Imagine you just fired a Twitter thread out into the Twittersphere.
Do you know what it looks like on people’s timelines?
Maybe you haven’t thought much about this. But you should. There’s one quirk in the algorithm that can improve your threads…
Why you should worry about how your Twitter thread looks on the timeline?
When you post a thread, Twitter shows only your first tweet and your last two tweets in someone’s timeline.
All that juicy stuff you wrote in the middle? No one sees it unless they click.
People make split-second judgments when it comes to deciding what they’re going to click or read.
So if you bury your best insights in the middle of your thread, you risk hiding your best insights from most people… which means no one will bother to read it at all.
How to fix your Twitter thread?
Write your first tweet… Your first tweet should be a cocktail of counterintuitive insight + tiny bit of evidence + cliffhanger.
… then include a serious insight in the second-to-last tweet. This can be a summary of your thread, a hard-hitting insight, or something else. Whatever it is, it should be really damn good.
If you’re using a CTA as your last tweet, that’s totally OK. But make sure your first and second-to-last tweets are the best ones in the thread.
This is deep Twitter theory, and Matt Heytens details this concept very well in an essay he recently posted on… well, Twitter. If you’re getting into Twitter threads, it’s worth reading the whole thing.
