I use Twitter heavily. If Twitter was tobacco, I'd be a three-pack-a-day smoker.
Before Twitter ditched real-time timelines in favor of showing you "what you want to see first," I made a lot of contacts with that little blue bird, sold a lot of photographs, and got a lot of retweets. Now, not so much. I'm not abandoning Twitter yet but I am wrestling with how to make it work for me again.
Of course, you can opt out of the algorithmic feed. Here's how to do that. But will my followers opt out? Just because I use a chronological timeline doesn't mean my 32,000 followers see what I tweet when I tweet it. Or see it at all for that matter. When I tweet a really strong photograph that's previously been heavily retweeted, but I don't even get a "like," I know the Twitter battlefield has changed.
So rather than a how-to-make-Twitter-make-you-famous article, call this a journal entry on my efforts to get around the Evil Algorithm. Because I haven't yet succeeded. But I'll share a combination of things I've tried, things I've observed, and things I am still trying.
1) The time of day you Tweet no longer matters much. When I first open Twitter, having already opted out of the timeline changes, I see things that were tweeted five hours ago, three seconds ago, and 14 minutes ago in that order. Or in some other wacky order.
Tuesdays still seem to be the best days for all kinds of social networking, including Twitter. Fridays still seem to suck. I still try to tweet relatively early in the day, say 10 a.m. eastern time, figuring that whatever I put out there will have a good six hours of peak time (that is, "work time," when people ironically pay most attention to social media accounts) to filter through the algorithm. Oddly enough, I'm seeing things get liked (far more often than retweeted) days after I post them. Your experience may be different.
2) All the old rules to optimizing tweets are more important than ever. Use mind-grabbing text, a photograph, and a link in every tweet. Use a hashtag or two. Think about keywords. Know your audience. Know your mission. Be interesting. Forbes has an old article on that stuff here.
3) Regarding the content of a tweet "Fine art for sale," with a photograph of a bridge over a lovely river attached beneath it is a pretty weak way to find buyers or even retweeters. Try something novel like, "Hot, oily Asian girls love my photographs. You will too." Unless you're selling Bibles. In which case you might try "Bored, wet, Christian housewives who show it ALL are buying up my art." OK. Both those examples are juvenile (and entertaining) but to get attention you need to spice things up. It's even more important now.
4) Ask people to retweet you. Likes are worthless because nobody sees what the people they follow "like." Retweets are gold. Stick an "RT" at the end of important tweets. Better yet, ask people, in private messages, if they'd be willing to retweet something you're about to post. I often do. And just as often, I retweet things for other people. It's no guarantee you'll get seen but without actually doing theoretical math, I figure a retweet doubles the probability of any given person seeing what I post. Or something? In any case, it expands the number of people who might see what you post.
5) The number of followers you have may or may not help. Logically, it would. Buying followers definitely won't. A hundred thousand followers with no profile pics who have tweeted twice and have between two and six people following them might impress your grandmother or people who don't know about accounts built mostly on the backs of ghost accounts but it does nothing to get your tweets seen. I have never paid for followers and I have 35,000 of them, with a few annoying, fake ones in there who have latched onto my account. But I know people with 5,000 followers who get lot more retweets than I do.
Keep trying. I'll do the same. Maybe we can come up with a solution. Because Twitter is not going back to its old format. In the meantime, follow me at @John_Sevigny and retweet everything I post.