#69: How to Use Twitter Search to Find Content and Conversations, with Warwick Brown

In this episode, Warwick Brown tells you how to use Twitter search to find content and conversations that will help your engagement. He shares a ton of advanced search tactics to help you connect and stay up to date on what’s going on in your community.

Listen in Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, Stitcher, Overcast, iHeartRadio and Spotify.

This podcast episode is brought to you by the #TwitterSmarter Twitter chat. Each week, I host this chat and bring together hundreds of people in an active one-hour discussion revolving around Twitter marketing. It’s every Thursday at 1pm ET. Hope to see you there!

My Favorite Quotes

“I just love Twitter for finding content. But you do have to invest a bit of time in setting things up.” – Warwick BrownClick To Tweet “Twitter search is so powerful. If you spend a bit of time figuring out the advanced stuff and how it works, you can find gold.” – Warwick BrownClick To Tweet

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Transcript

Madalyn Sklar: Hey Warwick, Thank you so much for joining the #TwitterSmarter Podcast. I am so happy to have you here as my very special guest today. My question for you is, what are your best Twitter tips?

Warwick Brown: Thanks, Madalyn. I am so excited to be here. And listen, I got a ton of them so I’m looking forward to getting into them during the uh, the episode.

Madalyn Sklar: Oh, I love that. Do tell. I can’t wait because you’re such a smart guy. I’ve had you on the #TwitterSmarter chat a few times. You always blow away, blow me away, with your knowledge or expertise. So I’ve been wanting to have you here on the podcast for a while so I can’t wait to hear some great juicy tips from you.

Warwick Brown: Well, I definitely am one of those people that goes after the next shiny object. So I do suffer from the shiny object syndrome badly. So consequently, you’re right. I had been across a ton of the tools, but I guess you know, when you work through them you figure out what works, what doesn’t, what, what suits you. And there are some amazing tools out there, but you know, that really helped you get more juice out of Twitter, of which I think Twitter has actually invested a lot in them as well. I’m really enjoying like just the, the developments on the platform itself lately.

Madalyn Sklar: Me too. I just love it. It seems like every week or so there’s something new they’ve added and some of these features are small, but they really make Twitter better. And I love that. It makes for a better experience.

Warwick Brown: It really, really does. And I think it’s really, they’re really been focused on engagement and helping you connect with people. And I’ve sort of been reclaiming my feed, to be honest, because you know, I completely ignored it for so many years. And I think actually, you know, there was, I mean, you know, ManageFlitter and all of those, a lot of those accounts, where would they did all those auto, you know, click follows and find people to follow and all that sort of stuff.

And you know, when Twitter pulled the API and suddenly you couldn’t do that anymore, I feel like actually that was a bit of a tipping point for me in terms of actually I’m not gonna, I’m not going to be so focused on follow accounts. I’m actually going to be much more focused about the conversation.

And I know that’s something you’re always on about on Twitter is about the conversation.”OK. And I feel like that just remove that element for me at free to be up to like, “OK, well I’m not going to be looking for followers and follow and then you follow and then I unfollowing and I keep better ratios and all that sort of crap, you know. I’m just like in it to have a good time. So.

Madalyn Sklar: I love that because yeah, it used to be the early days the strategy was: You follow people, see who followed you back unfollow if they didn’t follow you. But also it was a different time where they had those weird ratios with your follow to following and you couldn’t get over… I remember 2,000 used to be the limit. You couldn’t get above 2,000, uh, to follow unless you had enough followers. And it was kind of weird the way they had that. But I agree with you, I’m so much more focused on the conversation and not so much about the followers.

Warwick Brown: And I don’t know what you think, but you know, there were, there was that recommend, you know, that advice from all of this content and social media marketers that were like, you know, tweet like every 30 seconds, like 20 times a day, you know. And uh, I used to do that. I had like 10 or 15 slots in my, um, in my Twitter, uh, you know, content scheduling. It was just noise, you know, it was just stuff just to fill the, fill the space.

And you know, now I only tweet one or two times a day, sometimes not even daily. Uh, and I still get engagement, and I still pop up in people’s feeds and people pop up on mine. It’s like, “Oh, In case you missed it” or you know, uh, Madalyn Sklar just tweeted, which is brilliant. So you don’t feel like you’ve got FOMO anymore.

Madalyn Sklar: That is so cool because I do remember when the strategy was tweet every, like once a minute or every five minutes. And it was like, it was so cluttered, but some people did it very successfully. I remember Jeff Bullas was like the king of Twitter for years doing that strategy.

But I will always look at his feed and go, that’s too busy. There’s no way I would do that. I think, you know, it’d be a turn off to a lot of people. Uh, but I’m still, you know, all these years later, I’ve been on Twitter for like I think 11 years now, and I still put out a lot of content.

I try and make sure it’s very relevant to my followers. It’s something that they’re interested in, but I, I’m curious like if I do what you’re doing right now, like, like, you know, would that work well if, when people see me as a resource, so I don’t know. I’m a little nervous about doing that, but I think it’s awesome. It’s working great for you.

Warwick Brown: I think you can, I mean, I definitely scaled it back. So I think in my scheduling tool, I used to have something like 15 slots a day, which was like crazy. It was like trying to feed the beast, and now it’s like maybe five. And I had them categorized. I have fun, inspire, educate, and promote. So they’re my only four categories now, and I’m mostly around education, tips, tricks.

And then sometimes it’s just a funny meme or just so, you know, observation on life and then, um, yep. So that’s helping me also stay focused on what I push out. But, uh, yeah, I, uh, I like to go like you do. I like to look at somebody’s speed. I can get a sense of what their, what they’re about, what their message is and what, what they, what they know about and what they’re like. And you can’t do that if you’re doing 20 tweets a day.

Madalyn Sklar: Right. Exactly. That’s a great point you’re making. So do, so do you notice like immediately when you made that kind of switch that like engagement still was great and the numbers, everything still looks great. You didn’t feel like you lost a lot of people or lost interest.

