I have my main social accounts that I started over a decade ago. I don't even remember how I started or how I got my first followers, but I don't remember it being a challenge. I am pretty sure I just shared whatever came to my mind and what I thought is useful for others, and one by one, I gathered thousands of followers. Past 10k, if you post something even remotely interesting, you are almost guaranteed to get enough engagement to attract even more followers, and so it goes.

Punkpeye (https://twitter.com/punkpeye) is an experiment – can I build a new identity from the ground up in a new niche?

I just spent the first day trying to build audience on Twitter. I figured that since now I have 0 followers, I need to curate a list of high-relevance Twitter users and DM them something useful. The goal is to do something together that would allow me to leverage their audience, e.g. write a thread together. I spent a few hours doing it. I got a handful of responses and even a few followers. At least 1 thread will come out of this and hopefully will kick off the growth cycle.

However, not long after I started my first dozen conversations, I got a message from Twitter saying that my messages were being blocked because of suspicious activity. Hopefully, that is a temporary measure until someone manually checks my conversations. Long story short, starting a new social identity is hard because platforms like Twitter effectively penalize you for going above and beyond to build an audience.

It is an interesting experience. I've advised others who are just starting to build their audience many times before. However, I am learning that advice from a decade is not directly transferable to the current times. Growing your audience, especially the first handful of followers is a new game, and it does not look easy. No surprise then that most Twitter users have 0-2 followers.

Somewhat surprising that, at least in the case of Twitter, they throw you into the social network without any rules or suggestions on how to acquire your initial network – I would bet that the success and retention go one-to-one with user ability to attract some audience.

Tomorrow I will try to reply to relevant threads that are gaining traction.