Nikhil Krishnan’s Tweeting Strategy

This section was written by Nikhil Krishnan (@nikillinit), Strategic Partnerships Manager at TrialSpark, 10.2K followers.

For some context, my Twitter is generally a combination of healthcare, tech, and general observations I find interesting in my daily life.

There are a few things that make communicating ideas to an audience that I’ve found particularly useful:

• Humor. I can’t stress this enough. There’s enough dry content on the internet, truly funny people stand out. And Twitter as a medium is very flexible in the kinds of humor you can incorporate (image-based like a conversation, reactions, text-based stories, et cetera). If you can make your information more palatable with humor, people will remember it more and actually enjoy what you write.

• Concision. Keep it short when it can be short. You don’t need to add filler if it doesn’t make sense.

• Conversation. Twitter as a platform is designed for conversations. This means responding thoughtfully to other people’s tweets and also putting out interesting conversation starters and questions for people to reply to you.

• Obscurity. Commenting on the same article that everyone’s already read doesn’t add a lot for most people. Instead find more interesting and obscure reads in niche parts of the internet, older reads, or excerpts from much more dense reads than are typically shared. These are likely fresher for most people and you might find interesting nuggets your audience in particular might like.

• Authenticity. At the end of the day, if it feels like you’re marketing something, sucking up to someone, or flexing, then it probably reads like that to your audience too. The bar for authenticity today is so low—just showing you’re a regular person, you’re rough around the edges, and not trying to only show off your most polished version actually goes a long way. For example, I occasionally will post stuff about my dating life. It’s not related to business or my professional life but I think it makes it more fun to see another side of people.

It’s helpful to have a list of things you won’t Tweet, too:

• A take or analysis that’s been said a million times already and I agree with it
• Anything related to “outrage” Twitter where people are just talking past each other (most of politics Twitter)
• Anything about my life that’s super mundane (“Here’s this breakfast I ate today!”)
• Replies to someone that are just an emoji or like “nice!” If you respond to someone, actually say something about why you like what they said or appreciate it.