Background

I signed up for the Blogging for Devs Spring Accelerator program with the intention to gain more Twitter followers, or atleast that was my pitch when I applied to the program. I was not too sure, but in general I wanted to increase my Twitter engagement and visibility. I signed up in early February 2021, the accelerator was due to begin from March 2021. In order to get a feel of how Twitter would treat me, I started tweeting more often.

Expectations

I was hoping my tweets to get more attention and to be liked my many 😬, after all a little more publicity wouldn’t have harmed me, but thanks to the Twitter’s engagement algorithm, virality works in a different way.

Reality

I got 61 new followers. I tweeted on wide variety of subjects, and below are my observations:

What didn’t work 🙅‍♀️

• Random programming memes. Tweet
• General advice without a personal context. Tweet

What worked 👍

• Meme with a programming example. Tweet
• General advice with a personal context. Tweet
• Participating in discussions. Tweet
• Detailed blog post on submitting Outreachy application. Tweet

I must admit that I was disappointed when tweets like asking for pet animal pictures worked, but mine didn’t. I managed to get over the Twitter fatigue phase and this was a good exercise for me.

Not ready to quit yet

Although Twitter didn’t work this time, it does not mean it will not work again in the near future. But until then, I had to find my motivation and use the Spring Accelerator as a platform to get back to blogging consistently. I recalled the days when I used to blog for fun.

Some of those articles got lot of traction too. I had blogged consistently during my Outreachy days and didn’t worry about views and likes. I had also used the last six months in 2020 to blog consistently.

I joined the @bloggingfordevs community earlier in May this year. 6 months later, I am happy to share my work as I have been able to write consistently following her advice from the newsletters. Thank you @monicalent 🤗https://t.co/mM2L4EWXKG https://t.co/kD3OPp7XDx

— Princiya 👧‍ (@princi_ya) December 20, 2020

But somewhere in between, I got into the competitive band and lost my focus when success didn’t come to me as I had expected. I am generally optimistic with my life and its choices, but I do have my fair share of blues. And this Twitter drama was one of it. Success does not happen overnight, I am very well aware of this. So I decided to blog again, consistently and most important to have fun. I write, because I like to and it was necessary for me to step back and realise what I was missing the last couple of months.

Next steps

As an immediate first step, I redesigned my blog and improved the landing page.

For next steps, I want to continue writing however small it might be. My strectch goal is to write like Seth Godin 🤞, I really enjoy his style.

Let’s see how this goes. Happy blogging to myself 🎉.