Warwick Brown: Uh, I think, you know, I don’t lose followers, which is pretty great. I mean, I don’t have a lot of followers, but I actually just crossed the 2,000 mark. Um, but I’m not here to collect followers.

Like I said: That, that kind of API, you know, um, drama that happened a few months back kind of really just released me from all of that. And yeah, I mean people still like my tweets. I still get comments. I get retweets and reshares. Um, I’m looking at my hashtags a little bit more. I don’t know what you think. What do you think about hashtags? Some people say they’re dead; nobody uses them; nobody searches for hashtags.

Madalyn Sklar: Right.

Warwick Brown: Nobody clicks them. I’m in two minds. I like mine. Like I, you know, I followed your advice from way back. I was like, I’m being my own hashtag. That’s cool. Cause that helps me find people that are, you know … ’cause sometimes I quote my stuff and do my hashtag, but they don’t tag me. So I don’t necessarily know. And it also helps me find my stuff. But um, yeah, I’m, I’m, I’m torn between sort of whether I need hashtags or not in my tweets. What do you think?

Madalyn Sklar: We.., it used to be back in the early days of hashtags on Twitter, used to be that was the only way you could do a search. There wasn’t a way to just search a keyword. You had to have the hash symbol in front of it. So that was kind of the whole thing with hashtags as a search tool …

Warwick Brown: Right. OK.

Madalyn Sklar: … search engine. And then over … over the years it evolved where, Oh, you don’t have to do that anymore, but I was already using this #TwitterSmarter hashtag I came up with. And I was using it in ways where I was branding what I was doing, and a lot of people thought, “Oh, this was Madalyn doing a hashtag for the Twitter chat.”

But actually I started the #TwitterSmarter hashtag years before the chat and was using it as a way of saying to people, “Hey, I put out Twitter content all the time. I will always share an article. Anything I find about Twitter on Twitter marketing, I posted my Twitter feed. If you would like to see all those, just go and search the #TwitterSmarter hashtag and every day you’ll see at least a few if not more.”

I’ve been doing this every day since … It was like 2013, I think. I’ve been doing that every day since. I always make sure my feed has scheduled some really good Twitter articles I come across, and now that I’m putting out so much content these days, I’m making sure there’s plenty of that in there, as well. And that’s been great.

People discover me that way. And then I use the hashtag to brand my first uh, online course, my #TwitterSmarter Master Class. And that was also in 2013. Eventually the Twitter chat came about in 2015 along with this podcast. So I really used it as a way to brand myself ,and Twitter was just so perfect to be in the middle of all that. So it worked well for me. And it looks like it works well for you.

Warwick Brown: Yeah. Yeah, it definitely, and also all the other platforms have sort of gone on the Twitter … I mean Twitter and venture the hashtag and uh, you know, now LinkedIn, Instagram, Pinterest, they all have them.

So actually it helps you cross platform because they can say the #TwitterSmarter hashtag, #AMtips hashtag and doesn’t matter which platform you’re on, you’re going to find my content. So actually, it’s worked really well from a branding point of view.

Searching for #B2B, #businessgrowth, #salestips, I’m not so sure. I still put them in there. I don’t put tons of them. I’ll put maybe two or three. Uh, you yeah, can’t hurt, right? Unless I’m short on space for the tweet. Isn’t that funny how we used to, like … We were like, Oh, 200. And what does it, 280 characters or something. Scandal. I don’t want this, and now I can’t imagine living without it.

Madalyn Sklar: I was totally against it, and you know, I’m like the Twitter go to for Social Media Examiner. And uh, they had me come on their Friday video show when it was very close to them switching from 140 to 280. And they wanted my opinion. I said, I think I said, I was honest. I said: “I think it’s a terrible idea. I mean 140 characters is what makes Twitter, Twitter. I don’t feel like doubling it is the answer.”

And my biggest concern was … is going to be these long tweets, and how is this going to play out in a Twitter chat, especially #TwitterSmarter that moves at lightning speed. How am I going to read all these tweets in the chat in real time when they’re long.

But the great thing that happened with all of that, I’ll never forget this, it seemed like for one day everybody went crazy to type long tweets, like to everybody did 280 character tweets just to see what it was like. And then it went right the next day I went right back to normal, you know. Everybody was back to short tweets, and I was like, okay, this is awesome.

So now we don’t have to worry about, you know, abbreviating things or trying to get our point across when we got cut off at 140. Now we got that extra space, but I don’t go crazy with it. I don’t see too many other people do, so it’s nice to have it now. But it was a little bit of a scandal at first. It’s like, “Oh my God. Twitter won’t be cool anymore.”

Warwick Brown: I know. And at least now you can use punctuation, which I love, because you can never do that. You know, you’re always going, you know: “you” with a “u”

Madalyn Sklar: Ah ha. I hated doing that.

Warwick Brown: … and all these weird “4” instead of “f-o-r.” And actually you’re right. I very … I asked sometimes I have to really think hard to reach that maximum character limit. Like yeah, it’s quite a lot of words that you can squeeze into 280 characters. You sort of didn’t realize at the time how, how many words that actually gets you.

So um, yeah I do. So here’s a, here’s a, just on the subject of the Twitter searching cause that’s one of the things I’m really passionate about. And I just love Twitter for finding content. But you do have to invest a bit of time in, you know, setting things up and going to look for it. I don’t, I wouldn’t say it lands in your lap, you know. You have to go, OK well, hashtags.

So I’ll use Hashtagify to find the right ones for my tweets and also maybe find some new ones. Um, I love a TweetDeck. That is so great ’cause it’s sorta got the advanced Twitter search in it, but you can have it set up per column. And I love the way that you can have filters. Like you can um, include or exclude retweets. It’s gotta have …

Madalyn Sklar: I love that.

