A lot of people are selling courses on how to grow an online audience. Why spend money when I can give you the playbook for free.

[Lessons from observing online behavior for the last 15 years. Every platform is different, but tricks can be the same.]

  1. Build bots for upcoming popular accounts. Everyone loves flattery. Why should the world be restricted to a naval bot? How will this help: People love their own shit, but retweeting their own stuff multiple times is lame. Retweeting tweets by a bot solves this problem. The original account has to tweet enough truisms for this hack to work. More thought leadership, less personal stuff.  It would be weird if the bot tweeted stuff about the author complaining about his loose motions or something. Remember to out your own account in the bio of this bot.

  2. I know someone who reached 10s of thousands of followers/millions of page views on Quora by just copy-pasting answers from Reddit. You don’t need any original insight or experience to hack engagement. Just know the stuff your audience will lap up.

  3. Reddit answers sound boring? Why not summarise blog posts of popular accounts and then tag them + dozen other accounts? Remember to put [for visibility] on your tweet.

  4. Someone who was a top writer on Quora used to mass follow accounts, get follows back, and then unfollow them. Most people won’t remember to retaliate. Try this evergreen trick. What is old will be new again.

  5. Post saas facts. Always a winner. People love saas. Always remember this.
    • [Hot company X] grew their users by [Y]. Only possible in software.
    • [Hot company X] grew their valuation by [Y]. Only possible in a remote-first world.

  6. Why should the Pomp brothers have all the fun? Business lessons from sportsmen are taken? Why not share business lessons from musicians? Or business lessons from world leaders? Everyone loves business lessons. Don’t spend hours researching. Just check Reddit. Tons of business stories there.

  7. Have a template ready for big events. What has X taught us about Y?  <– A very popular template once upon a time, now forgotten.
    • What does Meghan Markle teach us about emotional intelligence as a business leader?
    • 5 lessons from Virat Kohli that you can use as a startup CEO.
    • 10 lessons from the Indo-China conflict that will help you in negotiating a term sheet with your VC.

  8. A lot of popular accounts’ growth is a function of truly supporting one side of the narrative. Follow the simple playbook mentioned here for max success: Life Math Money playbook.

  9. Become the mega supporter of a popular account. Always reply to their tweets. See ParikPatelCFA and Chamath. You know a lot of people love and hate Chamath equally. So his posts will always get massive distribution. Use a popular account for your own growth.

  10. Remember the first hack about creating a bot? Too lazy? Then just tweet out content by popular accounts. Remember to tag them. Template: [Truism or popular thought attributed to some thought leader] - [Thought leader name tagged].

  11. Acquire an imaginary 2 year old to have deep conversations with that you can share on LinkedIn later.

  12. Pick a fight with popular big accounts, aka the Taylor Lorenz playbook. Do a lot of quote tweets for maximum impact.

  13. Whatever opinion you have, dial it up by 100 before posting on social media. If you think people should work hard in the beginning of their career, instead of posting a nuanced take, post “work life balance is for losers.” This will help you get engagement and QTs from both sides of the work life balance debate.

  14. Form a hype squad. Most Instagram influences grew up forming close knit groups who would promote each other’s content. The same playbook works for Twitter.

  15. Cross post from one platform to another. Tiktok captures all the latent video trends first. Post Tiktok videos on Twitter. Reddit has all the juicy memes. Cross post them on Twitter and Facebook.

  16. Take old content. Repost a minor variation of them.

  17. Hack growth through Twitter topics: Use popular keywords like startup, investing, VC that drive traffic.

  18. Praise India publicly.

  19. Feed on people’s confirmation bias.

  20. Mental models and biases is an evergreen topic. You can tweet them every month, with minor variations.

  21. Ask questions to your followers: Ask something like ‘What mental models do you use at work?’ The question should be broad so that you can get more replies.

  22. Keep tweeting Probably Nothing on all major crypto news.

  23. Simp VCs. Retweet old things they had posted, and comment how right they were.

  24. Investment advice is evergreen. Use ‘If you had invested X in Y on Z date, by Z + W years, you’d be sitting on V’. This tweet always gets the numbers.

  25. Piss off the maximum number of people.

  26. Do what the algorithm wants

  27. Compare and contrast between two communities.

  28. Talk about BITS Pilani.

Try these for massive success.

P.S Not hating on anyone. If I had a course to sell or wanted to build a distribution channel on Twitter or Quora, I would do the same.