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Why Reciprocation Doesn’t Work, Do This Instead
How to get timeless engagement in your writing
Back in Spring 2021, I was an NFT collector on Twitter. I bought less than $2,000 worth of NFTs (non-fungible tokens) to support artists. While I never saw a return on investment nor expected one, I learned a timeless lesson in social media engagement.
Digital artists “broke” Twitter by retweeting other artists’ tweets in rapid succession. When artists banned together and upvoted each other to the top, their tweets suddenly started showing up in everyone’s home feed.
This allowed even “unknown” artists to amass tens of thousands of followers within a few short months.
Great for finding a loophole in the system.
The problem was when you went to an artist’s homepage, you would only see their retweets and not their own art. I could go to any artist’s profile and see 9 other retweets from different artists, and only 1 tweet of their own.
This meant that if you were following an artist on Twitter, it meant nothing. You were just following whoever that artist decided to retweet at any given time.
Eventually, the buying mania subsided, and most digital artists moved on to different life endeavors. The ones who stuck around focused on posting…