Warwick Brown: … likes and that sort of stuff. So you could, you kind of can surface some of the more popular content. You can hide … Yeah, it’s brilliant. I love TweetDeck, and they’ve done some good upgrades on that, like being able to add images to your tweets and GIFs. I think are on there.

Madalyn Sklar: Yeah. GIFs are fairly new. You couldn’t do that before, and it was so frustrating.

Warwick Brown: No.

Madalyn Sklar: Have you been using TweetDeck for a long time or is that recent?

Warwick Brown: Well, I kind of had to because when I’m on a #TwitterSmarter chat, it’s like, uh, Houston, you know, space station, Kennedy Canaveral, Cape Canaveral because there’s a lot going on. Instead of, like, the Twitter … Twitter browser ’cause I’m on your one with the tweets and replies.

Then I’m on TweetDeck to see the stream. Then I’m [inaudible] my own tweet cause I like using RiteTag, which is a, um, it … It turns your tweet into an image. So if I find a nice tweet I’d sometimes be on there. And then I’d quote that, and then I’d grab the image and then I … So yeah, it was crazy. But um, yeah, so I had been using it for a long time, but it annoyed me that you couldn’t do GIFs and it was fiddly with that pop-out, pop-out window for the message and …

Madalyn Sklar: I didn’t like that at all.

Warwick Brown: Yeah. Yeah. But for a Tweet chat, especially things I just did like Twubs and Tweet Chat and all those don’t seem to work as well as they used to. So I have … TweetDeck is essential. But it’s great just for, um … yeah, for keeping on top of your searches and finding contents. And I’ve got my regular streams.

So when I’m searching, like if I’m looking for a topic, and this was a, um, a tip, I can’t remember where I read it from. But, like, let’s say key account management. So that’s one of the things that I do. Instead of just going key account management, you’d do key account management in quotes cause you want the exact phrase and then you do “And” with a capital “And”, which is a, you know, uh, search, Boolean, Boolean.

Um, and then I’ll do, uh, like “how” or “what” or “help” or “newbie” and adding some of those extra qualifiers helps you get the content. Or I’ll go, “not hiring” ’cause I don’t want to see job ads. I want to see actual, like, content and conversations. So yeah, the Twitter search is so powerful. Absolutely. If you just spend a bit of time figuring out the advanced stuff and how it works, you can find a lot of gold, I think.

Madalyn Sklar: I’m so glad you mentioned that, uh, Warwick, because Twitter search is something that … It is very powerful. I think a lot of people don’t realize how powerful it is because when you’re on Twitter you see the little search box, and, you know, for those of us that are utilizing it, like if you know that Boolean search term, you know, the search, doing the quotes and doing all these little things, you can really narrow things down. But I don’t know why Twitter does this.

There is an actual dedicated search page. And what I do is I just bookmark it, you know. I’m make sure it’s bookmarked. I can easily access it. And for those of you listening, just go to Twit … This is on browser only, twitter.com/search-advanced. So it’s not always easy to remember.

But if you’re at twitter.com/search-advanced, uh, with the “e-d” on the end, uh, it’s so great that you can go in there and this box pops up. And it has all this. So like it says “all these words.” So instead of having to remember to put it in quotes, I can just type that out right there.

And you can, um, you know, search for conversations. Like if I wanted to go back and look at when we were tweeting … Like maybe I remembered you tweeted something really cool in the last #TwitterSmarter chat, but maybe it was a while back, I could come into the advanced search and put, you know, “from your account,” so I put your Twitter handle, and I could put the #TwitterSmarter hashtag.

And I’m going to see all your tweets from that chat. Or if we were having a conversation, I’d put from you to me or from me to you and the hashtag, and it will home in on those tweets. That’s just like the tip of the iceberg. There’s so much you can do with the search.

Warwick Brown: So true. And you’re right, they don’t make it easy to find. Uh, that doesn’t annoy me a little bit, but I mean, I have found so many, exactly what you said, like those random things where you’re like “Now I know Madalyn … It was a conversation we had “Madalyn” and, um, uh, “tires.” And then I’ll like … And it searches from like 10 years ago. Like it, it’s, it goes right through. It’s not even like a 12 month window. It’s like years and years. Uh, which is brilliant.

Uh, I know it haunts some of these celebrities when they get these things that come, come, dug up from, like, five years ago. But it’s brilliant that you can find that stuff when you just need the little random bits of a conversation you remember, and you’ll find it. It’s really good. I love it.

And um, the other one that, I mean, I mean we’ve spoken about Twitter lists. I did a chat with you, a #TwitterSmarter chat on Twitter list. But I love Twitter lists for finding stuff. And I know I mentioned this before as well, cause you interviewed the guy who created it. Nuzzel um, yeah. Brilliant.

Madalyn Sklar: Yeah, Jonathan Abrams that really, really cool. Yeah. That, that has been an amazing tool that for years people thought Twitter was going to buy it because like, it was so perfect for them, but they never did. I thought that was really interesting.

But Nuzzel’s still around. I’ll, I’ll put the link in the show notes for you guys to go check out ’cause it’s a really cool tool and I’ll have to go look up what episode that was. I’ll put that in the show notes as well cause that was an interesting conversation. You know, a little known fact about Jonathan Abrams: He was the one that developed Friendster, and Friendster was one of the very first social network sites.

Warwick Brown: Oh wow. Facebook before Facebook sort of thing.

Madalyn Sklar: You just kinda like the O.G. Of social networking.

Warwick Brown: Wow. Yeah. This is great because it curates your lists and you. I mean, you know, it kind of surfaces all the cool content from your list. But then it’s also your friends and your friends are friends, and you can kind of find stuff. And um, and I liked the way that you can turn it all into a newsletter and then it sends you a summary of all these articles it’s recommended.

So it just lands in your lap. Like that’s what I love about it. I don’t have to remember to go search for things. They send me … every day with content of the things I’m interested in and what’s happening on my list. Uh, my lists, I mean. So, um, yeah, that’s a really great tool as well.

