, so that's why the list is growing and growing. And I do appreciate you mentioning all the things, because it just shows me how much I've actually done it the last couple of years. So thank you.

And one of the responses to that was somebody was hoping that we could talk a little bit about using Twitter effectively as an entrepreneur. And this just happens to be the entire topic of your new course.

I was always using it just as a person looking around and looking at stuff and reading and finding stuff interesting. Following a couple people here or there not to intentionally, just kind of whoever came on my radar was the person I would. And that's showed because I think back in 2019, just after we had sold feedback Panda, and for that story, I think people can go back to episode, I forgot, but with Danielle y'all right. My, my co-founder and

How can I leverage the community that I'm already in, my personal experience as a software entrepreneur, and as somebody who can now teach the things that I've learned. And then I started doing it more professionally. I kind of just figured it out. It's like almost everything, every entrepreneur, all day, it's just figuring things out as they fall into your path. Right. And then I learned how to communicate with people more effectively and in a way that builds relationships.

And it's not just me watching somebody do something, but actually engaging with them. And then building, building a following, building an audience, whatever you want to call it, just like gathering people around you around the common cause around the common topic of interest. So yeah, I was really not using Twitter effectively because I didn't care, or I didn't really know. I don't think I knew how and that Twitter could be used in a way that I could then leverage in a more professional sense.

So I was really just like following random people. I was not following intentionally. I was engaging with people when I thought I had something really, really cool to see. And not in any other situation, I was less responsive. I didn't read the tweets ever. I just, you know, and I use Twitter, like a person that didn't really know how to use Twitter efficiently. And that's fine, I guess, because most people don't, then everybody has a different reason why they come to Twitter.

That's one of the first things that I went into for the course, because I was thinking, Hey, I'm going to make a course for people who want to use Twitter professionally, what do they need to know? Right. From the start. And under the two things that I figured out in my reflection on this, I actually, I didn't just make a course. I wrote 42,000 words of a script and then narrate it that through a teleprompter, into a camera, essentially.

That's what my courses, because that's how I I'm best I write first. And then I record either for my podcast or no for this course. So I really wrote it all out and edited it myself and thought about it. And I think, the two main things you need to know is why am I on Twitter as the person who wants to build an audience? And why are the people that I want to be in my audience on Twitter, as well. And then you need to bridge these two things, right?

Like if you're a software engineer and you really want to build a blog so that your future employers can see how cool you are and you want to be on Twitter, so you can build a little audience around yourself so that you can get into, I don't know, Google or any other cool startup. Well, then you need to know why special and what you can bring to the table and what the people that you want to see your stuff come to Twitter for, so you can provide it to them.

Or if you want to build a community around a particular social issue, you need to understand what is your approach that makes you interesting. And why do people who have also interested in that issue? Why are they on Twitter? What are they talking about and where are they? And that's, you need to figure out first, because all this stuff that you find in and Twitter advice. It's very marketing, very salesy. And how do I get people to follow me so that I can sell them something? And that is fine.

You can build a Twitter audience to sell people something that's fine. Monetizing is okay. It's legal. We can do this. That's okay. But you, you still have to be on Twitter for a reason for people to follow you as a not just as a brand, not just as somebody who has a cool product, but as a person that they want to engage with, because that relationship is so much more important than any transaction you could potentially have.

And that's what I figured out at some point, people aren't on Twitter because they want to be friends with. They are on Twitter because they want to be friends with their peers, people who are doing the exact same thing they're doing, or they got just a bit ahead of them on the journey, or just a bit behind them on their journey. They just want to connect with people.

And once you figure out that this is what people want, you learn how they connect with people, and then you can provide things, opportunities for them to actually connect with you. And that's , why the course exists because I figured this out for me. I did it in public for two years. Been building all my stuff in public because I find that very interesting to give people that kind of glimpse into the journey and that resonated so much with an audience that it grew to.

Yeah. I must be 50,000 by now. So that. And I'm sharing the path that worked for me. And that I see working for other people who are doing this, like Noah brag, right? Amazing builder in public. He's building potion, his little notion to aesthetic websites tool in public every day to something really cool out there where you have Matt Wensing, who you had on the show, who's building summit. Amazing tool in a totally different kind of SAS space, right? Financial projection, and prediction.

