How to Reverse Engineer Content for Tweets

A lot of people are under the impression that if they want to be successful on Twitter, that they have to come up with 100% original tweets.

I’m telling you, if that’s your thinking, you were well on your way to failure. That’s not the way the game is played. If you don’t believe me, look at the most successful Twitter accounts in your niche. What do they all have in common? I’m willing to bet that the vast majority of their tweets are actually retweets or third-party content.

This is not a fluke. This is not an accident. This is part of a winning strategy.

It must be very clear to you that if you are to invest a tremendous amount of time, effort and energy in coming up with original content, you are wasting money. It’s a better idea to look at what works. How do you do this? Well, publish third-party content produced by other people in your niche.

That’s how it’s done. That’s how you play the game. This is stuff that third-party people have published before. After you’ve done this, pay attention to your statistics. You would notice that of all the stuff that you published, only a tiny fraction gets a lot of love. Slice and dice this information. What kind of themes do they talk about? How do they format their content? What kind of hashtags did you use with them?

Using these hints, you come up with better content and through fine-tuning and of course publishing at the right time, you end getting higher levels of engagement which in turn, could lead to more traffic to your site. That’s how you reverse engineer tweet content. You start with a random distribution of stuff that works. Here’s the secret. It has to be stuff that works in your niche.

How to find stuff that works in my niche

So, how do you figure out hot content in your niche? What gives them away? Well, first of all, they are posted by your competitors. These are people who are in the same niche, trying to reach the same audience as you. Second, pay attention to the content that they post. Do they have a lot of retweets? Do they have a lot of objective indicators of popularity?

Compare these engagement levels with other relevant content. Pick out their most engaging pieces of content and then share that same stuff on your Twitter feed. Pay attention to your results and then focus on the stuff that works.

The key here is niche specificity.

It doesn’t really make much sense for you to tweet somebody’s favorite cat picture unless of course your blog is about cats and cat accessories. Focus on niche specificity. Focus on what works. Focus on objective measurements of success. Publish at the right time. Try to get the right results and then give people who follow your Twitter feed more of the stuff that works.

Eventually, you will be able to come up with your own version and this can turbocharge the amount of traffic you get to your site. For you to get there, however, you need to figure out the right kind of content and when to publish it. These two go hand in hand.