Madalyn Sklar: I’m glad you brought that up. That was N-u-z-z-e-l.com, Nuzzel is … They have a little uh … For my iPhone, I use the app, and it’s just really great. I get really great content through that.

Warwick Brown: ‘Cause you can, I mean… A lot of people, if they have like a readers like Feedly and Inoreader, Flipboard, you know, you can turn your lists into, you know, a, an RSS feed. You can see them, but it doesn’t do any intelligence sorting of it. It doesn’t give you any advice based on all of the tweets.

But what Nuzzel does is more than that because it recommends out of all of those hundreds and hundreds of tweets that might be going through a day on your lists, it’ll give you the most popular ones, the ones that your friends liked or your followers liked, or people that you follow liked. So it gives you some intelligent recommendations beyond just here’s a list of everything that came out on Twitter today, which is why it’s so helpful.

Madalyn Sklar: That’s great. Now for somebody that’s listening that might be a little newer to Twitter, I come across lots of people that don’t understand Twitter lists. They’ve never used it. And you’ve done, I mean, cause I remember when you were on the #TwitterSmarter chat and you talked about lists and you were just blowing us away with, with uh, your insights. Can you tell everybody just a little bit about what are Twitter lists and how it’s helped you specifically?

Warwick Brown: Yeah, so Twitter lists are essentially, uh, like a, a bookmark I guess, of people that you like to follow. And you can make them private or public, and you can name them whatever you want to name them. And you know, people can, if they’re public, can subscribe to your lists. And, uh, you know, you can build them around topics, which is what I do, which is what I do.

And, uh, it’s a great way to be able to find stuff really quickly. Because if you have an interest in, you know, video marketing or, um, social media marketing, if you have an interest in, uh, business trends, you know, um, macro- microeconomic trends or career-based content or whatever it might be, and you find people like, “Oh, this stuff’s good,” then you know, you just add them to this list.

And then, um, you know, go and check it out, and you’ll see all the content really quickly without having to do the searches, without having to sort of figure out in your feed where it is. And if you’re looking for content, it’s right there. And then, because you, you know, it kind of gets 10Xed when suddenly you can add them as an RSS feed to these different tools.

But I use it for, um, definitely to find content I want to share with my audience because there’s so much great stuff out there. So I’ve got one that’s business trends, so it’s, I call it the management consultancies, PWC, KPMG, Deloitte. It’s, you know, the people that publish a lot of thought leadership and surveys around what’s going on in business.

Uh, I have a private one, which is competitors. So you know, people that are in my space, and I want to stay on top of them. But I don’t, I mean … They probably know I’m looking, but you know, I don’t need to give them an extra … any more promotion that they’re already getting.

Madalyn Sklar: Right.

Warwick Brown: Um, so that’s really useful. And then things for my personal interests – um, you know, um, career development stuff, personal branding stuff. So it’s great. You’re like, “You know, I want to spend some time on my personal brand. What’s the latest happening in personal branding strategy?” Straight to the Twitter list. Great. A list of great content. So that’s brilliant.

And of course you, like … I actually encourage a lot of my subscribers to subscribe to my Twitter lists ’cause I’m like, “The great stuff’s there. If you want to stay on top of emerging trends in career, personal brand, business, just follow my list.”

Madalyn Sklar: Yeah. And I love that. That’s so smart. You know, that’s one of the benefits of making it public, a public list – that people can subscribe to it. And it’s basically: You did the heavy lifting. You put together … You curated a great list, and other people can take advantage of it. The only drawback is they can’t edit. They can’t remove someone or add someone.

Only you can because you’re the owner of the list. But I, I have quite a few lists that people subscribe to and find value in. So I think that’s really awesome. I love the way that you’re utilizing it. It’s very smart, you know, to, to use Twitter as a smart business tool for, you know, helping you do more in business for sure.

Warwick Brown: Yeah. And you know, also friends, #TwitterSmarter chat, um, uh, family. Uh, I’ve got lists for that. And actually I can’t remember who, where I heard this from, but they said create a list and call it “Awesome” because, you know, you, you get a notification if somebody has, uh, added you to list. So I’ve got a list called “Awesome.”

And if I find somebody usually on a #TwitterSmarter chat or something like that, and I like their stuff and we’ve had a moment, you know, little little bit of fun together, then I’ll add them to the “Awesome” list.

And uh, don’t check it all the time, but it just means it means I can still stay in touch with those people and not miss … because also a lot of people don’t tweet daily. Like, they’re not into it like you and I are. They may only tweet once or twice a week. Um, if they’re on the “Awesome,” you know, you might have a better chance of bumping into some of their content than if they’re on your main feed. You know, I can pick up conversations …

Madalyn Sklar: I used to do that years ago. I was really … because If This Then That – the I-F-T-T-T.com – they had a recipe for that where you could, you could set it up so that if you could put like a search term or keyword or something, and if people tweeted that to you, you can automatically put them into a list.

So this thing I tried and experimented with, which worked really well, very similar to what you’re saying, is if anyone tweeted the TwitterSmarter hashtag, which would of course be during the Twitter chat, that it would automatically put them into a list, a list. I think I called it like “Awesome People.” I know I had the word “Awesome” in it, and people went crazy.

They loved that because they felt special. They get this notification “Madalyn Sklar added you to her, you know, #TwitterSmarter Awesome list.” And uh, and it is a great way to just have that extra layer of being able to easily more easily connect with them ’cause you’ll see them in that list versus just your home feed.

So, I love that you mentioned that. I haven’t really done that as much, but I tell you, it reminds me of one of my lists as always done really well. Uh, when Twitter lists was a new thing, I had this, you know, I had ’em all private for my eyes only ’cause I was like, Oh, you know, it wasn’t really a thing to have them public yet.

