30-Day Twitter Challenge: The Best Guide on How To Make Short Content

I doubled my Twitter interactions in less than 30 days, and you can do it too.

You can write articles and create content for years without any success. But this doesn’t mean you are not good at it. You just need to learn to share your work.

How do you expect people to find your content if you keep it to yourself?

Not promoting content is one of the worst errors of new content creators. And I did it for a long time before understanding I was losing many opportunities.

I have seen some of my fellow writers gaining traction faster than me and getting job offers. But I ignored the reason behind their success. Until, one day, I made a Twitter account and found them all there, sharing their work with a large audience.

So I decided to try out a few platforms that could fit my promotional intentions. And a few months ago, I took my first 30-Day Twitter Challenge.

The Benefits of a 30-Day Twitter Challenge

Twitter is one of the best platforms to build connections and interact with your audience.

Thanks to its real-time experience, and short-form content, Twitter can simulate a real-life conversation with anyone. And the best thing is that people can interact from all over the world. They don’t have to gather in person and move from their comfort zone.

Using Twitter as your principal promotional platform can bring you many benefits. But if you are a content creator, you care about four of them:

1 — It is an idea generator.

Growing an audience on Twitter doesn’t only mean gathering followers. It is much more than that.

Publishing posts that highlight your expertise and credibility will be your first goal. But you also need to follow other creators to build professional relationships, or you will never test your content.

Relationships with other content creators bring you great benefits because they force a comparison between your work and theirs. And this comparison could bring your fresh ideas to discuss.

So using Twitter every day exposes you to many ideas in short time lapses. And this constant exposure tickles your creativity and improves your content daily.

2 — It shows you successful content.

As soon as you start growing and your tweets get more views, you will also have more people commenting on them and sharing their opinions. And you can use those comments to understand if a topic gets more shares or is ignored by your audience.

So if you want to test your content, you can follow a simple pattern:

• Share your core idea on Twitter.
• See how the community responds.
• With positive feedback, create content.
• With negative or missing feedback, search for other ideas.

3 — It helps you build loyalty.

Social networks are the perfect tool for building a close relationship with your audience and converting them from casual consumers to fans. So use them to interact with the community and increase their loyalty to your brand by:

• Clarifying their doubts.
• Answering other curiosities.
• Sharing your content creation patterns and sources.

And the more you interact, the closer they will get.

4 — It gives you new opportunities.

You never know where the next offer will come from or who your next customer will be. So keep following people, interacting with them, and sharing your work.

Someday, someone will engage and make you an offer. And building an audience on Twitter will be the best choice of your life.

Also, nowadays, every public figure is on Twitter. And if anybody finds your work over the Internet and wants to contact with, they will probably search you on Twitter first. So make sure to be there.

How to Prepare for a 30-Day Twitter Challenge

Abraham Lincoln has one of my favorite quotes about preparation:

Give me six hours to chop down a tree, and I will spend the first four sharpening the ax.

Abraham Lincoln

And starting a 30-day Twitter challenge without preparing yourself first would be like chopping down a tree with a rounded hatchet.

So how do you prepare at best for this kind of challenge?

1 — Create a schedule.

As for any challenge, creating a schedule is the first preparatory step to understanding how much you want to commit and how much content you should make every day.

Twitter requires constant activity on your profile to keep it relevant. So your schedule should include the publication of at least two posts daily, besides answering and commenting on other posts.

However, you can decide to create content for a week in only one day. And Twitter can help you by offering an efficient scheduling system for your posts. Or you can even use external tools like Buffer.

As for interacting with others, scheduling doesn’t work. You cannot answer a question three days later and still expect a response. So you need to access the platform every day for at least half an hour and interact with people in real-time.

2 — Pick hashtags and weekly formats.

Your schedule helps you organize the minimum number of posts and interactions to create daily. But if you want to grow an audience on Twitter, you need to get discovered, and you need to make your content simple to categorize.

