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Welcome to 1% Better. A weekly newsletter where I provide simple playbooks to grow your following, earn more revenue, and live a more fulfilling life.

Today at a Glance:

• I go over the number one strategy for growing your brand, building a network, and making social media way more fun: the reply guy strategy

• Actionable steps for implementing this strategy day to day

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The Best Strategy Ever for X Growth

X is one of the most difficult platforms to grow your audience on across all of the social networks.

Standing out is incredibly difficult. Putting out content that is valuable and well written is not enough to get you noticed a lot of the time.

There are many other factors that are involved with getting noticed, the most underrated of which is your network.

The higher quality the people are that interact with your content, the better it’ll perform. This means you need to be building a network of high quality Xaccounts through replies and DMs .

Here is a simple blueprint for implementing a reply strategy and getting your growth off the ground:

What Makes a Good Reply

Here’s the biggest mistake most people make when replying to others: they resort to laziness. They go for quantity over quality. They go down their feed and reply to every tweet with 🔥 or 👀. They think it’s enough just to get seen.

This couldn’t be a bigger waste of time. You not only have to be seen, but you have to be noticed. You get noticed by treating your replies just like you do your normal tweets, by using your own, unique, authentic perspective to share value with your audience.

Every reply should be relevant to the original topic, but also come from your own unique stand point. It should be an extension of your brand.

Loved this reply from James Downs to one of my tweets. Was well thought out and came from his own, unique voice:

What Makes a Bad Reply

A bad reply can kill you. It can ensure that A) people don’t join your network and B) hurt your long term performance because you get deprioritized by the algorithm.

Here are some things to avoid when replying:

1. No naked emojis. This is the number one mistake people commit when attempting to build their network. They just throw a couple of emojis into a reply and hit send. Nobody finds this kind of engagement interesting or enlightening. You might as well have sent nothing.

2. No negativity. Most people, especially the ones you want in your network on X, really don’t want to be brought down when looking at their posts. They’ll quickly skip over or mute anyone who’s bringing down the vibe on their feed. Just best to avoid any sort of negativity.

3. No constant contrarianism. Not everyone is looking for a debate on their timeline. A lot of people are just there for casual conversation. Light back and forths are fine sometimes, but being the guy that’s constantly picking fights on people’s tweets are not where you want to be.

4. Sending too many replies. X will shadow ban you if you are too active on the timeline. In the next section I’ll go over execution and what’s the best cadence to avoid getting banned.

Execution Strategy

Here are some ways to build an effective reply strategy that are fun, within the parameters of X’s rules, and do a great job of boosting your network:

1. Time block. I’m a big believer that mindless scrolling on your timeline can get out of control quick, eat a ton of your time, and be overall unproductive.
   
   You need to move with a purpose on social media. With that being said, I like to time block my reply sessions. Typically I’ll do this 3 times a day for about 15 minutes each (these time blocks are constantly shifting depending on my schedule that day.)
   
   After every tweet I post, I time block 15 minutes to not only reply to the mentions on my posts, but also to go down a X List I created and interact with other people’s posts (more on Lists shortly). By time blocking, you ensure you use your time efficiently, don’t do much mindless scrolling, and have a productive routine.

2. Use X Lists. X Lists are the most underutilized tool on the entire platform. Lists allow you to compile a group of accounts you’d like to interact with and make your entire feed that group.
   
   I’d recommend you make 2 lists. First list is people you interact with regularly. Anyone who replies to your tweets often who you’d like to maintain a relationship with. The second list is for accounts you aspire to be. These are bigger accounts/influencers with similar branding to you who you’d like to take their audience and make it your own.

3. Make your replies retweetable. Whenever posting a reply, reread it and ask yourself if the reply could stand alone. If it can, that means people will be more likely to retweet it and give you extra visibility.

4. Repurpose your replies into posts. If your replies can stand alone, that means you can also turn them into standalone posts, giving you more content options. I like to repurpose all of my content as many ways as I can. By repurposing replies into posts, you’ll have a much larger arsenal of content you can use across your platforms.

5. Subscribe to key accounts. The reason I do this is because it boosts my replies on their tweets. For instance I pay $5 a month for Elon’s subscription. Now all of my replies appear near the top of his tweets, exploding my visibility.
   
   I’ve had replies to his account hit over 100,000 impressions. A lot of companies pay thousands for that kind of visibility. I pay 5 bucks.

A well implemented reply strategy is critical for growth. I use this strategy and almost every big account you follow uses this strategy. Don’t overthink it. Build a list, start growing your network.

My X Spaces Mater Class launches on Monday!

Want to grow you X audience? Host Spaces that attract thousands of people? Feel like your Spaces always flop? Not sure how to get started with Spaces?

You need to take my X Spaces Master Class.

It launches Monday and has hours of content that will teach you:

• How to host Spaces that make people want to follow you
• How to attract tons of people to your Spaces
• How to become a WAY better public speaker
• How to deploy Spaces as a main growth strategy

This master class will be a part of my private community, the 1% Club. All you have to do is sign up for the community to get the master class!

Also part of my community are my 2 other classes:

• The X Growth Master Class
• The X Algorithm Master Class

As a part of the community you also get 2 live calls with me a week as well as access to our full community of over 200+ content creators.

If you’re a content creator on X and are looking to learn and grow, this is the only community you’ll need.

Have a great weekend everyone!

-Alex