And I created one of just all the top social media people on Twitter that I would come across. I put them into this list for my eyes only called Social Media. Then I had about 100 people in it after about a year or two, and I started thinking “Maybe I ought to make this public ’cause I basically curated a great list. Why don’t I make it public?” But let me rename it because of exactly what you said because if I add someone to it, they’re going to get that notification. So I renamed it from just “Social Media,” which is boring to “Social Media Smarties.”

So who doesn’t want to get a little notification. And the beauty of this type of notification is that it’s as a singular notification. It’s not lumped with likes and retweets. You know, those all get lumped together so it’s easy to miss when somebody likes or retweets you. But you get that single notification that says, you know, Madalyn “@MadalynSklar added you to her Social Media Smarties list.

People get really excited about things like that. I get excited when people add me to a list that has a cool name to it. If it’s not, if it’s just “Social Media,” I’m like, “OK, I’m on, I’m on a million of those.” But when they have something that sounds more exciting, you know, it’s the psychology of it. We get excited, so that’s such a great idea.

I hope those that are listening will take action on that because it’s such a great idea. Go through your Twitter lists, if you have ’em, and what could you do to spruce up the name if it’s public because any time you add someone, they’re going to get a notification. If it’s private, they don’t.

That’s kind of the beauty of that. You don’t have to worry about it, but a little side tip is if you already, it’s like when I talked about my “Social Media” and then turning it into “Social Media Smarties,” all those hundred people I added, they never got a notification. It was private. Once I made it public, it does not mean they’re going to get a notification. Now I would have to take them out and put them back in. And I didn’t do that.

But anybody moving forward, I added so something to think about ’cause there’s so much you could … I mean, we could sit here and spent a whole hour talking about Twitter lists, you know, cause there’s so many cool things you can do with that.

Warwick Brown: Honestly.

Madalyn Sklar: But I don’t wanna keep you, I know that you want to talk about it or the things, so … I just love Twitter less. It’s just something I’m very passionate about.

Warwick Brown: Yeah, me too. The only thing I would say is err on the side of caution because I did go a bit crazy. And I have like 50 lists, and some people I have like two people on it, you know? And I kind of like cleaning them up seems really overwhelming. It’s like going through that bottom drawer in the kitchen that you don’t even want to know what’s in it. You know? It’s a bit like that. I do need to tidy up some of them, but I’m absolutely, they’re so powerful. Uh, and then …

Madalyn Sklar: And let me ask you this. You know, on the, on mobile, you know, they added that new feature where when you’re on the home screen, if you swipe to the left you can, you can just keep swiping to see like your top five lists, which I love. That is a cool new feature. Have you been using that feature?

Warwick Brown: Uh, I have. Yeah. Uh, I love it.

Madalyn Sklar: And what do you think?

Warwick Brown: This, is this what I’m saying? Like I think Twitter’s just doing this, like you said, these little incremental little bits to the mobile experience, to the desktop experience. Yeah. And I keep, I don’t know about you. I keep, I keep jumping between the old layout of the profile and the new layout of the profile. It’s confusing the a bit. I’m not sure why.

I don’t know if they’re beta testing it, but even just the new look at the profile layout, how it’s done. It looks really, really great and easy to find things and looks better as well.

So, um, yeah, no, I really liked that. I liked the features to swipe it and to … because it does give you the, the better, you know, the, the, the top posts and things like that. Um, there’s really not much I don’t like about, but I got to say. It’s so good.

And what I’ve really been focused on is the conversations. So even like, because everything’s so threaded now, and it’s so easy just to keep the trail of a conversation. So for me, I’m seeking out people that are talking about the topics that I’m interested in, and you’ll find I don’t tweet as much as I used to. I respond, I reply.

So I tend to do more replies, and I am doing sort of native original tweets these days. And I kind of enjoyed that more at the moment. I find there’s less pressure for me to find content and create or curate content. I’m just looking for stuff that people want to talk about ’cause if they’re tweeting, they want to talk about it.

And if they’re tweeting, then hopefully they’re active users on Twitter, which means I will be up building a connection with somebody that’s, you know, gonna be on Twitter. Um, cause you know, you don’t want to be, I mean somebody tweets once in six months, you know, there’s not much value to you. And you’re, you’re not adding much value to them. They’re not adding much value to you.

So yeah, I tend to do that now. I really like it. I love that whole threaded view. And it’s a bit like, yeah, it’s just like having a nice good old chat that goes over however long the tweets last.

Madalyn Sklar: Yeah. I really enjoy those.

Warwick Brown: I had somebody reply to something … Somebody replied to something from May this year. I couldn’t believe it. I’m like, you know, people said Twitter, you know, a tweet had a lifespan of like 30 seconds on 90 seconds or something, you know. Here I have people commenting on tweets from May.

So I think that just shows how some of these things, you know, … people are using search and are finding and discovering some of your older content and engaging with it. And Twitter’s helping them find that as well.

Madalyn Sklar: I think that’s so smart. And you know, I’ve been really getting into threaded tweets more recently. Now that I have all these Twitter tip articles I’m putting out, I started a new strategy where instead of just, you know, “let me tweet that,” you know, “I got a new article. Let me tweet it out.”

When I do that initial tweet for a new weekly article, I start it as a threaded tweet, so, I’ll at least have two tweets. You know, you do one, you hit the plus sign and add that second because now it started a thread that I will go back to over the next few days and keep adding to it so someone can start beginning and work their way down.

What I do is I pin that … So if you go to my – at any time – go to my Twitter. Doesn’t matter if it’s now or you’re listening in the future. Uh, you go to my Twitter profile, whatever the pinned tweet is every week I put in whatever the newest article is. And I always start it as a threaded tweet.

So if you’d go in there, that’ll be the main tweet, and below it will be a second tweet. And then I, and then what I can do is days later and then I can go back … The beauty of this, Warwick, I could go back months from now and go back. I’ve been keeping … I use Trello for organizing stuff like this.

