How to Make Twitter Work For You

New landscape

Social media is getting competitive these days, different platforms are tweaking their algorithms to fine-tune their ability to better monetise from their users. The same goes for Medium. You might have been able to make a living off Medium several months before, but now, you would be happy if you could make enough to put some bacon on the table. Stats are at an all-time low, and you wonder how you are going to make up that lost income.

Why Medium?

The situation might have changed but it is not dire. It has only forced open a need for more innovation. These days it is a struggle for any blogger to survive from a single platform, to live decently, they must venture beyond. Many bloggers had chosen to shut down their personal blogs and migrate onto Medium or Substack so that they can save on infrastructure and hosting costs. Most of them chose Medium over Substack because Medium has a large organic base of ready followers that is much easier to tap on and build up as compared to Substack.

Why Medium alone is insufficient?

Medium has seen drastic changes in recent years. Not only did their logo changed, but their algorithm has also changed. Bloggers who had jump ship over are seeing their newfound platform sinking too. How now? Most of them were demoralised by the recent changes happening on Medium, yet none of them can do anything to reverse it, they are on the verge of giving up.

Seasoned bloggers have seen the early warnings and have already begun building their networks across different social platforms. Top names like Tim Dennings, Tom Kuegler and JJ Pryor, do not only have their presence here, they have expanded their presence across other networks too.

How does an average bloke survive?

To survive this new landscape, new bloggers must spread their effort wide and make money not only from a single platform. To be an established player in this gig economy, it is no longer enough to do well just on one platform but do well across a multitude of platforms while constantly on the lookout for new emerging platforms to colonise.

Where to start?

With so many platforms already in existence, where does a novice blogger start? In this article, we will assume you have established your presence on Medium and you have been writing on a consistent basis with sufficient quality content to monetise. If you have not, then your task is to be consistent with what you do first.

Once you have build up your reservoir of content, the next thing is to find ways to monetise. Putting your quality articles behind a Medium paywall can only earn you so much, once you reach the glass ceiling, your earnings will stagnate or worst come back down. It will more likely fluctuate quite drastically and in the long run, it will gradually decline, because such earnings require consistent hard work from you to maintain, and you know there is only so much you can write.

Growing passive income

Medium has initiated a referral program where you get half of the subscription for every new subscriber you bring onboard. It may not seem to be much but it will add up and the best thing about this earning is, once you get it you don’t have to spend any further effort to maintain it. It is what investors would call a passive income. Many writers have gotten their first few referrals despite not spending too much effort, me included. It has come to show that this is indeed a viable way to get passive income. The only thing is we need a strategy to be more targeted at getting this group of people to read and then subsequently sign up with Medium. Not only do you get a referral, you also gained an internal follower that adds to the growth of your loyal group of readers and further increases your internal reading revenue after their conversion.

In order to grow this passive income, your target audience cannot be restricted to Mediumites, you must have an active strategy to extend your articles into uncharted waters and hopefully fish yourself a subscriber or two every now and then. Over a longer period, this passive income can add up.

Some people have asked how long would Medium run this referral program? If it is only here for a few months, then, may be no point to pursue this trajectory as it takes a lot of effort to build up a sizable income from this.

Understanding why Medium is pushing this and how long the referral program might run.

Medium is a VC-backed company and its primary financial objective is to increase its revenues to a level that it can go for IPO some years later. Medium only has around 725,000 paid subscribers as of Mar 2021 as compared to roughly 400,000 in 2019. This had fallen short of their target of 1 million subscribers by end of 2020.

Medium is running out of time and funds, it had cut back on funding to publication and layoffs many of its editorial staff. It had trimmed its own advertisement budget. It is now razor focus on catching up with subscriber numbers. It has given out 4x bonuses to top writers between Apr-Jul to boost up their content and, it has run expensive challenges to beef up the content quality, it had subsequently rolled out referral programs to incentivise the entire army of Medium writers to work jointly toward bringing in new subscribers.

Medium’s Series C investors are likely looking forward to an IPO some years down the road (my guess is before 2024 since their round 3 was in 2016). For that to happen, Medium probably need to show that it is a $100 million revenue a year company by then. After pivoting away from advertisement, its business strategy now solely rely on its $50/yr subscription (or $5/mth). What this means is Medium probably (my guess) has an internal target to reach 2 million paid subscribers by 2023. But looking at the past trend, Medium took 2 years to grow from 400k to 725k paid subscribers. What is the likelihood to reach 2 million by 2023 to go IPO by 2024? With this, it seems to me this referral program will run for longer than you might expect.

Okay, the referral will last a while, but where to find convertible traffic?

The largest platform is of course Facebook with over 2 billion active users every month. This is certainly a target that one cannot neglect. The second group worth exploring is Twitter. We will cover Facebook in another article, so in today’s article, we will talk about Twitter.

What is Twitter?

Twitter was co-founded by Medium CEO, Ev Williams back in 2006. Twitter is a micro-blogging site and its primary purpose is to connect people and allow people to share their thoughts with a big audience. At the time, tweets were limited to 140-character. Its focus was brevity and provide little space for clarity and quality.

Williams left Twitter in 2011 and started Medium, with the goal of creating higher-quality content than what was available on Twitter. Twitter eventually doubled its character limit to 280 in 2017 although its users still prefer to send tweets at less than 140 characters.

How is Twitter important?

Medium’s post is a longer form of Tweets and there is tight integration between the two platforms, making sharing of content seamless. Twitter users are more akin to Medium users, they are more text and words oriented, unlike other platforms that are more videos and image-oriented. Hence the chances of them being converted would be higher than others.

Twitter had more than 139 million daily active users (DAU) as of 2019 and this rose to 206 million DAU as of Jul 2021. Medium pales in comparison, and there is a lot of room for Mediumites to tap into the Twitter user base to fish for their potential readers.

How to get started on Twitter?

First of all, if you are serious about making writing a viable source of income and you haven’t already had a Twitter account, you have to set up one. When writing your article on Medium, always have a view from twitter’s audience angle. Because, the way tweets are shared, your title, image and subtitles play a key role in attracting Twitter readers to click on your article links. It is crucial you begin to realise this and pay full attention to the way you choose your image and how you craft your title and subtitles.

Why you shouldn’t share your articles using your own Twitter account.

When you share your own articles over at Twitter through your own account, readers on Twitter tend to take that as self-promotion and the response is usually less desirable as compared to when a publication is sharing your articles and you are merely retweeting it or commenting on it. The perception for the latter is far more subtle.

That said, the reverse is also true, when a publication has shared your articles and links over at Twitter, and the writer himself is not there to respond and interact with the comments its effect is will also be limited.

This is the reason why you must have a Twitter account. You may not need a strong following, but you must have an account for people to engage with over at Twitter.

So, you MUST get a Twitter account and have it linked to your Medium account.

Other benefits

Helping you get external traffic on Medium is only a fraction of the reason why you need to be active beyond Medium. When you make money off a platform, you are relying on the platform for a living and if you only depend on one, you are at the mercy of that platform, if anything change that is not in your favour you will be caught and it may cost you your livelihood.

Always spread your eggs around. Furthermore, Twitter has acquired Revue earlier this year and had made their advance into the newsletter business. Even though their capability is not comparable to Substack and Medium as yet, but never underestimate what might come. If Revue takes off, you need to be there to ride the first wave.

Always have your lifejacket with you. When the situation comes, you will have the option to jump ship.

This article was originally published on Medium by Coffee Times

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