Threads are transactional.
You get attention, readers get value.
Provide more value, get more attention.
Value can be in the form of information or entertainment. In a perfect world, you provide both.
Topic Selection & Addressable Audience
Target content towards a community that will rally behind your thread, but don’t go too niche or you won’t go viral.
Keep in mind the size of your addressable audience. You can’t go viral if your addressable audience is only 50,000 people.
- Too broad and you won’t convey value through focus.
- Too narrow and you won’t achieve escape velocity.
Example: NFT community (too broad) → DeGods (sweet spot) → Mythic Skin DeGods Holders (too narrow)
Example: Top 5 Large Cap Coins to Invest In (too broad) → Chainlink Investment Thesis (sweet spot) → How to Stake Chainlink (too narrow)
Top 5 Large Cap Coins to Invest In: Addressable audience includes all crypto investors, but the topic is not niched down enough to convey specific value. “5 coins” is too much to cover in one twitter thread, which means it’s likely a watered down low quality thread. Your readers know this intuitively just from reading the headline.
Chainlink Investment Thesis: The addressable audience includes anyone who is a Chainlink holder + all crypto investors. The addressable audience is nearly as large as the example above, but the topic is niched down enough to provide a specific focus, which conveys value.
How to stake Chainlink (too narrow): The addressable audience only includes Chainlink holders. Too informational (no room for exciting opinions or interesting viewpoints). Unlikely to go viral unless timed perfectly with the release of Chainlink’s staking announcement.
Headline
The headline should grab the reader’s attention (duh). A perfect headline is short, inspires curiosity, promises value, qualifies the writer, and sets expectations. This is difficult to do, but will make or break a viral thread. The higher your top of funnel conversion rate is, the higher your viral coefficient will be.
- Short. Readers scroll through their feed fast. They are lazy. They avoid paragraphs and long text. If your headline is long, many people will scroll right past it.
- Qualifies the writer. This is particularly difficult to do in a short headline, and arguably the least important. We can do this later in the thread if we have to. If your goal is to go viral, your thread needs to reach people outside your circle. These people do not know you. Qualifying yourself builds trust. On a sidenote, part of the appeal of an expensive or recognizable pfp is that it can help to immediately qualify you to a decent amount of people (NFT community).
- Inspires curiosity. Get the reader to open the thread.
- Sets expectations. Set the reader’s expectations for what they are about to read. Are they opening a thread? Of what? About what? Is it informational or entertaining?
- “Unpopular opinions” and “hot takes” seem like a great way to draw in readers, but if they’re actually unpopular opinions, the thread will struggle to go viral as retweets will be difficult to get. You may still go viral if enough people engage by replying.
Graphics
- Adding a headline graphic helps with your branding goals long-term.
- Adding a good headline graphic creates a promise of quality. While the perfect headline grabs the reader’s attention, a high-effort, quality graphic makes them more likely to dive into the thread as it shows them that the quality of the rest of the thread is likely to be high.
- Adding graphics throughout the thread help with
Formatting
Write like this.
No paragraphs.
No more than one sentence per line.
People avoid paragraphs like the plague when they are browsing their phones.
Paragraphs mean fewer people get to the end of the thread.
Only people who get to the end of the thread share the thread.
More paragraphs = fewer shares = lower viral coefficient
If you have a really long sentence…
…use ellipses to break it up.
Ellipses leave the reader hanging mid-thought…
…and almost guarantee they’ll keep reading.
Putting an ellipses at the end of a slide will also increase the likelihood the reader continues on to the next tweet in the chain…
Threads are not books. You don’t have to cover every minuscule detail. You can discuss the details with people in the comments/replies, which helps engagement anyways.
Effort
- quality > quantity (mr beast method)
- The amount of effort put into a piece of content bleeds through to the reader. It becomes obvious within a few sentences whether its a high effort or low effort thread.
- Slight optimizations/improvements can have a HUGE difference in reach.
Getting the retweet
- Readers should want to share the content. They should feel that by retweeting it, they are passing along value to their followers/network
- Ask politely (reminder). Politely asking for a retweet in the final slide greatly increases the amount of retweets you’ll get. Many people are happy to help you out with a retweet if you provided value to them, but will forget if they are not reminded.
- Retweeting directly raises the viral coefficient.
Viral Coefficient
- The viral coefficient is simply the # of readers each reader generates or refers.
- If on average each reader retweets and brings in 2 new readers, your viral coefficient is 2.
- If on average each reader only refers 0.5 people, your content will not go viral.
- The huge difference in reach between a 0.9 and 1.1 viral coefficient is demonstrated below. Tiny optimizations for a higher viral coefficient makes a huge difference.