So I, I put in the link to … that starts the thread, the URL. So I could go back later, and I’m going to just keep making it an ongoing thing where I’ll just go back months from now and add another. And sometimes I’ve done that on the #TwitterSmarter chat where if we’re like maybe the icebreaker, like recently on the icebreaker it was like, “What do you think of the new look, the new desktop layout?”

And I had written an article about it, but it already was several weeks back. So I used the opportunity to go back to the threaded tweet and add to the end of it with that plus side. And now if somebody goes and looks at it, they can see above the whole threaded conversation I had with it originally. And it just keeps that perpetual, which I think is a really neat strategy

Warwick Brown: That is like brilliant. I mean I didn’t even know you could do that. I hadn’t kind of thought about it in that way. I just thought about it as participating in the thread and just being able to see what had gone on.

But actually that makes so much sense. And I can see like if you’re like … Quite often I’ll try have a topic for the week, you know. Like, it might be OK… Well, maybe effective meetings might be my topic for the week. I’ll post different types of things about that. But then I could easily just add that whole thing to one thread and in one go people could kind of see that, that beginning and end of a kind of a dialogue.

Madalyn Sklar: Right.

Warwick Brown: That’s brilliant. I’m totally doing that.

Madalyn Sklar: And, I’ve seen some people do it really well, like Matt Nevarra who’s really gotten known as this top social media guy who, like, test things and knows all about all the new features that are coming with all social media, especially Twitter.

And I noticed the other day he did a thread that looked really interesting. I’ll have to go find it and put it in the show notes because it’s like, you know, the first tweet with, like, big and bold, you know, thread, you know, something about the thread and then numbering them so that it makes it very easy to go from tweet to tweet to tweet. And you know, the order and, uh, it makes it very easy to understand what you’re doing.

Warwick Brown: Oh. That’s a good idea because then you can kind of add a bit more formatting, and it’s a bit like a story, isn’t it? It’s almost like a,

Madalyn Sklar: Exactly. Yeah. You feel like you’re reading a story. I mean, the beauty is is that, you know, with any tweet, anytime you originate a tweet, whether it’s mobile or desktop, you have that ability before you hit send to hit the little plus sign at the bottom and do another tweet on top of it that will go right below it.

And you could just start with two. But know that you could always go back to either one and add more at any … So you know, a lot of people complain about, “Oh it would be nice to have an edit button.” And I would love to have an edit button button just as much as the next person.

This is, in a way, a way to kind of have an edit button because now I could go back and do more with this tweet that I couldn’t do before. That’s powerful.

Warwick Brown: That is so good. I love that idea. Wow. That’s something new I’ve learned or a couple of things I’ve learnt. I’ve met, it’d been making some notes, but that’s the, that’s my light bulb. That’s my aha moment.

Madalyn Sklar: Yay!. I hope that is for everyone that’s listening to this. Um, I, you know, I, my thing is I experiment. I try things and see what works and what doesn’t. And I look to see what are other people doing. When I see people doing interesting things, I’m like, “How can I do that and make it work for me?” And thread, threaded tweets is something that really never became a big thing.

You see people do it but not all the time. And it seems like the people that do it do it regularly, and I try to do them regularly. I don’t do them all the time, but I do, you know, I try to keep up with it.

It’s just a way for me to just be able to continue a conversation or continue that, that content I put out without having to start over. And if, you know, if do the threaded tweet, I mean, I can keep adding to it. Whereas, prior to this threaded tweet feature, I would just have to, every time I want to talk about my latest article, I have to start over.

Warwick Brown: New tweet.

Madalyn Sklar: Just a new tweet, new tweet. And then you starting a zero. Nobody’s liked or retweeted it yet, you know, so it’s kind of a way to kind of have that conversation be be perpetuated.

Warwick Brown: But you, you, you also like people to be able to take action, you know, so, yeah. That’s, so that’s a great way to be able to outline some steps people can do. It’s not like, OK, well now you’ve got to go read this article. You gotta spend 10 minutes going through it.

You can use threaded tweets, I would imagine, to be able to help people just take some action without leaving Twitter. And uh, you know, I think like all social platforms, they don’t, they prefer you stay on the platform than off it.

Madalyn Sklar: Exactly.

Warwick Brown: So if you can, um, use threaded – my mind’s already racing. I’m like … exploding.

Madalyn Sklar: Well, I have an article open the show notes about, you know, using Twitter threads. And the very first one, it was a brand new thing. I made a little how-to video on YouTube. I’ll put that in the show notes as well.

Um, I, I created my first thread, and I made it where I’m explaining what threaded tweets … And I showed different ways. So like when you started this … It’s very meta. It’s a Twitter thread about Twitter threads. And it’s so cool, and it just kind of walks you through all the things.

And the beauty is, because I did that, I can go back now, this was like two years ago, I could go back now, and, and, and that’s … I actually did do that recently on the #TwitterSmarter chat ’cause we did have an icebreaker question that was about threaded tweets.

I kind of did that on purpose because I was like, “Ooh, I want to be able to go back to that old tweet that shows you how to do it and just add to it and give my two cents and say ‘look above to read the whole thread.’” Nobody cares it’s from two years ago. It’s still just as relevant. So, it’s a really interesting concept. Once you wrap your brain around it, it’s like, wow, it’s a lot you could do with that.

Warwick Brown: And get creative with it. ‘Cause I, I kind of wanted that to be what Twitter Moments was, but I’ve never really taken to Twitter Moments. So they look good on the mobile. They don’t look good on the desktop. They kind of don’t. They don’t seem to have a real shelf life. It’s just a collection of tweets. And now that there’s bookmarks so you can bookmark your favorite tweets now, that kind of was what I was using Moments for, but I don’t know what we’re, what moments [inaudible]

Madalyn Sklar: Well it kind of solves that problem because, ’cause moments was a really cool, you know, feature they have. But then also with the new desktop, they’ve taken away our ability to easily add … Like you could just be on a single tweet and say, I want to add this to my Twitter Moment. They stopped that.

