Supercharging growth with personal twitter accounts
This is a guest blog post written by Samantha, a web3 marketer specializing in writing and storytelling for brands. She writes Testnet, a weekly newsletter where crypto-native marketing experiments are tested live.
If you’ve worked in crypto marketing, you’ve probably blamed “the algorithm” for at least some of your marketing woes. Like pointing a finger at an indifferent god, “the algorithm” turns into a scapegoat for everything from poor-performing tweets to a dwindling follower count.
I hate to break it to you, but it’s not “the algorithm”’s fault. It’s the preferences of the audience you’re trying to target.
The algorithm is a mirror of what your audience wants. The more likes, retweets, comments, and bookmarks a post gets, the better it does. So if your brand account is clocking in at 0.01% engagement for each post you make, it’s not some all-seeing “algorithm” that is causing the poor turnout. It’s the fact that your target users simply don’t care that you’re reposting a twitter space that had a turnout of 8 people last tuesday.
But there is a solution. You know what people do like? You know what users connect with instead of blank-faced brands?
The people behind these brands.
This week, I’m diving into how to leverage your founder and core team twitter accounts to drive users to your product.
In 2024, the highest engagement accounts are founder and builder accounts
Founder and CEO accounts are often doing better numbers than the brand account for the project they founded. Some examples ranging across the industry:
Jacob Horne of Zora
Jesse Pollak of Base
People connect more easily with other people, rather than ideas, technologies, or products. It’s the same reason that ads hire famous actors to talk about a product, and that podcast ads read by the host are more enticing than a plain banner ad on a website. The person behind the product is important.
Founders and core team members can also post more freely and without constraints, which can make the content more interesting. For example, the founder and core team accounts have the freedom to post more spicy takes and personal insights than the brand account does. They can post things that would seem very out of place on a brand account, such as….
Criticisms of the space
Personal feelings and ideas
Brainstorm ideas
Sentiment check from followers
Back-and-forth conversations
Showing the human side of the brand through the founder and core team accounts significantly helps put a face and a personality to your brand that the main account can’t.
This is true in web2, also. Think of the top companies today and ones that you might resonate with. They typically have a very public founder-figure behind them. For example…
Steve Jobs of Apple
Bill Gates of Microsoft
Jeff Bezos of Amazon
Mark Zuckerberg of Meta
Elon Musk of Tesla
In short, the most well-known brands are not faceless. They all have someone behind them that gives the brand its personality. In crypto and more decentralized orgs, that can often be multiple people—you don’t need to zero in on one single person.
My personal experience building core team accounts
When I was the Content Editor at Aragon, we noticed that personal accounts were getting more engagement than brand accounts across the industry. So, we started an internal program to elevate the voices of core team members within Aragon and help bring their ideas into the spotlight.
We did this through:
Retweeting core team posts on the brand account, to amplify those voices to Aragon’s existing follower base.
Running an in-house competition to gamify the posting (we did this by sharing top tweets from team members in our All Hands).
Writing threads specifically to post on the CEO account and RT from the brand account, and scheduling them in the calendar.
These tactics helped us elevate individuals’ accounts and give them more opportunities throughout the space, such as speaking on panels and podcasts.
One of the biggest challenges team members faced was taking the time to write and post the content. On top of your job, it can be hard to set aside time to post and grow your twitter presence, especially since CT is ruthless when it comes to what gets engagement and what gets 7 views. It can be demoralizing to see a thread you worked really hard on or a meme you thought was razor-sharp get two likes (I’ve been there many times).
I learned that the best way to deal with this challenge and amplify the voices of your team is to build a strong program to support them.
In the next section, I’ll dive into some tactics I learned from that experience and things I would want to apply to a future one if doing so again:
How to build strong founder and core team accounts
Things that your marketing team — or agency! ;) — can do to support the accounts:
Build a content calendar for the founder/CEO/core team with topics to riff on. Some ideas…..
What have you shipped in the last month that you’re proud of?
Weekly high and low
Screen recording of something new in your product and why you’re particularly excited about it
A challenge you’ve faced recently
Upcoming conference/panel/podcast/event/dinner you’re attending
Problem you’re seeing in the space and how your product fixes it
More ideas: Founder account vs brand account mini guide by Ish Verduzco has other great ideas!
Create a no-judgment-zone brainstorm channel to share post ideas and provide feedback
Offer to help edit posts for both style and grammar
Create a budget for people to purchase a premium twitter subscription and have funds reimbursed
Provide easy plug-and-play formats that people can use as templates (such as pain point-solution or feature-benefit-CTA)
Offer to have social copywriting sessions to educate team members
Things that founders and team members can do on their own:
Have a place to write down ideas as soon as they come to them, such as a Notes app or Notion doc or notebook. (If you don’t write them down immediately, you WILL forget them!) Then, set aside an hour each week to refine those ideas and schedule them out.
Follow accounts that are similar to their target user so they can get to know the persona
Spend time replying to accounts that engage with their content
Bookmark posts and formats they like to come back to and test out for themselves
Build a bigger audience for your product and win some favors from the algo
Using founder and core team accounts can help build up your audience and give your brand more personality. It can also significantly increase engagement on posts, because people are more likely to engage on other peoples’ accounts than on brand ones. It’s a win-win for your brand and the people behind it, because they can grow their personal following and get more public-facing opportunities that way, kicking off a flywheel of growth.
And, of course, it will help you win some favors with the algorithm!
Author Bio: Samantha is a web3 marketer specializing in writing and storytelling for brands. She’s currently on the content team at SCRIB3, a crypto-native marketing agency. Prior to that she was the content editor at Aragon and a full-time contributor to BanklessDAO. She writes a weekly newsletter where crypto-native marketing experiments are tested live: Testnet.
great piece!
Love these ideas, thanks!