And he's so good at building and public. Everything he does on Twitter is kind of, it's a smart thing, it's related to two businesses. It's sometimes not, it doesn't seem related to his product, but it kind of is, and he knows what he's doing and he's doing it so well. There are so many great examples out there and I kind of pulled them all together. For other people to find. And that's why I made this course, right. That's really why I'm doing this.

But of course the aside, I'm just super interested in those people, in what they do and how you can leverage what are to teach.

Most people won't even get it into that timeline. And most of the people who do will scroll over it because somebody else that they find more interesting has something else to say that. That resonates more with them. So it's super tough for somebody with no audience to just tweet and hope that they grow an audience from that doesn't work. What does work is engaging with people where they're already having conversations? It's like if you go

Like people will stay clear of you, but if you join the conversation with three or four, people have gathered, and they're already talking about an interesting topic that you just listen for a couple seconds, maybe a couple of minutes, and then you have something that you can actually meaningfully contribute that will make you interesting. Right? That's the perfect example.

Like if you go to a group of people and you listen for a second, and then you adjust what you have to say to fit into their ongoing conversation. They will look at you, invite you into the group and now you're one of them. And that is essentially what Twitter is all about. You join conversations, you join communities, you establish yourself as a contributor to this community, by just replying to people with your ideas.

Maybe those three links that you've been posting about are something interesting that somebody else could learn something from in an ongoing conversation about a similar topic, and you bring it to that conversation instead of just tweeting it into the void. That is the most simple.

And then you get another conversation going, you get an interaction with the extra person that tweeted, so now you have some sort of, starting to Kindle a relationship and connection with that person by showing interest in that conversation. Or you can invite somebody who, you know, could benefit from being exposed to this conversation and other expert on Twitter, into the conversation.

Or you could disseminate the conversation out by just retreating it to your admittedly low follower account, but you would still maybe invite a couple of more people. There are so many ways to engage with a conversation other than just replying, and you don't want to turn into this kind of reply guy, person that just replies all the time to try and get into the buzz of the conversation. So just like spread it out.

There's many different ways of giving meaning and adding something to an ongoing conversation. And that brings me to a second point, because that is something that you can do when you're exposed to this conversations. Right. You have to see them happening to be able to engage with them and that kind of has a prerequisite and that is following the right people. So if you.

I don't know really where to source these interesting conversations that you want to join, you have to start with exploring your space and following those influential kind of you would call them influencers or nexus communicators, or community leaders, whatever you want to call them. People who kind of control, or at least very strongly influence the conversations in a particular field in our space. That would be people like Courtland Allen, who hosts. Indie hackers, podcasts, right?

People who are super exposed to so many, many people or Rob walling who has a startup sort of for the rest of us. And you're kind of probably starting to understand that podcast hosts are really interesting people to follow on Twitter because they're connected to every. They're part of every conversation. You, Michelle, you are one of these people. Now, if you follow you, you get exposed to so many new people. And if people follow me, they will also get exposed to so many people.

Now, there are certain people in any community that once you follow them, you will be part or you at least will see in your activity, feed interesting things happening. So that's the first thing you have to do is to go out there, find those nexus people. I call this nexus discovery because the nexus to me is where everything comes together. And you can do this by.

Going on Twitter now and looking at who are the people with somewhat high-ish follower counts, or at least a lot of engagement in each community, following them, looking at their followers, seeing other people that you might find interesting, following them, doing some kind of recursion or looking at Twitter lists that those people are on and following the whole list, there are many, many different ways of exposing yourself to all these these conversations.

And then you just set notifications for the people you'll find most interesting. And you get actual engagement notifications, so you can jump right into a conversation. when it happens. If you do only one thing, this is what you should do, follow the right people and then just interact with them.

So not necessarily, you know, replying to your tweet, for example, and trying to get a reply from you though, you will probably reply because you are you, but like, you know, seeing like, oh, here's these 20 other people who are following this conversation. And they have interesting things to say. And then, you know, having adding a question or adding a nice comment to that.

