I decided to stop lurking & take Twitter seriously around 6 months ago.

Grateful for a place to share ideas & to have grown from 900s to 7.1k since then.

Learned a lot about Twitter's algorithms over this period.

Sharing 1 tip to grow your Twitter per every 2 likes 📈 🐦

All your reach on social media is dependent on Network effects.

If you're below < 2k followers most of your tweets should be helpful replies to other larger accounts.

Don't be a "reply guy" tho. The audience of a large account can tell & the large account holder my block u.

When you borrow reach from a large account & someone clicks on your profile you should ->

Specify why people should follow you in your bio.
Give people a reason to follow you.

Titles & Social proof do help, unfortunately.

Good Format:
I Tweet About / Explore X
I Do Y
I Am Z

Your Pinned Tweet is the next possible point of converting someone into a follower.

Ideally, your pinned tweet should have a lot of social proof (likes) & summarize the essence of your bio & expand as a thread.

This is where you start to have an umbrella for your brand.

Each tweet you make should add value.

It should either:
1. Educate
2. Inspire
3. Entertain
4. Connect
5. Dispute

'Twas the night before Christmas, and all through the tweets
Not a user was stirring, not even in fleets
The drafts were all scheduled for the a.m. with care
In hopes that virality soon would be there

The children were all nestled all snug in their snaps
Their instas, their twitches, their lit tiktok apps;
And mamma in her Pinterest, and I in my LinkedIn,
Had just settled down (the edible had kicked in)

When out on the lawn there arose such a ruckus!
I cursed the doorbell stream app I'd deleted for 'Among Us'
Plus the wi-fi was down, so I leapt from my bed
Flung open the window and lifted it over my head.

I could see nothing, I was in no mood for jokes
Snowblinded by moonlight, climate change is no hoax
When what to my furious eyes did appear?
The outline of a sleigh, and eight tiny... I wanna say, deer?

With a round little driver, he was no kind of runt
It was either St. Nick or a damn YouTube stunt.
More rapid than retweets, they came on like vandals
And he whistled and shouted and called out their handles

OK. I may get slaughtered here, but there is a kind of pundit who doesn't know what he doesn't know. I'm not talking about ordinary people on @Twitter who shoot the shit on a variety of topics, but people with millions of followers, readers. 1/

These are usually men, who will assume expertise because they've always been told they were the smartest in the room, were given a platform because of who they are, and feel no sense of humility when they decide to ramble off and take down others. 2/

Here I am talking about @NateSilver538 @mattyglesias and @DouthatNYT who have decided they are the arbiters of truth in science and public health. 3/

It started with the #ACIP recommendations on the next phase of #COVID19 vaccination (which as far as I know is still pending). All three of them are suggesting that #ACIP doesn't know what it's doing because there are discussions happening about how to manage trade-offs. 3/

All three believe age-based allocation is the only way to triage vaccine delivery and they've been scornful of the deliberation of #ACIP for talking about things like equity, essential workers, etc. 4/

THE DANGERS OF FEMINISTS THEORIES OF DISPUTE RESOLUTION

Mary(Not real name) was a friend I met on Twitter. We had good conversations but disagreed on how Twitter court of public opinions handled rape issues. We agreed to meet and our first meeting was at her place.

She brought up the issue of why I always sat on the fence and why I always wanted to hear from the other party because it means I support the “rapist” – RAPIST? I found it funny because how do you label someone a rapist just from an allegation?

You didn't hear from the accused & never want to hear the details of the allegation because you deem it insensitive. Mary explained that she was a victim and she is still traumatized and she asked if I knew just being a guy suffices to make her feel unsafe because she was alone?

That is why she normally prefers having her flatmate around or at least pretend her flatmate was around when she had a male visitor. I said her fears were valid because, stranger danger.
We ate lunch, gisted, played scrabble (which she cheated to win. Lool) and saw a movie.

When it was time to leave, I turned and asked her, do you know if you went on Twitter to say I raped you, nobody would ask question? They will believe because you are a woman. She nodded in the affirmative and said she knows.

A guide for ambitious teenagers who want to grow

This thread contains guidance related to:
• Twitter Networking
• Avoiding Naive bBlunders
• Growing on Twitter
• And anything I could tell advise you like an elder brother

Thread Continued

No one is perfect from the beginning. Self development is a journey.

I made almost all of the mistakes I've mentioned further in the thread

1/

Be patient when you reach out people (especially the ones with more than 1k followers) on Twitter

You may not get reply for couple of days. This happens cuz the person has many DMs pending and is left with no bandwidth to reply

2/

So don't be like "???" or "will you reply???"

