I’ve just got to 2,000 followers on Twitter. Not 200K, not 20K but 2K. Not a great result for six years. But at least I have expertise on how to fail at building a Twitter following! Here's a thread on how to FAIL at the Twitter game:

1/7 Don’t check Twitter that often. For the first five years, I barely checked my Twitter account and more recently I only check it once a day. Low-frequency usage means less engagement which means less profile.

2/7 Avoid attacking others. ‘’Any fool can criticize, condemn, or complain” said Dale Carnegie and I tend to follow that advice. It’s much much easier to tweet a criticism than a compliment. And nobody gets bothered if you are not attacking someone, so less engagement.

3/7 Avoid politics. Most political tweets are boring– either the politician is tagged a right-wing nut (Trump, Brexiteer) that wants 1930s Germany or they are a left-wing nut (AOC, Bernie) that wants Soviet Russia. Engaging political tweets gains followers, but I'm not interested

4/7 Avoid culture wars. Join the woke train (eg 1950s were terrible) or the red pill train (eg 1950s were great) and you can trigger your people to engage. But Twitter is the worst place for a subject that requires nuance.

5/7 Avoid FinTwit tribal wars. There are clear tribes. There’s the anti-central bankers, the bitcoin bros, the VC/tech utopianists, the inflationistas, the Big Tech is evil lot, climate-is-all tribe etc. I’m not a member of any and it shows in my lack of followers

6/7 Don’t use memes and funny pictures. If I use pictures, it’s usually a chart. But it seems memes are much much more popular. You know like the one with the guy with his girlfriend but he’s looking back at some other woman.

7/7 Don't follow for entertainment, but if you want well thought out market views sign up for free here: https://macrohive.com/join-the-hive/