So now if you want to add a tweet to a Moment, you have to really jump through a lot of hoops, and it makes it much more difficult. So it’s interesting how they kind of take a few things away.

Just like, you know, it was all about video replies, and now if you want to do a video reply, they took the ability out on the mobile camera to do it while you’re in the tweet. You’d have to step out of the Twitter app, take video or even a photo or a video, and then go back and add it. It’s like that kind of defeats the whole purpose.

Warwick Brown: That’s annoying. I don’t, I don’t normally do them on my phone ’cause I need to. Yeah, but we were talking about being perfectionistic.

Madalyn Sklar: Yeah it was. I love your Twitter videos, but you’re doing like nice professional videos. And you’re very, very good at it. And every time I’ve seen any of your video tweets, I love that you start with a really nice, well done video, and you do happen to tweet it, which a lot of people don’t think to do.

They just do it from their phone, but they don’t think to just make something nice. And I, I learn a lot from you when you do that because you’re sharing really great valuable information, and you’re putting it all together in a tweet. And people think, “Oh I can’t say much in a tweet.” Well, you can if it’s a video.

Warwick Brown: Yeah. And then you’ve got, you know, so many different ways you can use a video and a, you know, Twitter with their, um, you know, the Twitter cards and all that sort of stuff makes it really easy to promote them and use them.

So yeah, I’ve got to get back to that. I haven’t done it in ages. Yeah. Consistency is the main thing. But yeah, I think, um, I think Twitter is, uh, I’m just really enjoying the direction of it, and I just don’t feel like I need to spend my whole life there now, which I did before.

I was like constantly on it in case I missed something. Now I feel like if I check in once a day, I’m good. I’ve got my lists. I’ve got my searches. The feed and the algorithm are working. It’s not just chronological anymore. Um, and, you know, I’m really finding that having conversations is just the place for me at the moment to, to be with it when it comes to Twitter.

Madalyn Sklar: That’s great. Well this is great information you’re sharing. Um, and it really sparked a fun conversation with the two of us in talking about a variety of things.

What are some tools or apps that you use that help you use Twitter better? You mentioned TweetDeck, and I’m a fan of TweetDeck. I love that TweetDeck is owned by Twitter. So you know, you know, it’s good. It used to not be very good, but once Twitter took it over it became a lot better.

Warwick Brown: Yeah. Um, so I, I do like to Twitonomy. Uh, I find that that’s … It’s a bit ugly, uh, I gotta say. The interface could do with some work. But in terms of the information you get, basically it’ll analyze your profile. It tells you all about the tweets, your followers. You can follow lists.

If you want to do any research on what, uh, tweets are successful, what users are successful, what your followers are doing. So how many tweets they’ve tweeted, how long they’ve been on Twitter, uh, when they last tweeted.

You see, you know, it’s, it’s sort of like just all in one spot, and you’ve got lots of insights and analysis into top tweets and can get ideas about what content works on Twitter. So I do like that. I don’t go there all the time, but I think it’s any of those Twitter analytic tools I think is even better than Twitter’s to be honest.

Madalyn Sklar: It is really good. I’ve been on there and I’ve used it and you’re right, it’s not the most prettiest to look at. Interface is not great, but, but it’s good quality information that can be really helpful in your Twitter marketing. So I’m glad you brought that up. I don’t think anybody’s ever really mentioned that tool on this podcast, so I’ll make sure the links in the show notes. Any other tools?

Warwick Brown: I do believe in social media automation. Uh, I know Twitter had bot scheduling, so you don’t need to go … There’s plenty of free tools, but Twitter does let you schedule tweets. Bit clunky. But, um, I use Smarterqueue? But I have been a fan of Hootsuite and Buffer in the past. And you know, sometimes there’s this whole, like, “Automation is, you know, ruining social media.”

Madalyn Sklar: Oh yeah.

Warwick Brown: But you know, for me it’s like, well, there’s good content. I want to get it in front of an audience. It’s not that your’ e absent. Like, I mean, you are, I don’t even know how you do it because, like, you were all over it. When you reply to people’s tweets, you like retweets, you send out your own content and you can’t just do that by automation. Like engagement …

Madalyn Sklar: Right. Absolutely.

Warwick Brown: You can’t automate.

Madalyn Sklar: No.

Warwick Brown: So, I love having … OK, I’ve got some placeholders. I’ve got like maybe 10 tweets that I know are going to go out in the week, which means I’m not absent. I’m giving my followers some good content that’s useful to them, and then I get on there and I spend my time engaging instead of, you know, trying to send out content.

So, it’s all about that attitude. I think if you come from that place of you want to engage, then get an automation tool. If you want to do automation just because you want followers and you’re never going to go on Twitter, then don’t even bother being on Twitter. You know what I mean?

Madalyn Sklar: ‘Cause it doesn’t work. It just doesn’t work. It’s not a one-way street. It’s a two-way street, and you’re doing it exactly the way I do it in the way I preach for others to do it where you got really good content, schedule it out.

And and, you know, spread it out so that it covers, you know, different times zones, different times a day where where people will see it. And focus on being there, you know, to talk to people and to do that engagement. Never automate engagement.

I’m so glad you brought that up ’cause that is a great tip. Everybody listening this not doing that is something you definitely want to be doing, and those are great tools you mentioned for that. I use them all.

I use like all the scheduling tools. Like I use Buffer for something in one thing in particular. I use Hootsuite for something. I use Agorapulse and Social Jukebox. Like I use a bunch of them, but I use them for very specific things instead of one in all.

And some people just like for one and all, which is fine. But I, since I’m old school, I’m total O.G. Twitter, I, you know, I love Hootsuite. When that first came out it was the very first scheduling tool, and I still like using it.

