Oftentimes I wish that I had a large following on Twitter, that I was well-known enough to garner that kind of attention. What it would allow me to do is to throw out random ideas, thoughts, or questions and expect a handful of people to give me a serious answer. It is like googling, but instead of an artificial algorithm answering me, it is real humans with experience more varied than I could ever imagine.
I see this all the time on Twitter with people whom have a following in the thousands and higher. They share a pretty innocuous but random tweet. It could be:
- What’s the best coffee shop in X?
- Where can I get the best deal for Y?
- Who is the best person to talk about for Z?
These are things that are easily google-able, but being able to leverage the experience and know-how of your following is hands-down a more effective (but perhaps not efficient) route to a quality answer or solution. Imagine if this sort of thing was monetized, the value of the information, depending on how niche it is, would probably be higher than most people think.
The ability to query 10,000 people is such an underrated part of Twitter. I imagine it is the case because the majority of twitter users don’t have a large enough following to be able to leverage the platform in this way. But still, the principle is a neat one.
In the absence of being famous in the twitter-verse, what can the everyman or everywoman do to jerry-rig this sort of thing?
This is something that I have thought a lot about, and all of the solutions require a long(er) term time horizon. The short-answer is to build a system, a digital home if you will, that allows the individual to share their ideas as frictionlessly as possible. For most, this will be a combination of blog, twitter, and perhaps even YouTube channel. Once the funnels for directing attention are set-up, it becomes easier to invest into sharing online one’s ideas. Without investing into these systems, any idea that is shared may receive attention in the moment, but will probably not do anything for you long-term unless you have an email list people can subscribe too, or a twitter account, or YouTube channel … you get the idea.