Breaking 4000 Followers on Twitter

I recently broke 4000 followers on Twitter. What have I learnt so far?

Transcript

Russell: Hey everyone. Russell here from the Canadian Conservative podcast. Thecanadianconservative substac.com and today I wanted to talk about just a few of the lessons I've learned using social media and how it's worked for me so far. I've recently passed 4000 followers on Twitter and I'm publishing podcast episodes, interviews on YouTube, and that on a semi regular basis now. And so this episode is less due with politics and more talking about like a lessons learned style document in audio format. The biggest lessons I've learned so far is that consistency is key. You got to publish every day or near every day. Don't take long breaks. You really have to brand yourself the right way as well. At first, my initial name for my show was Coffee Breath Conversations and it was a great idea at the time. I had to go where the audience went. After about ten episodes, it was obvious that people wanted to hear a certain format. They wanted to hear the political content, they didn't want to hear about the non political content. They didn't really want to hear that much about business owners and stuff like that. The episodes that I got the most viewers from was my political content. And so I started working with a coach about six months ago and he's a former podcasting guru and he's launched a few successful podcasts. He's working on a book now, and frankly, normally he would be wildly out of my depth to even be able to consult with. But he did give me a discount because I was following him a lot when he was involved in social media and interacting with his content and that. So he gave me a good discount, and it's really worked out so far. Rebranding has been a huge component to this and it's also been due to just making connections. I've met such a vast and amazing group of people on Twitter online, like truly excellent people on both the left side of the spectrum and the right side of the spectrum and the centrist. It has been really excellent. I've gotten to talk to some decent hitters in the industry of online commentary politics. I got to interview Maxine Bernier. I got to talk to Mark Emery, the Prince of Pot, stuart Parker, he's been an instructor out in BC for years. And it's been really good. It's been really good to be able to talk to these people and get their viewpoints and learn from them and hopefully produce content that people find interesting, push it out to the world and hope that people find value from it. As you can tell the recent episodes, I ditched the intro music. I ditched the long expositions at the beginning, and that was actually a tactic I took from Mike Cernovich listening to his podcast where you just get right into it. I don't try to do insane amounts of editing anymore. Mike, when he did his podcast, he didn't do any editing at all, I don't think, but for myself, yeah, I do still do some editing, but not nearly as much as I did before because it's about producing the content and producing value for people. And what I will say about using social media is that you can do it without being an asshole. I see people on there all the time and they're just constantly battling it out and it's like, well, this is just online. Yeah, it's reality, but it's not reality reality. You're not face to face with someone. So it's a lot easier to kind of fly off the handle and be a loose cannon and get riled up and all that sort of stuff. So I've really taken a non aggression approach very often. I don't respond generally to negative comments. I mute the person and move on. Found that just in general, it works best if I go there with a healthy attitude that these, as Jordan Peterson might say, these anonymous troll bot accounts from hell are making ignorant statements and that you just mute or block and move on. And it's worked really well for me. I don't interact with that type of content usually. And if I do make a controversial statement and I have people on there and they're not being completely out to lunch, but they are kind of ribbing me a bit, like I'll give it a little bit back. Or you just got to learn to also kind of not take yourself too seriously either. You got to be able to take the jokes and take the online punches and that when they arrive at your doorstep. So there is ways that you can interact online without getting into the mud and getting nasty and just ostracizing yourself and ostracizing other people. The online sphere since Elon Musk took over Twitter has certainly been much better. Overall. My account was pretty heavily debosted before, so I was seeing just a pittance of growth at a time. And now since Elon took over and since I started getting more consistent with the show, I easily hit 4000. I'm past the 4000 mark. I'm hitting up to 4100 almost already. I'm just going to keep trying to push out content that has meaning, content that has value. Yeah, some of it's reactionary. Well, that's kind of fun though. Give your opinion on things and people will tell you if they think you're right or they think you're wrong. But I also try to interview interesting people every once in a while. And those are my much longer form podcasts than the solo ones that I do. And even on occasion I've even I won't say I've broken news, but I've gotten a few interviews where I've done some exclusives with people, people that have been smeared in the media I've kind of reached out to, and I've gotten the other side of the story from them. Still. One of my highest ranked episodes is the one I did with Darryl cooper who ran for the Sass Party nomination, some anonymous trolls online reported that he had liked, just simply liked the wrong types of tweets. And for that, the Sass party dropped. His nomination definitely appeared like it was a coordinated smear campaign because a few small media outlets came out with the news that he'd been dropped over the tweets. And then that literally spread to CBC. And then they ran a hit piece article about the rise of Misinformation online and right wing figures liking Misinformation disinformation. Frankly, I think his case is pretty fascinating. Overall, it was a pleasure. I literally just reached out to him randomly and I had to really track him down on Facebook and I just messaged him out of the blue and said, hey, this is who I am and I'm looking at doing a show and I'd love it if you came and we did the show. We still follow each other on Twitter and it seems like he's doing well for himself now and I'm really happy for him. Yeah, so 4000 people, that's not insignificant. Yeah, it's not a million followers or 7 million or like elon with 11 million followers or something like that, but it's something and it's an audience and it's people that have said, hey, this person's interesting enough that I'm going to hit the follow button. With that comes responsibility. The goal is to keep producing content, keep producing content that has meaning. And yeah, some of it's going to be reactionary stuff, opinion stuff, kind of like the Paul Joseph Watson stuff that you see, and there's nothing wrong with that. But I am going to continue to try to find interesting people to talk to and find interesting stories to talk about. And I hope that everyone that's listening will be along the way on the journey. That's all I got for today. And I hope that everyone here has a great May long weekend. Take care.