(Image by Irfan Ahmad from Pixabay)

Another week has passed since my last Twitter update. This week I did the less hashtags leg of my A/B test, to see what difference it would make. I also focused more on chatting with the community and started sharing what I'm working on.

Let's have a look.

Results week 3 - Less hashtags week

Things looked a bit less exciting this week growth-wise, but not too bad. I tweeted more, but not at the same rate of increase as I did in week 1.

Looking at the Tweets, Impressions and Profile Visits columns, it seems that if you subtract 100% from week 1's results, we can perhaps have a more realistic comparison with week 2, since before that I didn't really use Twitter at all.

Doing this bit of hand-wavy magic, I think we can better look at the figures and come to some conclusions;

I tweeted 70% more but had less impressions(60% compared to an adjusted 80%). This is probably due to me using less hashtags and my tweets being seen less outside my followers circle.
My profile visits increased a little bit, 60% compared to an adjusted 50% from last week. Perhaps this is due to me commenting on people's tweets more, making them curious to check me out too.
My mentions increased a lot - 90% from an adjusted 50%! Likely due to the same reason from above - I tweeted at people and they tweeted back, or other people tweeted replies on tweets mentioning me.
The increase in followers, however, was a lot smaller, when adjusting for the increase in the other metrics. Not sure why. Might be due to the reach being less or people being less likely to follow from comments. Or it could be that most of my growth last week was simply a fluke due to that IndieHackers thread.

Hashtags - yay or nay?

So with the experiment being done, I think I can feel comfortable stating that hashtags might work for small accounts. They can supercharge your reach and increase the probability of someone discovering you and sticking around.

I'm not sure at what point you should dial it back, I guess it depends on your audience. I do see accounts with 40K+ followers using them liberally. Perhaps it depends on where you sit on the Twitter Value Spectrum, with the Motivators using more hashtags and the Showers using less.

My personal style falls somewhere in between, so I'll ramp up hashtags usage again, but only with certain posts, like those offering motivation or small tips.

Building in public

The other thing I'll be doing more of is to share the progress of the personal stuff I'm working with my followers. This is the build-in-public mantra, mentioned by a few people in the makers and WIP community.

The idea is to share the progress you're making on a project in real-time, in order to accomplish 4 things;

Validate that it's a product that people actually want.
Grow interest in the product by having its progress frequently come up in your follower's timelines.
Encourage other makers, by showing them that you struggle too and that they're not alone. And perhaps to pressure them into putting more effort into their own stuff as well.
Encourage and motivate yourself, by receiving some(hopefully) positive feedback, to hold you accountable, and to create some drive to put in the effort when things get tough.

So I'm doing that now too. The first BIP thing I did was the revamping of an old site of mine, Remote React Jobs. I have some plans for Remote React to be executed later, but need to do some setup work first, so I'll be sharing more progress on that in the near future.

However, my main effort for the next couple of weeks will be to share landing pages for ideas I want to validate, and then sticking with those that seem to generate the most excitement and interest.

I'm tired of building things that no one knows or cares about, so hopefully combining my validation efforts with my Twitter ambitions will pay off.

And that's it for this week. Thanks for reading, and as always, let me know what you think on Twitter. Also, sign up below👇 to be the first to know when I post something new!