• You can enhance discoverability by using trending or well-known hashtags. For example, using #MondayMotivation gave my posts more interactions and visibility.
• You can grow an audience by using weekly formats. Usually, when people visit your profile, they will try to understand if you are worth following. And using fixed templates can help them recognize which are your trending topics and if they should follow you or not. So make sure to write about recognizable niches.

Twitter also allows you to invent hashtags to personalize your work. But before creating one, check how much you know about the topic.

If you want to create your weekly format and hashtag, you cannot run out of things to say. So you either pick a generic topic with many nuances or a narrow one you know very well.

3 — Build a content buffer.

Emergencies can happen on a 30-day Twitter challenge. And the frequency is even higher if you have never used such a platform before. So how can you solve them without failing your challenge?

Do not worry: build a content buffer.

The easiest way to neutralize unexpected events and lack of inspiration is to build a content buffer with a few posts for each of your formats. So if a bad day occurs and you miss the time to create your tweets, you can always use this tool to remain consistent.

Also, since you already chose the formats, make sure to have at least a one-week coverage for any topic. So every time you use a part of your content buffer, refill it as soon as possible.

4 — Construct a catchy profile.

There is a big difference between amateurs and professionals on Twitter: their profile pages.

Amateurs do not care about their profile. They might write a few things in their biography or add a profile photo, but they might also not.

But if you want to build an audience with your 30-day Twitter challenge, you need to construct a catchy profile.

• Pick a professional profile picture. Better if it is not a selfie.
• Use a cover picture that resembles your brand or your mission. For example, you can use a logo or an image that shows your values.
• Write a short biography to explain who you are and what you are doing for others. Focus on the latter.
• Set a link towards your webpage, blog, or anything you are trying to promote.
• Fix your most successful tweets or any post that gives the most value to your audience.

Goal Ideas for your 30-Day Twitter Challenge

If you are starting from scratch without a Twitter audience, focus on consistent goals instead of results. You don’t have any previous data to compare with your results. So you cannot make any other distinctions between success and failure.

Here are a few goals you could pick for your first time:

• Write 2–3 posts per day.
• Interact with at least three different people daily.
• Find three new people with similar audiences to follow every day.
• Publish at least two posts with images weekly (image posts have more traction on Twitter).
• Create a least one weekly format.
• Use at least one hashtag each day.
• Make at least one thread a week.

On the contrary, if you are repeating the 30-day Twitter challenge, you can improve your goals:

• Increase your followers by 50/100 or more in a month.
• Increase the monthly engagement by 10%, for example.
• Create from one to three more posts daily.
• Expand your reach by talking about one additional topic.
• Interact with at least two more people every day.
• Write one more thread a week.

The Results of my 30-Day Twitter Challenge

A few months ago, I took my first challenge.

I set up my profile, created a content buffer, and scheduled 3 daily posts with Buffer. But since I was experimenting with many platforms, I did not have time to interact with other creators. Some days I commented on two or three posts. Some other days not even one.

I published 54 posts, and I reached 2.3K views on my first try.

After 120 days of silence, I took my second challenge, but I made a few changes:

• I published fewer posts but commented on at least two posts daily.
• I commented on at least one post with many comments, likes, and retweets.
• I published at least one image per week.
• I promoted at least two or three pieces of my work per week.

And with these few changes, my results almost doubled.

I published only 36 posts and already reached 2.8K views on my second try. But I only started it 10 days ago.

Final Thoughts

You can learn many things about Twitter with a 30-day challenge. For example, how to use it for your own business or interact with potential clients. But a month is not enough to gather consistent value.

In 30 days, you barely understand how to move on the platform and interact with people to make them answer you back. You learn which type of content to write and how to use hashtags to expand your reach. But you cannot build a following in such a short time.

So your first 30-day Twitter challenge can only help you understand if you like being around Twitter or choosing some other promotional platform, like Facebook or Quora. And if you do, keep interacting and creating value for your followers until you become a Twitter superstar.

Cover photo by bruce mars on Unsplash.