Hey there👋

This is Ayush, that dude from Twitter🙏

How’s it going?

How was last week? Hope you’re doing good.

Welcome to The Indie Creator issue #21.

Today we're talking about -

• Launch of the Twitter friends group (and why I'm not calling it a community)

• The secret to higher engagement rates.

• Leveraging larger accounts to reach a wider audience (in the right way) - My best Tweet of the week.

All in 3 minutes.

Let's go👇

Twitter friends group

So this week I launched the Twitter friends group. It's a private group of like-minded people all of whom want to grow on Twitter and leverage it to build a business.

I had originally envisioned it to be a paid community and launched it with my Ghostwriting service TweetForMe.

But not enough people signed up for the group. It didn't make sense for me to go through all the pain to serve so few people.

I had decided to scrap the idea, but then I ran a poll, and 18 people said they wanted such a group, but it should be free.

So I thought I should give it a shot.

I launched it with a simple form on Twitter a few days ago.

30+ people have signed up so far. I went through the profiles and sent out invites.

20+ people have already joined in. Setting up the Discord over the weekend was fun.

I want to keep the group high on engagement conversation quality.

That's why I'm manually curating all the people who want to join. Not sharing the Discord link publicly.

But I'm not calling it a "community" yet. I think "community" is a loaded word. It means different things to different people.

And I shouldn't take on something that I'm not capable of.

For now, it's just a group.

Like we all have a school friends group, a college friends group, a work friends group.

Well, now we also have a Twitter friends group😅

This is my 2nd experiment of 2022. Let's see how it goes🤞

If you're doing interesting things on Twitter, you might like it. Here's the launch thread:

The secret to higher engagement rates.

So a couple of my Tweets this week got above than normal engagement rates.

I normally get a 3-3.5% engagement on most of my Tweets. But this week few of my Tweets got 9 to 15% engagement.

And here's the secret - write Tweets that force engagement 🤷‍♂️

Sounds obvious, but here's what I mean - write Tweets that force the readers to click through on the Tweet.

For example, this Tweet got 15% engagement:

When I write that, people are forced to click on my handle and go look at the banner. That's counted as an engagement.

Another example is Tweets with pictures, for example, this Tweet got 10% engagement:

I posted a screenshot of my DMs, while sharing my take on the whole Calendly issue.

Again, people are forced to click on the Tweet and look at the image. Which boosts the engagement rate.

I'm going to try this experiment with a few more screenshots this week. Let's see.

Leveraging larger accounts

This was my best Tweet of the week -

I've mentioned Nathan and his essay - Ladders of wealth creation a couple of times before in this newsletter. I love the concept.

I am genuinely a fan of Nathan's work. I've written about him and his story before as well.

So I wrote a Tweet about his essay and how I feel like I'm following the path mentioned there.

He liked it and RTed it.

I think this is a legit way of increasing your reach. You share or appreciate someone in a meaningful manner, they will find value in that.

And their followers will also find value in that.

Some of Nathan's followers eventually ended up following me as well because of that Tweet, (and also subscribing to this newsletter, hi🙋‍♂️)

This is another Tweet with an image, so a 9% engagement rate.

And 11,000 impressions! That's great for a small account my size.

Do try this strategy in your Tweets as well and let me know how it goes.

Important Information

That’s my 3 minutes with you today, will let you go now. But one request -

If you’ve not been having fun with this newsletter, please consider unsubscribing.

I don’t mind.

No hard feelings.

I’d rather you unsubscribe than not open the newsletter.

But if you do enjoy it.

Please do me a favor, please ask one of your friends to subscribe.

It would mean a lot to me🙏

Cheers,

Ayush