7.5 Reasons Why Twitter > College
Why a strong Twitter presence might do more for your professional success than a college diploma will.
But first — why Twitter?
I wouldn’t say I am a Titan of Twitter but I have used it to create a decent following that I’ve leveraged into a 6-Figure business at one point (you can read about that one’s unfortunate demise here) with less than 3K followers and am leveraging it once more to build new ones.
As a private coach I’ve been able to develop connections with coaches at top tier college football programs, current and former NFL Pro Bowl players and coaches and generate countless leads in referrals to my coaching business all through Twitter.
In 2020 it isn’t uncommon during an informal job interview for the interviewer to simply ask “Follow me on Twitter I’ll check your stuff out.”
Right now your brand is being built. It can be done by default by the company you’re working for or school you attend or you can do it by design, rally your tribe and create more opportunities for yourself than you ever could have dreamed a college diploma would give you alone.
0.0 What is college for?
The average American education path looks like this: Get good grades to get into a good high school. Get into a good high school to get good grades to get into a good college. Get into a good college to get a good job. Get a good job to have a good life.
While I am vocal critic of college, college was very good to me. I made lifelong friends, had fun, was mentored by great professors and met my future wife there. As a dating service and sleep away camp for young adults, college is unmatched.
But, as good an experience that I had in college it is impossible to ignore the combined impact that the internet, social media and brand building have all had on tearing down the monopoly that higher education once had on the American Dream.
Twitter might be the biggest disruption of them all.
1. Twitter Treats You As A Brand
In the 20th century you went to school to train to work for a famous brand. In the 21st century you are the brand that companies want to work for.
A brand is simply what someone expects from you, or your reputation.
Pre-Twitter this reputation relied on bosses and supervisors to develop for you. Now, Twitter allows you to cultivate a specific reputation with every tweet, like, retweet or comment.
In the 20th century people went to school to train to work for a famous brand.
To do this they tried their best to go to schools with famous brand names like Harvard, or Yale or Stanford. The more famous a brand of school you went to the more famous a brand company you can work for. If you want to work for Apple, you could better do it as a Standford graduate than Glendale Community College graduate.
Now, you get to decide what your reputation is. And that’s scary for a lot of companies.
2. Twitter Is A Portal To The Soul
We can’t read minds — yet. But, Twitter is very close.
In a few taps you can see every post, every comment, every like and every piece of content a person has ever created. You can peer into the depths of their mind and soul to see what makes people tick.
Even cooler, you can decide to drop into that thought thread and add your own valuable insight into someone’s running conversation with other like-minded people.
And, if those people resonated with anything you said, they too might drop into your own thought threads, comments and DMs to begin building a relationship with too.
If you’re looking to understand the hopes, dreams and fears of your ideal market, Twitter is a great starting point.
(As an aside — if you can find this much information out publicly on Twitter just imagine what they’ve got on you privately!)
3. Twitter Made The World Flat (Again)
Columbus might have proved the Earth was round in 1492 but Jack Dorsey made it flat again in 2006.
Twitter has removed all gatekeepers between you and people you want to interact with.
The Silicon Valley term for this is “disintermediation” — or removing intermediaries between people and brands.
Entire industries are based off positioning themselves at information choke points and then charging for access to that information.
Higher education positioned itself at the choke point of “how do I make sure I get a good job?” and charged handsomely for access to that information.
Now, there are 15 year old YouTube stars making 7 figures through their iPhone. It’ll be tough to convince them of the value proposition of attending a $70K/year liberal arts college when the average graduate ends up working at Starbucks for minimum wage the first few years out of college.
In theory, there is now no real barrier between you and Trump. If you tweet something outlandish enough his way, he could tweet you back and drive the next 24hr global news cycle. This is both very cool and scary.
Secretaries, mid-level management and other gatekeepers now have less power than ever over who can reach their bosses. If you have a compelling enough offer and someone sees enough value in it you can get through to anyone.
4. Twitter Is A Hyper Network
You’re just one retweet away from going viral.
Metcalfe’s law states that a network’s value compounds with every additional node added to it.