Be more generous in the approach. Follow up more politely with sentences like "looking forward to your reply"

3/

Whenever you send a Cold DM, keep the message short and precise.

@palakzat and @SumneshSalodkar guided me in the right direction with this

1/ My first @threadapalooza. I've been managing people for 18+ yrs and tweeting about it for 10. Here's 100 tweets on what I've learned and try to implement in my work @PermanentEquity :

2/ If a company's highest paid people had jobs they'd only observed, had never trained for, and had no actual experience doing, you'd think it was crazy. Yet this describes people managers in most orgs.

3/ Managing people is not a promotion in your current line of work. It is an entirely new career that uses a different set of skills. Train. Your. People Managers.

4/ If your employees feel like they have to manage people to make more money, that's a fail. Management jobs are for people who are passionate about helping others optimize their gifts, not just for people looking for more compensation.

5/ Provide non-management career options that offer better compensation for specializing in a certain area and documenting/communicating what you know. This helps keep bad managers out of management.

Merry Christmas! How’s your Christmas going? Here is a collection of random tweets from Indian Twitter that will do India proud. Thread 👇1/n

The run up to Christmas started with Chavhanke running his Christmas special series on conversions. 2/n

A few days before Christmas, a ‘dharmic’ influencer started a campaign about whether Hindus should celebrate Christmas. 3/n

Right-wing blog OpIndia meanwhile thought it was an opportune time to dig out a 10+ year old video of Zakir Naik on Christmas greetings. 4/n

No Christmas is complete without Indology enlightening his followers. In fact he does it every year on Christmas. 5/n

So - that was quite a twitter/media day for me, and welcome to my new followers; 3 threads coming up - introducing myself, explaining my background and COIs (this one); technical aspects of the new strain from my vantage; commentary on what is means for the future

(for the people who know me, skip the rest of this thread!)

A brief tweet portrait of me; I am deputy director general of @embl and co-direct (with Rolf Apweiler, not on twitter) one it's six sites, @emblebi which is based just south of Cambridge, UK.

is the European Molecular Biology Laboratory, a European treaty organisation that does science, similar to CERN. EMBL does molecular biology from high end atomic structural biology to development - and in the future, bridging to Ecosystems.

EMBL is Headquartered in beautiful Heidelberg, Germany and has 5 other sites; Hamburg (Germany also), Grenoble (France), EMBL-EBI at Hinxton (UK), Rome (Italy) and Barcelona (Spain).

In an effort to keep myself accountable and to “build in public” as many do on Twitter, I’m going to share my training and thoughts in my build up to running the 2021 Barkley Marathons.

A thread:

1/ I’m out of shape right now.

That needs to chance quickly as the race is approximately 3 months away. If you don’t know what the Barkley Marathons is, there are some great documentaries on Amazon & YouTube you can search for.

2/ Essentially it’s a 100+ mile ultra marathon held in Frozen Head State Park in TN. It is a 5 identical looped course of unmarked trails and cross country scrambles over steep terrain.

Each loop is over 25 miles in length with +14,000 feet of climb.

3/ Just 15 people have finished the full five loops in the event’s 35 year history. You have 60 hours to finish and no one has finished under 52 hours.

Most years there are no finishers.

4/ I first toed the line at the Barkley in 2014, but I first read about it in 2005 or 2006 just as I was getting into running ultras. I found the website, read this poem and immediately added the event to my bucket list:

I’m not a scientist, so obviously do correct me if I’m wrong. (Heck, this is twitter, I don’t need to ask that do I?)

BUT a virus doesn’t mutate in *nothing*, does it, it doesn’t mutate when it’s on the handle of the supermarket door or even in the air you’ve just breathed out.

It mutates *in a host*. And the most sure fire way for a virus to find a wide variety of hosts in which to mutate is to do precious little to control the spread of the virus. To have policies which amount to “take it on the chin”. To have an ‘acceptable’ death level.

To allow the virus to run absolutely rampant through one section of the population (children) because stopping it doing so would mean making a politically unpopular decision (closing the schools).

Seen some people (scientists, I mean, not your uncle Jim) saying this virus is now more transmissible in children and like... what did they THINK would happen if you allow the virus unfettered access to kids?

It adapts! It adapts to its fucking hosts! It becomes better at infecting them! Like, the whole fucking point for a virus is to be able to make copies of itself. It’s actually not that arsed about killing or harming you.