10 Lessons I learned on Twitter in November

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I’m cleaning my house, watching Jason Calacanis’s 90 minute interview with Reid Hoffman and was inspired to dig into Little Bird’s LinkedIn data as a result. Christopher Penn‘s blog post about analyzing your Twitter history over 2014 inspired me to look at my history from this month. You can too at analytics.twitter.com.

And from that chain of great content, I was inspired to share 10 of my most popular Tweets from this month. I tweeted 200 times over the month, on average almost 7 times per day, so these are the top 5% with a little bit of editorial and framing this as lessons I learned, that I shared with my Twitter community and that resonated.

In order of most recent to least:

I liked this blog post, I shared a link to it in our Slack chat room for sharing cool stuff, our fabulous designer Jason Zeiber enjoyed it and posted the subheads. I thought that was a good value add and decided to one-up him by posting it on Twitter, using @ mentions to introduce relevant parties and people loved it. On one hand the lesson here is that, in ten different ways, startup growth is an ongoing process. But another lesson is that people really appreciate not just curation but summary and introduction. This one got over 4,100 impressions.

Focus is a great form of value to add and this is something you might be able to say almost every day if you were really only going to find one thing to dig into. There were certain parts of this interview I loved, mostly because they affirmed my belief in the value of real time data. “a little bit of the right information, just a little bit beforehand, is more valuable than all of the information in the world six months later.” Further evidenced here: just because a popular person like Vala Afshar has posted something doesn’t mean a bunch of people won’t appreciate seeing it again, or for their first time. This got 5,800 impressions and probably helped extend my relationship with Vala. Vivek didn’t seem to care. Oh well. My community and I appreciated the content none the less.

Lesson here: Tweeting a link to a blog comment is a perfectly legitimate thing to do. This was a big day, I sure wish the folks over at ReadWrite the best.

I really like adding my two cents to conversations on Techmeme and the site added this one to its collection. Apparently you can pull off self-promotion in the public square if what you have to say is interesting enough. And apparently this was. No one from Twitter has responded to me challenge yet though. 🙂

I love this bit from my friend Jill Rowley, especially the way it concludes with that soccer analogy. Jill articulated her vision of learning and change really well here, I snapped a photo of it as I read it on my phone, and cross-posted from LinkedIn to Twitter. My big lesson here is just what Jill says: effectively encouraging people to change their work practices is a high-touch thing. I’m trying to help people leverage social data and networks more effectively and am thankful for our Customer Success team and lessons learned over at Little Bird for that.

I have a private Twitter list of top people I keep an eye on and Mark Andreesen is one of them. I can’t read all that he, much less the other 40 people on my list, post – so I use Little Bird to capture a highlight reel of their best content. (I do the same for marketing tech, Portland tech and other topics.) I really appreciated this article in order to hear from a roboticist himself about the context and pace of robotics.

This got almost 10,000 impressions – which is awesome. Lesson: people like mini celebrations of startup good news. At least they do when I share them, probably because I am a person people like to support. Someone told me that explicitly on Twitter elsewhere in the month. That’s helpful in building a company.

A. This is really interesting. B. Guess who this led to a phone call with? C. Thanks to Little Bird’s current investors Henry Copeland for creating this cool plug-in PullQuote and Howard Lindzon for sending me this link. Sharing this selection of thoughts got me on the radar of several parties of interest and the Tweet got over 9,000 impressions.

A. This is awesome and I didn’t know about it. I found it via the Share & Engage page in a Little Bird report on IoT. B. It is cool to share things that are important to you like women in tech are to me. C. I added the imagery here myself using Skitch and I bet it really caught peoples’ eye, that big black and white photo. All the better to help spread this important story!

Summary as value add and I love the sentiment. I am blessed with a lot of intrinsic motivation too – if you are as well, this is a good post about how to leverage it, in conjunction with content, in service of your goals. I’m going to @ messg Gary about this whole post in fact and I hope he appreciates it.

There’s a little thinking out loud about 5% of the Tweets I posted this month that got the most traction and the lessons I learned from them. I found almost all of them by knowing who to listen to and leveraging automation to see the best content from those trusted experts. In other words, I used my own company’s technology just like our customers do.

See you on the social web in December!