I used it for a big part of the #TwitterSmarter chat, but then I like Buffer when I’m once-a-day reading articles going through Feedly or any RSS feeds. If I see really interesting articles that I think my community will enjoy, it goes right into my Buffer queue. So I have very specific ways I do it, and it works.

And the bottom line is it works for me and how I want to do it. So that’s cool that you’ve got some interesting tools that help you market better.

Warwick Brown: And Hootsuite. That’s what I use for Twitter … any tweet, twit Twitter chats because you can set up the draft; you can add the picture; and then literally as soon as the question comes out you hit send. And then you can just answer people’s questions when you’re in the chat without having to type up your answer. It’s really good for that.

And I think that … Oh and Rite … I mean I do use RiteTag. RiteTag is really … ’cause images, you know, that help get visibility to tweets.

Madalyn Sklar: Sure.

Warwick Brown: And uh, instead of retweeting somebody. So it’s a Chrome extension I think, uh, and a Firefox extension. And in Chrome, when you open the tweet, um, dialogue box, there’s a little enhance pink button. And then when you type a tweet, you click the pink button, and then you preset up all your templates.

Oh, I have one that’s got a applause, and it’s highlighted in yellow and a clap and my name. And I just quote their tweets, click the button, and it gives me an image and then I attach it to the tweets.

So it’s not just a retweet. I add their picture, um, you know, a quote card, and um, people really, really like the extra content, extra, you know, step. And it doesn’t literally take two seconds. So if you really wanted to crunch out some quote card type images, that’s an amazing tool either directly within your tweet or you can go to their, uh, their website and just batch a whole ton of these quote cards for the week. Super quick.

Madalyn Sklar: Are you on one of their paid plans for that or is it on the free plan?

Warwick Brown: No, it’s paid. It’s like nine bucks a month.

Madalyn Sklar: Oh, That’s not bad at all.

Warwick Brown: But honestly, and also it doesn’t … It includes the batching for YouTubes or a whole bunch of batching. So I can literally batch and schedule every YouTube video on my channel in about 90 seconds, send it over to Buffer and it’s done. And it has all the tags and does the emojis and a screen grab of the, um, the video as the picture and sends a link. So that’s really good for some batching stuff as well. So I think for nine, nine, it saves me way more time.

Madalyn Sklar: Exactly. That’s how I am. It’s like if it’s going to save me a whole lot of time, like, it’s worth the fee because … And the big picture is not really that pricey. So RiteTag is R-i-t-e-Tag, RiteTag.com. I’ve always been a fan of theirs, and they’ve come on the Twitter chat a few times just to support. And they’ve done some of those, uh, tweet images to me, and I’m going to, like, spend a little more time looking into that because that’s a, a great … the way you’re describing Warwick, is a really great idea. For sure.

Warwick Brown: Yeah. And I’ve got about 10 different templates so I can choose a different color, a different background, a different highlight, different icons depending on what I’ve set up. And then my very last tool, which I cannot live without, is missing letter, which is am M-i-double s-i-n-g-l-e-t-t-r. It’s missing the “E.”

And what that does is whenever you post a blog post, it will automatically, you know, it monitors your feed, then it scans all of the article and it creates a social media campaign across Twitter, LinkedIn, um, Instagram, Facebook, whatever. And um, create, it’ll create 365 days of content based out of your one blog post.

And you can pick … You can either let it do its automation algorithms selection of the quotes, or you can just preselect them from a bunch that it finds, and then you send them to the queue.

And that is brilliant ’cause that’s what I always struggled with was like, “OK, I’ve written one piece of content, I send out one tweet.” And then a whole year goes by, and I never mentioned it again.

And I put a lot of time and effort into those. So, um, that’s a really simple way you can do a a year-long social media campaign in about five minutes flat with pictures. It automatically does quote bubbles.

Madalyn Sklar: I’ve looked at that. It’s very cool. And you, when you’re able to take a peek at the ones, cause you could just set it to just automate it and they just go, but you can go take a look and you can edit them too, right?

Warwick Brown: Yeah. Yeah.

Madalyn Sklar: So if you want to make some adjustments …

Warwick Brown: Yeah, upload new images, whatever you need to do. So again, costs you money, but you think about the time it takes you to promote your blog content and just to even set up native tweets. If you were to set up manually 20 tweets – copying and pasting, that would take you a couple of hours, you know, an hour or two.

Madalyn Sklar: Absolutely.

Warwick Brown: And then create the images as well. That’s brilliant. So …

Madalyn Sklar: I think Missinglettr is using like some AI and all that ’cause I’ve seen some other tools that do it as well. And I, I have done their free trials to try it out. It’s very interesting. And, and all these tools we’re talking about have free trials.

So I definitely recommend everybody listening. If you’re not using any of these tools that were wakes missioning try them out. Do the free trial. You have nothing to lose. You may find that one of these tools is a great lifesaver for you and helps you tremendously. So I’m so glad you mentioned that Warwick, because these are really great tools you’re talking about.

Warwick Brown: Yeah, there are so many, but you got … yeah … None of them will be perfect either. So you know, when you’re looking at some of these tools, there will be gaps. You’ll never find nirvana.

And, you know, that’s why I bounced around to so many of them. But other than that, I made peace with the ones that I’m happy with now. And um, you know, there’s not … But overall their great value, a lot of them are free. And, uh, what actually really improve your experience and you know, save you some time, as well.

Madalyn Sklar: That’s awesome. This has been really great. Where like you shared a lot of great information that I know is helping a lot of people that are listening. If anybody wants to reach out to you, how can they reach you on Twitter and, and your website?

Warwick Brown: So my website is, uh, AccountManager.tips. Uh, so you can find me there. You can find me at WarwickABrown on Twitter and everywhere. And also jus:, #AMTips. I’ll find ya.

Madalyn Sklar: That’s awesome. Thank you so much for being on the podcast today, Warwick. This has been really great.

Warwick Brown: Thank you so much. I had a great time.