By Shawn Cav
I wrote an article about this a while ago called "be a sh*t poster". The concept was to get monetized on X and how to do it, but I didn't include strategies that I use on a regular basis. I will be breaking down the requirements needed to qualify and then the means in which to accomplish those requirements.
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Requirements:
be verified
have 500 followers
have 5 million impressions in 90 days
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STEP 1 - BE VERIFIED
This is the easiest of the steps. All you have to do is sign up for X premium. X has also made it even easier to get verified too by creating different tiers of membership that help you differently. There is the basic tier which is only $4 a month. This level is the cheapest and offers the lowest boost to your replies and posts. It's still better than not having any boost to your content. This level also removes some of the ads from your feed and of course gives you a blue check still. Then there is X premium tier which is what most people are at that had already signed up to become verified. This one is $8/$11 a month and offers less ads and an even greater boost to your content. And finally there is X premium plus, this is the highest level of membership at $16/$22 per month with the biggest boosts and also access to grok and other new features that come out for X.
So you have options for how much you want to invest in growing your account and you always have the option of changing them as you go. For example, I started with a premium membership and when premium plus came out I opted to try it and see if it would help me with my impression rate. The improvement is MASSIVE! So I would recommend considering going big at first when you really need to farm for followers and impressions, but then downgrading once you have good engagement with your account regularly.
STEP TWO - HAVE 500 FOLLOWERS
Again, not a hugely difficult requirement. I feel that anyone who wants to grow an account on X knows you have to engage with people to build those relationships to where people will want to either follow you back or follow you because your content is interesting. You could find the accounts that say " I follow back" or the ones that share smaller accounts to help grow them. But keep in mind that a lot of the followers you will get from those types of techniques don't engage often. They follow sooo many accounts that you can get lost in the mix and you may never see them again honestly. Plus if you follow back sometimes they will unfollow right away and you won't catch it for a few weeks if you aren't paying attention. You could buy followers but that doesn't help with impressions or engagement as those are just bot accounts that do nothing besides boost your follower count. Pretty useless honestly for becoming monetized on X. Just do it the honest way by creating good content, and engaging with the followers in your newsfeed. It won't take long to hit 500 by doing this. One final strategy for gaining followers is being witty and clever with replies to big accounts. This will get you a surprising amount of followers simply by posting a good meme or GIF sometimes.
STEP THREE - HAVE 5 MILLION IMPRESSIONS IN 90 DAYS
This is the hardest of the requirements and the most time consuming, but it is very feasible so don't let the massive impression number scare you. If you are asking "what's an impression?", easy answer, impressions are the number of views that accumulate on your post/reply. So It has nothing to do with the number of likes, reposts, or comments, just the views. The likes, reposts, and comments help keep your reply/post circulating on the newsfeed of course or at the top of the replies section, but you will get paid off of the impressions. I've had replies that get 40k impressions and 13 likes. There's no explaining people's tastes in replies and you never know which ones are really going to blow up without being a provocateur looking to really stir the pot. Trust me, no matter what you write, you will piss somebody off, it's still twitter... But this leads me into how to get the 5 million impressions and the strategies I've used to hit this goal WITHOUT being someone looking for trouble.
The first thing you will want to do is follow the big accounts that share viral videos. These are the pages that the top commentators pull from and usually harvest their impressions from. Since you don't have a massive following yet you shouldn't quote or repost but instead just reply. Reply with something that is related to the OP (Opening post), you will see lots of irrelevant replies underneath but those are stupid and people see that those replies are just looking to get impressions and not add content. By you adding content to the OP you are more likely to get engagement and possibly even new followers.
Keep your replies short and sweet, or a little wordy but never exceed a typical tweet size. People don't want to read novel length replies when scrolling. I recommend having a witty or quick phrase and a GIF to get some attention, or a thoughtful reply that is quick and to the point with no gif. Those have been winning strategies for me with getting engagement and higher impression counts.
Be careful of the words you use. Being edgy is fun and will get you some good engagement, just be careful of the types of words you use though because it can attract the wrong type of attention. I personally don't wish to be a provocateur when posting replies. I will call out evil for evil and use broad generalizations as to not be pinned down by and of the more liberal accounts favorite words (nazi, homophobe, transphobe, racist, xenophobe, the list goes on...). I've literally just posted some really tame replies and still gotten people all bent out of shape over it. Expect the mean replies, It will happen. You'll be called every name in the book for just sharing an opinion, or not sharing the same sense of humor as someone else. I've had someone attack me for not understanding a joke I wrote. Yea, I get it, some jokes fall flat but who cares?! Just expect to be attacked for breathing the same oxygen as some of these mouth breathers hiding behind anime profile pics and pronouns in bios. The reason I still state to be careful of what you write is because you don't want to give these troll accounts any ability to report you and win. Being reported could get your profile shut down or suspended which works against you when trying to get monetized. Avoid the landmines that could trigger someone to report your account and you'll be fine. This is why writing something that is just a honest observation versus attacking someone in a video is a better strategy for gaining impressions and followers.
If you do get a reply from someone who you can easily dunk on with your own reply. GO FOR IT! But again, don't personally attack the commenter, just their statement. This creates a thread of replies which will sometimes lead others to go through reading the debate and you will essentially be double dipping into the impression pool! If you see that the other person is just dense and incapable of having a normal debate, remember to always thank them for helping increase your impressions and that you couldn't do it without them. That almost ALWAYS get them to stop replying and leave because they realized that you weren't going to get triggered by them. Instead you were having a calm debate and remembered to thank them for helping boost your post. It drives them nuts!!!
Don't be afraid to comment on whatever comes through your "for you" section. Sticking to only politics can get old or even annoying. That's why I follow as many of the random viral video accounts as I can. that will get you infront of way more people than just an echo chamber of similarly minded people who may already agree with your take but aren't going to engage with your post.
In the end, you will end up probably posting about 5-20 replies a day. Some will grow with impressions, others might die on the vine. Can't predict it, but you got to be in it to win it as they say. If you want to get monetized on X this is the way to do it and grow your account to eventually becoming one of the bigger commentator accounts.
FINAL STRATEGY
Not so much a strategy as it is goals to keep in mind. In order to hit 5 million in 90 days you need to acheive about 55k impressions per day. This can fluctuate but you'll want to have an average of 55k. So for a couple days you get 35k but then you hit a big one with 120k. you are still averaging 63.3k over the 3 days. So don't get discouraged if you have a bad week. Just stay on task and make up for the slow weeks with extra replies to try and help boost your chances of getting a bunch of impressions.
And one final bit of advice. Your older replies will still continue to get impressions over time. So if you have a few that hit big numbers, chances are that for days if not weeks you will see more impressions roll in from them contributing to your goal anyway.
If you have questions or want more advice on this topic. Leave a comment and I will do my best to address your question or concern.
