The Inner Workings of Twitter's Algorithm

G’Day, in the last edition I told you:

• How I got 9 twitter accounts

• Modified the strategy

• Did preparation for execution

• I started automating

In today’s newsletter:

• Twitter Automation

• Problems I encountered

• How does the Twitter algorithm work?

🤖Automation

For Twitter I need to automate 4 tasks:

1. following

2. liking

3. retweeting

4. posting

Automating browser tasks is pretty straight forward, you look at each action you do and make a bot do it. For following it would be go to profile URL → press the follow button.

To do that I scraped my competitor’s followings, filtered the results and put them all in a spreadsheet. For the follow button I got it’s “selector” with a browser extension, then I told the bot to open each link from the spreadsheet one by one, go to the selector, hover over it and press it. It worked flawlessly.

I did the same with the liking and retweeting and added them. Posting was a bit different, as in the spreadsheet, there were the tweets, rather than the links and it posted them one after the other.

🚩Problems

Once I started testing, I realized that the bot was only liking 7 posts, rather than the 10-15 I wanted it to like. I am still not 100% sure why it was doing that, but it’s most likely due to the page loading twitter uses. It’s dynamic, rather than stationary, which leads to the bot not being able to correctly collect the tweets from the profile page, because before it starts executing the tasks, it loads the page and collects the tweets.

Sadly I couldn’t fix it, as I was using no-code tools, which have their limitations, so I settled for 7.

𝕏 Algo and limits of Twitter

I’ll get a bit off-topic here, but that may be the most valuable info in today’s issue.

Every platform has limitations, in twitter you can follow maximum of 400 people daily, but I’d recommend you stick under 100 to avoid bans. With this said, posting is the core. It gives you reach, which is the most valuable thing on any platform.

Tweets have a rating system. When you post it, you start with 0 points.

• Like = 1 point

• Retweet = 2 points

• Comment = 27 points

• Author reply = 150 points

From this we learn that in order to go viral you need to reply to every comment you get and encourage people to comment. The only exception is spammy comments and ones under “show more comments”, both will lead to shadow-ban, because you associate with them.

Another big thing the twitter algo looks at is your Social Circle.

You want to engage and follow people in your niche, big accounts, do everything you can to be noticed by them, because twitter is not about how many followers you’ve got, but rather who are those followers.

If you build your social circle right and they engage with you, twitter will push your content to them and other users like them. If your social circle is engaged and active, then twitter will push YOU.

Thanks for reading!