And I guess I think a mistake I tend to see is that people will like be critical cause I think there's some, like there's a space for being critical, but you know, some people are socialized in environments where you show your worth and add value by being negative or critical. And I don't, I'm curious to hear your perspective on this like I find that you know, negativity or criticism on Twitter is really, really tricky and I tend to avoid it entirely.

And some people forget that this group of potentially millions of people exists out there and every single one of them will judge you for what you say. So you always have to consider that You are interacting with another public persona. I have a group of people that are listening and are judgemental in ways that you might not understand might not comprehend. You already mentioned the fact that people are brought up in different ways. I personally was brought up in a pretty neutral way.

Like to me, it was fine to criticize, but you should always kind of see both Sites, right. That was kind of the devil's advocate situation that I was socialized into. That is okay to do if you announced that you're doing it. So I now live with a Canadian and here this straight up devil's advocate perspective is not much appreciated.

So I have to kind of stop myself from going there, even though it's something that I often do and like to do, because it's interesting on an intellectual way in our conversations in our home, it is not much appreciated. And I it's fine because we talk about it and. But on Twitter, you don't get to talk about this. For two reasons, first off, the people who are listening, they don't talk to you. They don't interact with you. They just read, they are the lurkers, right?

The potentially millions of people that are reading this public interaction that you're having with somebody else, they don't tell you what they think They just judge you. And second in the medium of text, there is no subtext. There is no nuance. There is no like hidden subtlety, text is text and everybody interprets that, text the way they read it. So that is something that is incredibly hard to pull off if you want to be critical. So I would never be just critical.

I would always either preface it with devil's advocate or whatever you can do to make sure that people understand that, this is not criticality. This is not like an ad hominem situation where you attack the person. Okay. I want to talk about the argument, but honestly, I don't do this at all.

I think I'm like you, I want Twitter to be an empowering and positive space and, everything that I add to a conversation will it's supposed to be positive and helping other people, which is that the other side of doing this as a performance. So it's a performative act because you want to help other People If that is my, the reason why I go to Twitter, one of my core values is empowerment is helping other people Uh, become better at whatever they want to do.

So if that is why I'm there, then every single thing I do, at least a little bit have that as its goal. So just crushing somebody's dream or negating somebody's opinion will not do this. Right. It's gonna need to the opposite. It's going to be a disempowerment effect. So I don't want to do that. And that is why I publicly don't do this. I don't do it privately either.

If there's something that is flat out wrong, I will still try to always see the other person as somebody who still worth being friendly to, and just kind to like showing them my perspective without pushing it towards them or onto them. And that's how I go about this. So, and, and if you're trying to build an audience, if you're trying to build a following of kind people, a friendly people, people like you, or people who you want to be like you, well, then don't the aggressive towards them.

Don't be critical towards some, just give them the room to be, themselves and to have their own opinions and respect them for that. It's really all I can say to this. So yeah, I would definitely just caution anybody out there to be critical because Twitter is about like helping other people succeed. Right and PR critical stuff, rarely ever does it. Cause it gets misinterpreted.

And at the same time, you're on a stage in front of the millions potentially, right? Because it just takes one viral tweet for the thing to be exposed to literally millions of people. And you always have to live with the fact that you're doing both at the same time and you don't know which is currently. It's tough because that's just what a public medium, like Twitter does. Like Facebook is kind of different.

If you're doing something in a Facebook group, it usually stays in the Facebook group or in a forum, right. It stays in this little community, but Twitter has this potential of this breakout effect where you get out of your community and you exposed to the whole world for good, or for bad that it makes this such a weird balance to think about. Honestly, everything you do in marketing is performative to begin with, and Twitter is marketing yourself, marketing your personal brand.

You're doing something intentionally. You're sharing something because you want people to buy it or you're sharing something because you want people to donate to a charity or you just want to grow your, their awareness of you as a brand or as a person or your project, whatever the reason is you're on Twitter you're doing it for to reach a certain goal. So any step along the way is an intentional tactical or strategic implementation of action towards that goal.

That makes it performative to begin with. Because you're doing it in front of an audience that you want to use in a certain way, or you want people to react to you in a certain way. I can understand how introverts and I consider myself one, it may not sound like it, but I kind of feel like one and I always felt like one have a lot of trouble with, and I'm only this outspoken about everything that I'm doing, because I've been speaking about it for years.

