Most people fail to grow on X because they have the wrong mental model. They think of X as a stage, where you come up and make a speech to an audience.
The right mental model for X is a party. When you walk into a party, you don't just go to a corner and start talking into the void. You find an existing cluster of people, listen to what they're already talking about, and join the conversation.
This mental model is the basis for all my following tactics:
1. Tune your feed
Think of this as “figuring out which parties to join and which crowds you wanna hang out with”. If your feed is full of slop and clickbait, you won't be inspired to post. You'll be participating in the wrong conversations.
Before I even started posting regularly, I took a couple weeks to deliberately tune my X algorithm. Specifically, every time I saw clickbait or topics that I didn't care about, I clicked on the three dots -> “Not interested”. Every time I saw thoughtful and useful content, I engaged with it by liking, retweeting, replying, or bookmarking. Over time, the algorithm learns to push more of the high-quality content to you. My X feed is now full of inspiring and educational content about AI, new product launches, and thoughtful discussions that I actually wanna engage in.
2. Reply authentically
Do not use an AI bot to mass reply on your behalf. I repeat, do not use an AI bot to mass reply on your behalf.
Replying for replying's sake is useless. When I see replies under my posts that are clearly AI-generated and just paraphrasing what I said, I actually feel offended. It feels extremely sloppy, insincere, and lazy.
If we go back to the party analogy, replying is like poking your head into a circle of people and participating in their existing conversation. You need to say something actually interesting so that the people will pay attention and welcome you into their circle.
Let's say you're person A and trying to engage with person B - who has a much larger following - by replying under their post. When you engage meaningfully and sincerely, person B will engage back with you - through liking/replying to your reply, or following you back. This tells the algorithm “these 2 people like each other; now let me push more of person A's content to person B”. Then the next time you say something on your timeline, it's more likely to appear on person B's timeline, and there's a chance that they'll retweet. This is how you grow.