How to grow on Twitter & online communities

Curated Tweets, resources, and advice to grow your audience & community.

Author

Sofia Terlesky
January 25, 2023

Hey there,

Thanks to the 🎉100+ subscribers🎉 that are supporting this newsletter designed to help founders building online communities.

In the last edition, we explored why you should build a community around your product and how to start. Today, we’ll learn from the advice of growth hackers that leverage the power of social media and communities to grow their user base.

Keep reading to explore:

  • Top profiles of founders building audiences on social media and communities

  • Interview with David Berkowitz, founder of Serial Marketers

  • Latest tweets about audience growth and community

  • Best resources for founders

  • New community tools launched on Product Hunt

🛠️ Top profiles of founders growing an audience

Pierre launched his first product on January 17, and although he has been active on social media for almost 6 months, his account is growing at a fast pace.

With less than 1K followers on Twitter, he has already made his first $18 online with My Paper is Better - a directory of research papers with funny titles - and interacts with big accounts.

💡 Strategy

  • Roast landing pages and propose new designs to founders (for free!)

  • Tweets every day about UX and product development

  • Documented the whole process of building and launching a product

  • Shares free design resources

🏆 Featured Tweet

Pauline makes products inspired by her own pain points and from the ones she finds on Twitter. Also, she builds in public and documents the process on aboutstartup.io and in a monthly newsletter.

Recently, I tried TwitterExplorer, a tool created by Pauline that allows you to export Twitter bookmarks in Google Sheets. It’s amazing and you can get it for free! The analytics you can get with paid plans are pretty impressive, offering the most complete dashboard for Twitter analytics I have seen around.

💡 Strategy

  • Deep audience research before building

  • SaaS building in public

  • Weekly Tweets with resources about data and her journey as an IBM Data Scientist

  • Shares personal stories behind the creation of products like Cryptopy

🏆 Featured Tweet

Danielle is an indie hacker and nomad who travel the world documenting everything from her boat. She co-founded an AI email assistant and recently launched Leave Me Alone, a tool that allows you to easily unsubscribe from annoying email lists.

She’s been active for some years, and build an audience of 10K followers on Twitter. Mostly, Danielle shares new product features, shutout other creators, and shares pictures from her trips.

💡 Strategy

  • Builds in public and supports open startups

  • Share weekly tweets on nomad lifestyle

  • Info and memes about AI

  • Uses her products a lot and shares possible use cases

🏆 Featured Tweet

📣 Asking for a founder: How to grow a community organically?

This week we’d like to feature David Berkowitz from Serial Marketers, an online community running on Slack that now has over 3K and keeps growing. He shared with us his experience growing and managing an online community for marketers 👇

Q: Why did you decide to create serial marketers?

A: I created it because while I thought there are a handful of marketing communities that worked well on LinkedIn, Facebook, and Google Groups, there wasn’t a great place for vetted marketing professionals to learn from each other in a more organized setting where you can tune into conversations that matter and tune out the rest.

I waited a couple of years in part because I was worried about starting a community as a vanity project; this had to be about connecting members with each other, not about making use of my network.

Q: What brought you to the position you are in now with over 3K members?

A: It’s been overwhelmingly organic, with members referring members to the community. I launched this via a LinkedIn post in July 2018 as one of the first marketing-themed communities on Slack.

There are two main reasons why we’re still here, growing, and thriving. The first is that it’s an incredible, supportive group of people. There’s very little negativity. I’ve removed less than one member a year for any code of conduct violations, and even that is for behavior that any other social platform would tolerate (and perhaps encourage).

The other reason is that anything I do with the community is designed around providing value for members, and I think members appreciate that.

Q: Can you share your tool stack to manage the community’s daily activities?

A: The tech stack includes Slack at its center along with Mailchimp, Google Forms, WordPress, Upstream, Zoom, Dots, and Superpeer. And then Zapier connects all of that.

✨ Latest tweets about audience and community growth

💬 Best resources

🚀 New community & audience growth tools on Product Hunt