Like in the beginning, I was also kind of shy, I didn't know what to say and how to phrase it, then this is my second language. So, You know, that's a whole other level on top of it. But you know, like if you care about. And you surround yourself with the right people, and I count you as one of these people for me, like you are an amazing person that is extremely kind and supportive, and you're the tide that lifts all the boats in our community as well. Well, how could I not want to talk to you?

How could I not want to share things with you? Right. That's why I'm doing this because I've surrounded myself with wonderful people that have the same goals that I have, which is making the internet economy, a thing for people to explore, being a creator, being a writer, being a SaaS entrepreneur, whatever it is making this a possibility for more people. And if that is my goal, I can live with the fact that people are watching.

In fact, I embrace that and I try to be as authentically me as possible while knowing that there is like 50,000 people listening to everything I'm saying it's, it's, it's a super hard balance to strike and it definitely takes some reflecting, but once you understand it, once you accept it, you can use it for good. That's my perspective.

And it's a sort of coffee shop, bulletin board, so to speak, like it strikes me that, because you're an introvert you had to learn all of these particularities sort of about how the ecosystem of Twitter works, because it did not come naturally to you. And I wonder how, like, I think of my example, person with 15 followers and their side project.

They're listening to this and thinking, oh my God, the whole thing is a performance and people are going to judge me and I could go viral and I have to reply to these famous people, but I actually don't reply to them, I reply to the other people. And then somehow all of this is going to get me customers for my side project. And I'm like, where am I going to spend all this time? Replying to people? I already have a job and I have a family, and I don't have very much time.

Shouldn't I just be building features instead and, oh, and by the way, I could accidentally criticize someone and then go viral, and then everyone hates me. Like, no. And so it kind of strikes me as, emotionally, what was the transition for you getting comfortable with the idea of like, of putting yourself out there more and having these conversations.

When I launched my course, whitewater course, that launched tweet, I had a typo in it and, I just noticed that like 30 seconds after I tweeted it out and I was like oh no, I have a typo in my launch tweet, people are going to see this forever. And I was just about to delete the tweet when I got a notification on my phone that the first person had bought my course. I couldn't even delete my launch tweet fast enough for people to not care about my typo instilled by it and purchase my info product.

I've had these moments so often, I thought, oh no, this is the worst. I made a mistake and nobody noticed it. And people only really cared about the thing that actually gave them something of value right. I let it just stay on, it's still in my pin tweet. Like there's a quotation mark in the wrong place. It's really not a problem. Nobody really sees that. And nobody cares about it. People who care about the thing that I helped them. Not my own insecurities about how I phrased it. Right.

That's, that's kind of one of the things that I noticed very quickly. And that is a recent example, but forever on Twitter that I started writing in public and launching my blog posts and stuff. The people who cared about it in a way that I could actually help them in their lives, they cared about the important stuff. They cared about the stuff that actually impacted them. They didn't care about my shortcomings, my imposter syndrome, my nervousness of whatever.

They just don't care about it because if everybody on this planet cares about one person and that's mostly. And once you understand that people don't care about what you care about, unless you are actively preventing them from reaching their goals. Really what it is, you can do almost anything you can experiment with your stuff. You can tweet about things that you find interesting. Look at if it creates resonance With people, you can give people.

Positive or critical responses, whatever it is, people won't really care until you step too far and you will learn this, which is why starting with these kinds of experiments. When you don't have many followers is actually the best thing you can do, because then you're not exposed to hundreds of thousands of people you're just exposed to 20. And if you say something that nobody cares about while you will see, because none of those people will react to it.

Say something that like three or four care about it, then you've got to hit and then you can learn from that and write more like that. Right? It's like, really the people will give you a lot of leeway if you're just friendly with them. If you're kind to them, if you support them in what they are doing, you can almost do anything. And create these kinds of nightmare scenarios. And yeah, it's the same, like in my course, I totally miss attribute a book title to another author.

In the course, I say that Derek Sivers wrote start with why, which you obviously didn't, that was Simon Sinek, but I just mixed it up during a recording. My brain went into a weird state that I set the wrong name and It took people, it took like a hundred or something students to actually start the course two for one to figure this out. Like the other 99 didn't care to take care more about what the course can actually teach them. Then the little mistake that I made while recording it.

