SOCIAL MEDIA
New Insights Into the 𝕏 (Twitter) Algorithm for July 2024
The latest research into growth strategy which inspired me to give 𝕏.com another chance
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Remember when Prince changed his name to that unpronounceable, androgynous ‘love symbol’ and everyone had to keep referring to him as “The artist formerly known as Prince”?
It got attention but it ended up being far more clunky and cumbersome than he probably intended when he adopted the symbol as his name.
I can’t help feeling it’s the same with 𝕏, which seems to require the addition of “The platform formerly known as Twitter” every time it’s mentioned.
Anyway, I’d all but given up on 𝕏 as my engagement on my main account there had plummeted to almost zero, while my other account was only getting decent engagement by posting increasingly extreme and shocking content into an echo chamber.
One was a complete waste of time and the other wasn’t doing my mental or spiritual health any favours.
I wasn’t prepared to spend all day every day posting, reposting, liking and replying for no results, so I gave up.
Shortly before I quit, though, I took part in a survey by Hypefury aimed at identifying exactly what is and isn’t working in terms of the 𝕏 algorithm right now.
Hypefury is a pretty decent application which I use on a semi-regular basis to help automate, streamline and inspire my 𝕏 content.
It has a free version and (of course) an upgraded version with more enhanced features. It is one of the best platforms of its kind that I’ve come across.
I’ll post a link to Hypefury at the end of this article. Yes, it will be an affiliate link so if you do join and at some point down the line decide to upgrade, I will get a (very modest) commission.
Anyway, I had an email a couple of days ago with the results of the survey.
I have to say, the figures have inspired me to go back to 𝕏 and give it another go.
Now, Hypefury is in a privileged position in that they can monitor the actual growth rate of their members’ 𝕏 accounts, so we know these results aren’t just based on hot air.
After receiving feedback from the survey, they selected the top 20% of creators with the highest growth rate on 𝕏 over a 2 week period.
The idea was to find out what these top creators were doing differently from everyone else.
In short, to discover what is working right now, in July 2024, on 𝕏.
Here’s what they found:
What was the growth rate?
Okay, so it was ever so slightly more than a two-week period. They actually measured growth rate over 15 days.
In that time, 16% of participants grew by more than 100 followers.
5% grew by more than 500 followers (I think that’s pretty damn good).
1% of participants grew by more than 1,000 followers in that 15-day period.
So rapid growth is still possible on 𝕏.
What should I post?
It was no surprise to me that the top-performing post-types were threads, images/memes and videos.
What was a surprise was that video posts weren’t at the top of this group.
I’ve always felt that videos are generally much more attention-grabbing than images, but maybe this is because I often access 𝕏 on my PC. Videos autoplay as I scroll past them.
Most people access 𝕏 most of the time on their mobile phones, where they are likely to have autoplay disabled to save data. In those cases, videos won’t necessarily have the same impact.
There is another reason why videos might not appear to have performed as well as expected in this survey.
Remember that the survey was run by Hypefury. Hypefury allows users to compile and schedule 𝕏 posts directly from their Hypefury dashboard. However, the ability to post videos via Hypefury is only a recent feature, so many of the creators surveyed might not yet be using that feature very much.
Whatever the reason, videos still perform much better than text-only posts.
What niches work best?
The top 20% of creators seem to be broadly confined to just 5 niches: self-help, tech, health/fitness, marketing/sales and writing (yay!).
The top niche was self-help, with 26.3% of the creators who took part in the survey falling within this niche.
Also within the top 3 niches were tech (17.5%) and health/fitness (16%)
Closely behind these, and almost neck-and-neck were marketing/sales (12.3%) and writing (12%).
So if you’re looking for rapid growth on 𝕏 it makes sense to stick to one of these five niches.
How often should I post?
This was one of the most pleasant surprises for me, as someone who doesn’t want to spend hours every day on 𝕏.
It turns out that around 57% of the top creators were only posting 2–3 times per day.
Any less than that and you’re not likely to get enough traction, but more than that and you risk overdoing it and having your followers stop engaging with you. You can have too much of a good thing 😉
What about replies?
Although you should aim to reply to others more often than you post your own content (it’s called social media for a reason) you still don’t need to go overboard.
