Armed with a basic niche we now want to see what others are doing in that space.
We do this for a number of reasons
For inspiration about what sort of content works
For targeting who we will be interacting with
For learning and emulating best practices
Numbers 1 and 2 we’ll be looking at in later lessons in this module
Right now we’re looking at other accounts in the space in order to learn and emulate best practices.
At this point I recommend you go ahead and set up a handful of X Lists. We’ll be using these later so we may as well set them up now.
You will need an X account to do this. Go ahead and set one up if you don’t have one. You can change your username later so don’t worry too much about the name, bio or any other account details. We’ll cover those.
First head to Lists in the Desktop or App version of X.
Click Create New List on Desktop or the Create List button in the bottom right of the App screen.
Create a handful of lists. My recommendations here:
Under 10k
10k-50k
50-100k
100k+
These are lists for different size accounts. Under 10k is people with under 10,000 followers - ie. Small. Over 100k would be considered “large”.
I personally make my Lists private because these are used specifically for engagement and growth later.
We want to use these different lists to collect up accounts at different stages of their growth. The basic idea will be that we’ll start with engaging with smaller accounts at the beginning and then move from category to category as we grow. We’ll go through in a lot more detail later - for now it’s just handy to have the Lists in place whilst we do this preliminary research.
Next up, we want to start to find other accounts in the space and begin to follow them.
ChatGPT, Claude2 and similar AI models will do a decent job of giving you some accounts to follow. Use a basic prompt like “give me 30 twitter accounts to follow in the ‘AI in digital marketing’ niche” to generate a basic list.
However, due to the fact that training data is not fully up to date in many AI models this information will only get you so far.
Supplement it with a basic Google search for “top [niche] Twitter accounts”. For example “top AI in digital marketing twitter accounts” brings up blog articles and curated lists with account suggestions
Try this with both Twitter and X in the search - I find better results with “Twitter”.
Go ahead and follow all of the relevant quality accounts.
Make sure to add the accounts to their respective List.
To do this
On their account hit the … in the top right of the screen.
Click Add/Remove from Lists
Tap the List you want to add them too. A tick should appear next to the List.
Hit back.
Also, whilst you are on the account look at their Lists.
On their account hit the … button
This time click View Lists. This will show you any Lists they have curated. Look for ones relevant to your niche
In the list click Members to see the full list
Follow any relevant accounts from the List.
Here’s an example in AI:
This is a List by @mreflow (Matt Wolfe). He’s already curated 476 other accounts in the AI space. And that List is public.
This is a goldmine for me in the AI space.
By clicking on the 476 Members near the top I can see all the accounts and choose to follow some of them. When doing this make sure to also add and sort them into your own Lists that you made before.
Continue this process of finding relevant quality accounts in your niche until you’ve followed and categorised a few hundred accounts into Lists.
Following them means you’ll also be getting their content in your main feed so you’ll be able to see what they are up to - this will be vital as we move forward. Begin to read, absorb and monitor what everyone else is doing.
Before we start creating anything ourselves though we need to get our profile set up.