So if that can happen at that scale, you tweeting something weird, that will also be fine. And the thing is about Twitter, even though it's performative. And if you're an introvert that already is hard to talk to people, but you can always consider Twitter, a place where you find friends. You making friends, you finding people just like yourself, and you're just exchanging stuff that you both find interesting.

It's like a meetup, you know, where you go, you don't really know the people, but you know, they have to success I'm interested because you're both going to the JavaScript meetup. Well, I guess everybody here likes. Right. So it's the same on Twitter. If you find those people, those nexus people that have the same interest as you have, well, their audience will have the exact same interests.

So whenever you interact with the, let's say with JavaScript engineering, you interact with somebody who's big in the JavaScript community and you interact with their tweets. You're now exposed to this audience of other people who also love JavaScript. Or love, hate JavaScripts. That's maybe not the perfect example, but you know, you're exposing yourself to an audience of at least intersecting interests.

And that's where this audience audition concept comes in, that they kind of hinted at earlier, right? You're not interacting with the JavaScript influence. So you don't want them to follow you. You want their audience to follow you because they have 40,000 people that are following them. You want a couple of those people to be interested in you.

That's why you interact with the influencer stuff, not to get the influencers attention, but to get the attention of the pre filtered audience that they have that is already really compatible with you. And if you consider Twitter making friends with other people who are. Then it's so much easier. It's so much more enjoyable too, because then it becomes more of the couch and less of the stage, right.

You always have to, at some point consider that you are in a stage, but that really only happens when you have a couple thousand followers. Anything below that, most people will recognize you as one of them, right? There is no big exposure. It's not that you are one of those huge accounts that everybody wants to follow. You're just a person interacting with other people, and making friends is very easy at that point.

And if you consider every interaction that you have as a potential of making friends, Then you will also speak to people differently because if you want to make a friend, you don't go there and tell them about your products. Right? Imagine that if that was how we made friends, like you go to a person at a party and you tell them, Hey, I have this cool product. It's only $10 when you buy it. Nobody does that because that's not how you built a relationship with a person. You go there.

SMA, how are you doing? What do you do? And what do you find? Interesting. How do you know the host that you asked them about themselves? You asked them to tell them more about you so you can tell. About yourself and, build on common ground. That's how you do this in real life. Why wouldn't you do it on Twitter? Why would you post stuff? Why would you put links to your newsletter as the very first thing you do when you interact with the new person? That's not how you do it.

You make friends on Twitter and once you understand that it becomes so much easier and so much less scary.

Right. You, you don't. Yeah. You don't

And the moment you've got some notoriety on LinkedIn, people have to dig really deep to connect with you bring up a reason to do it, have to link like oh, I went to the same school as them for somebody, for some reason, that is why you want to allow people to interact with other people. This social graph on linkedIn is so selective and so hard to establish. While on Twitter, you don't even need to follow an account to get their information.

You can just follow a list with where they are on or you just follow a person that consistently retweets from that account and you get exposed to new people. Twitter is just so. Oh, I have a free space that people can use in any shape they want. And obviously that creates so much more opportunity because it allows for serendipity. LinkedIn does not allow for serendipity. Allows for really, really targeted interactions, but on Twitter, anything can happen for good or bad. Right?

You have the whole shitstorm situation and I guess is there an opposite of a shitstorm, like a windfall. Love

I just find that wonderful and often it's cute animals and stuff, but you know, there are still also people who do meaningful things that have impact that now get exposed to so much larger audience and have so much more impact for the good. that is what Twitter allows you to do. And obviously that is in my eyes, that for somebody who has empowerment and support and motivation as my core values, that is the product for me.

I could not do what I'm doing on LinkedIn but I can definitely do it on Twitter. And I I'm really grateful for that.

Because that's how you build a relationship with me by coming to a Twitter and talking to me. And I want that because I want to, talk to you dear listener. But honestly, because I think I can learn from every person out there, and I hope that I can teach something to any person out there a little bit, at least. So, yeah. My DMS are open. And that is something interesting when you have 50,000 followers, but I will still try and respond to every single DM and yeah, that's where you can find me.

And that's what I would like you to meet me.