Want to grow your twitter account?

Be awesome.

That’s the simplest, most honest advice I can give you on Twitter.

Don’t buy followers. Don’t try to game the system. Don’t quit.

Just write awesome content.

How do you do that?

You analyze your tweets.

The free Twitter analytics tell you an awful lot about what works and what doesn’t.

Login and then click “Timeline activity” at the top. Then choose “best” to sort out which are your best tweets.

Here are the five tweets that worked best for me in the last month.

Think your past disqualifies you from God’s future? Moses the murderer, David the adulterer & Paul the persecutor would disagree. 434 retweets.

Fearing change doesn’t prevent it from happening, it just prevents you from enjoying it. 353 retweets

Want more fun in your day? Each time you see someone say “smh” online, instead of “shaking my head,” read it as “so many hamsters.” 332 retweets.

Leaving your phone at home on purpose when you hang out with someone is the new way to show them you care about them. 317 retweets

I’m pretty sure that what the fox would say today is, “Please stop.” 285 retweets

A lot of people might care about how many favorites each tweet got. I don’t. I feel like more people discover you via a retweet versus a favorite. I’ve never personally gone through someone’s favorite list to find new people to follow. I am sure some people do but I promise more people see the retweets as a way to find new followers.

Looking at those five tweets a few things start to become clear for me.

1. Time matters.
My number one tweet was about God. When did I send it? Sunday morning. It’s easy to see that sending out a tweet about God when folks are at church is an example of being timely. I need to keep that in mind for Sunday. The takeaway is, “What other subjects might be strong during other times of the week?” I don’t think that tweet would have done as well on a Friday for instance.

2. Type of content.
It’s interesting to me that three of my top five tweets weren’t humorous. I used to think that the only tweets that would do well are the funny ones. The data would argue otherwise. The secret is making sure I mix up the content. Not all serious, not all funny, but rather a potpourri of both.

3. Relevance.
Both the SMH and fox tweets had elements of relevance. For the SMH tweet, people on twitter are constantly using that idea. Whenever I can, I try to use the vocabulary of the medium in the content I create. The fox song is also massive right now and has been a viral success. Referencing relevant things is like referring to a private joke everyone gets.

4. Length.
I used to think that less is more was the key to Twitter. But in the last 6 months I’ve seen how little the lengths of my tweets matters.

Those are the four things I learned from a recent study of my tweets.

But guess what? Your tweets might reveal something different. That’s the key when it comes to social media advice. Personalize it and always know who the source of the advice is. These ideas worked for me, but they might not work for you. The point isn’t to write short tweets or always have some funny ones. The point is that if you want to be deliberate about twitter, it’s always good to analyze the way your individual approach is or isn’t working.

Question:
What’s been your most retweeted tweet of all time?