When the telegraph first came out, it was not very valuable if only one person had it. But, the more people who adopted the telegraph the more valuable it became.
And, so it is with Twitter.
If only 10 people used Twitter it would not be very valuable. But since there are 321 million active users on it (as of February 2019) and is a $3.5 billion dollar company it’s value is undeniable.
Overnight you may be retweeted by someone with 100K followers which then gives you 2,000 new followers, and 80 DMs asking you about collaborating on your new business.
Twitter isn’t bound by physics. It is a force multiplier that lets you connect with anyone, anywhere and at anytime.
5. Twitter Is A Low Cost Litmus Test
You can test without going broke (or crazy).
One analogy I enjoyed from David Perell, whose got a great course on Twitter you can find here, is that Twitter like 24/7 Zoom Call you can tune into at anytime.
Empowered by distance and not knowing you personally Twitter will viciously slay any idea it doesn’t like. This will save you a lot of potential time and frustration in market research.
You can accomplish in one tweet market research that might have cost the Mad Men of Madison Avenue $100K+ of work to do over the course of several months.
Personally, I like posting a generic tweet “Hey guys I’m looking for 8–10 people who are serious about learning a bit more about how to xyz. DM/Comment if you’d like to test run my new course”.
Then, I’ll make a private DM group (you can add up to 50 members on a single Twitter DM right now) and begin the conversation there.
6. Twitter Builds Your Tribe
While not yet clients or customers, building an audience is the first step to finding them.
Some ESPN personalities have more followers than ESPN itself does. Some NY Times reporters have more followers than the NY Times do.
Pre-Twitter, if you lost your job that was it. You would have to start over at a new company — low man on the totem pole. Now, even if you get fired from your job, you will still have your online audience that you can leverage to create revenue generating opportunities for yourself.
Better yet, losing your job always makes for a great read. You can turn it into your flagship blog post that will build your credibility and authority in your audience’s eyes as someone who know how to recover from job loss, start their own business and so on.
Twitter is the perfect first stop on building your audience and eventual sales funnel.
Twitter lets you take your following with you.
Across America the unemployment rate is through the roof. What if when you were let go because of COVID19 you simply shrugged, flipped open your Twitter account with 10K+ active audience members and tweeted out you were starting a new business or launching a new course and it made you $5K?
The days of businesses having a monopoly on your brand are over. In fact, businesses are scared to death of the power that their employees’ personal brand can now wield upon their companies. In the age of each person having their own unique brand, the faceless corporation will lose.
7. Twitter DM is the New Email
Right now there are multi-million dollar deals, scholarship offers, and business discussions occurring on Twitter DM.
The DM is today what email was 15 years ago — an uncluttered direct line of communication between you and someone who can say “yes” to your dream. Like the dark web, 98% of what goes on inside Twitter occurs here.
In theory, once someone follows you back they are open to you DM’ing them. I would recommend if you do DM someone you take the following guidelines:
Seek to give to that person first. Do you have something valuable that might benefit a project they are working on? Could you connect that person to someone else that they might find beneficial to know?
Seek to learn from that person first. Everyone enjoys answering questions about things they are passionate about. Craft 2–3 succinct and insightful questions regarding a post, project or podcast you heard that person on to ask.
Give it time and space. Just because you were responded to once via DM doesn’t mean you are best friends. I like a span of 2–4 days in between DM’s when trying to build a relationship with a new person.
DM’s are not a replacement for conversation but rather the first step to having one. When possible, transition your DM conversation “offline” to over the phone or email. With every cell phone number or email that person grants you permission to you build a little bit more trust.
7.5 Twitter Won’t Make You Happy
It will just make you more or less of what you already are.
10K + followers never made anyone happy. And, money only solves money problems. Even if you are making some it won’t change who you are as a person.
Twitter and social media are great at building connections but not great at building conversations. The magic of Twitter comes when you can leverage a connection made on its platform into a real-life relationship, mentorship or friendship.
In the future everyone is going to be their own brand that companies will apply to work for. Twitter is just one of numerous other platforms where people will be able to intentionally craft that brand, make money from it and ultimately live life on their terms.