A conversation with @benroy__ from Accelerate Art.
No Nonsense Growth is a Twitter Spaces series dedicated to all things marketing, product, and analytics. These are some highlights from the second episode.
For the second episode of No Nonsense Growth, we hosted co-founder, the CEO of Accelerate Art, to talk about narrative building.
Background
Ben has had experience in both the startup and venture side of crypto. He naturally gravitated towards the art side of things and co-founded Accelerate Art with Claire Silver. They do six physical shows a year and bunch of other onchain and online events.
Highlights
How has Twitter changed for web3 folks after Elon's takeover?
One observation is that it has become tougher for smaller accounts to grow. We have bigger accounts get a significant boost in engagement and followers and all of that, but it has never been harder for smaller accounts to grow.
Also, I don't know how much Elon has to do with this, but I've noticed a trend of corporate and brand accounts approaching Twitter with more personality. We often see corporate accounts posting like personal accounts, so that has been interesting.
In light of that, what is your content strategy nowadays? How do you think about content?
All content serves the higher goal of building relationships. And I see this on two axes — building relationships of depth and building relationships of depth.
Relationships of breadth means trying to get as many followers as you can, trying to reach as many people as possible. Relationships of depth, on the other hand, are more interesting.
I don't care about having a big following, but I care more about the stuff that happens as a results of focussing on a niche and speaking to a specific audience, because that opens the door to interesting conversations, whether that's in the DMs, on a Twitter Space, in person, etc.
Having said that, my primary reason of doing this is to have fun. And so that also dictates my content strategy. And people can sort of tell when you're having fun, right? That makes them want to follow you and interact with you, so that's that.
Do you think this approach translates well to other platforms like Farcaster?
Farcaster is an interesting call-out because it itself is a small environment. Farcaster feels like one giant Discord server, which has led to many people forming relationships of depth there. But I see this changing as time goes on and more and more people come onboard.
Let's talk about content creation in general. What's your strategy for long-form or other types of content?
First off, most content creation is really boring if you don't enjoy that. So the most important for me is if I'm having fun, if I'm really interested in what I am writing or talking about.
For me, I am personally most interested in the intersection of technology and culture, so those are themes that capture my interest the most.
And since I am naturally drawn to that, I choose to write or Tweet cuing off of those themes, and then I try to also hit hot topics that seem to be connected to those themes I am interested in.
For someone running a business or an official account, how would you tell them approach content creation?
I'll start with this — most businesses will be better off if their founders have strong personal brands. Today, more than ever, people filter businesses through their founders' personalities. So as a founder, you should focus on being active, for sure, but you should also put thought into developing a unique voice for your business. And you don't necessarily need to be loud or edgy, but just have something that you become known by.
Having a clear idea of your values and what you are out to solve should form the basis of your content strategy. You should focus on highlighting these things and then find ways to integrate what's hot at the moment into a piece of content that, at its core, speaks to your values and what you stand for.
What are some mistakes that people make when trying to build an online presence?
Lots of people like the idea of having a social media presence, whether that's for them personally or their business. And this is where you face a conundrum because you realize that it's annoying to tweet everyday. It's hard. It takes a while to get it.
So a lot of people try for a brief period of time and then give up. In the case of a business account this could look like going to back to putting out average content. A way to get out of this is to change your approach, and focus on building the muscle to respond or add to conversations in ways that are mutually beneficial.
What I suggest people is to paper-tweet, i.e. for a brief period of time, when you see something interesting on your timeline, just write down your response in a Google Doc or a file on your computer, just to build the muscle of replying. And then evaluate this later.
The aim of this exercise is to build a certain level of comfort with the act of tweeting, which makes everything else very easy.