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The Bot-Powered Epigrammetry Twitter Adventure goes into another round!

As you might know or have suspected if you follow us on Twitter, we’ve had part of our account bot-powered for a while now (just auto-retweeting of hashtags relevant to us and hopefully our audience!). But engagement is still pretty bad, so I wanted to try something new.

First auto-retweeting hashtags.. now “engagement prompts”!

I have implemented what I call “engagement prompts” in the bot, like I have done for #100DaysofDH. Hopefully, the epigrammetry account won’t post multiples but rather just one each day, even none on some days. I haven’t configured one for Sunday, for example, because that’s usually when we blog anyway and then promote the link on Twitter. Also, the bot’s timing is just a little bit random, so it won’t tweet at the same time each time, etc.

Like some of you might know from the LaTeX Twitter, I have done a sort of “engagement experiment” for Twitter at the end of October 2020. I have actually written down all my learnings from it in a series of blogposts which will to go online one post a week starting today! (The Ninja’s “How to better promote your content on Twitter” Guide)

With that account, I’ve also definitely seen a significant increase in followers. It’s still unter 1000 but I feel that the “climate” does change a lot once you’re over 400 (more on my experiences towards the end of the blog series). Still, the Twitter growth is working like it should according to the advice I found and it’s a steady growth now, even though I’m not actually doing much right now.

How to get more followers on Twitter without investing the famous “20 minutes a day”

That’s also the reason why I felt it was a bit sad that the epigrammetry account didn’t get a lot of exposure. I mean, I know how to get more engagement by investing 20 minutes a day in Twitter growth. But really, I’m too busy with my dissertation right now. Also I wouldn’t want to invest 20 minutes each day. My personal account and the Ninja one have had enough growth for my taste (read all about it in the later parts of the Twitter Guide Series linked above).

On the other hand, I really don’t know what I should write/tweet about. I know, I know. Sometimes I start talking and never stop but on Twitter, it doesn’t really work for me. I mean yeah, I understand now that I have to reply etc. to keep a conversation going (what an insight!) but I’m still having trouble starting a conversation or joining one I wasn’t specifically invited to. That’s why I thought doing (manually) scheduled “engagement prompts” should work, like it does for the Ninja. But then I thought: Maybe I don’t have to do this by hand?

So starting from tomorrow, epigrammetry’s bot-powered Twitter will send out engagement prompts into the Twittersphere.

Let’s see how that works.

We would like to discuss with you more!

See you on Twitter,

S


OpenEdition suggests that you cite this post as follows:
Sarah Lang (January 24, 2021). The Bot-Powered Epigrammetry Twitter Adventure goes into another round! Epigrammetry. Retrieved March 21, 2025 from https://doi.org/10.58079/og7f


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