It turns out the vast majority of the top 20% of creators surveyed only post 5–10 replies a day.
Your growth is likely to be directly proportional to the number of replies you make to other people’s posts, but posting 8–10 replies each day is more than enough to achieve rapid growth.
For best results, you should reply to a mixture of large and small accounts, and always remember that the quality of your replies counts almost as much as the quality of your other content.
Make your replies useful, provide value and try to write them in such a way that they can be reposted by others as standalone posts, to encourage maximum engagement.
Twitter Spaces
Spaces are a fairly new feature on 𝕏 allowing users to set up a kind of interactive podcast within 𝕏 itself.
59.5% of the top performers in the survey hadn’t yet tried Spaces. Of those who had, less than half thought they were worthwhile.
In fact, only 18% of the top creators thought Spaces helped grow their accounts.
Since they are time-consuming and labour-intensive, I personally wouldn’t recommend bothering with them.
Monetising 𝕏
The majority of 𝕏 users don’t monetise. Out of the top 20% of creators, though, more than half monetise their 𝕏 accounts.
Less than 20% of those top creators who do monetise were doing it through the Ad Revenue system. The vast majority were doing it by getting clients.
The vast majority of this group got those clients either by collecting their emails or by inbound DMs from their followers.
Very few top performers actively sent outbound DMs in the hope of getting clients, probably because it’s very hard to do this without appearing spammy.
Receiving tips or selling posts made up just a tiny proportion of the total monetisation.
Interestingly, monetising through affiliate links wasn’t featured in the results, so I have no idea how much these play a part in the income of 𝕏 users.
I’d be surprised if it wasn’t significant, though.
Do engagement groups work?
Engagement groups are groups of 𝕏 users who agree to support mutual growth by liking, reposting and replying to one others’ posts.
They seem to be overrated. Very few people in the survey felt that these groups worked well for them.
Perhaps the 𝕏 algorithm can detect when people are artificially inflating their engagement stats in this way and takes measures against them.
Although there is no definitive proof of this, the following section lends weight to this theory.
Beware of reposting
Okay, so this is an odd one.
Obviously, whenever we post on 𝕏 we are hoping for as many reposts as possible. It boosts our visibility and is one of the criteria by which we measure a post’s success.
But…
The survey found that the top performers only repost other people’s content very sparingly.
We’re talking less than once per day.
Reposting too much seems to slow your growth — which seems totally counterintuitive.
Could it be that the 𝕏 algorithm views excessive reposting as an indicator that you are in an engagement group (see above) or is there another reason for this apparent anomaly?
Unfortunately, at the moment, I don’t have an answer to that question, but it is advised to repost very sparingly and strategically.
Is it worth getting a Blue Tick?
It used to be the case that a blue tick on an account meant that the account holder was a verified personality. Since Elon made the blue ticks available to anyone willing to pay for one, there has been considerable debate over whether these $8 upgrades are worth the money.
I’ve tried upgrading a couple of times. Most recently I tried upgrading just a couple of months ago in an attempt to revive my failing 𝕏 account.
At first, it seemed to have an immediate positive impact and I experienced increased engagement for maybe a couple of weeks, but then for no reason I could fathom, engagement on my posts plummeted again and I didn’t renew the subscription.
In retrospect, based on these latest findings, perhaps I was trying too hard and was penalised for reposting too much, or something similar.
Whilst over 10% of top creators in the survey said they hadn’t yet tried the $8 upgrade, 57.8% said that having the tick has helped them reach more people.
No doubt, this is at least partly due to the ability to write long-form posts and to make them stand out with bold and italic text.
In Summary
In summary, then, here are Hypefury’s recommendations:
- Post threads and image/meme content
- Engage with both large and small accounts
- Try long-form and video posts
- Build connections and trust
Don’t…
- Rely solely on text-only posts
- Overwhelm your followers with too many posts
- Spam replies or DMs
- Fake engagement by joining engagement groups
- Believe that a blue tick is a “magic growth pill”
In short, the study suggests that if we stick with the following formula we shouldn’t go far wrong:
Tweets = 3 per day
Replies = 8–10 per day
Reposts = 1–2 per day
Threads = 1 per week
Videos = 1 per week
If you want to check out Hypefury for yourself, here’s the link.
