How Morning Brew Gained Over 65,000 Followers on Twitter
Credit: Twitter
One minute you are watching golf at home, the next minute you are viral on Twitter. Just another life in the day of Toby Howell, social media editor for the Morning Brew. It was May 24th, 2020. The Match II was on TV. A charity golf match pairing Phil Nickelson and Tom Brady vs. Tiger Woods and Peyton Manning. For Toby, it was another opportunity for Morning Brew.
Leveraging the Power Follower
Toby saw a tweet from JJ Watt, the NFL player and Morning Brew Fan:
This was Toby's opportunity. He responds:
And then Toby got his wish. JJ Watt retweets Toby's tweet with a comment:
A day later the tweet garnered 499 RTs and 9.4K likes. Twitter wasn't always that easy for Toby.
Toby Joins Morning Brew
It was February 6th, 2020. Toby was working at Topsail Sports & Entertainment. He sent a cold email to the founders of the Morning Brew.
They replied!
A little more than a month later he was hired as a full-time writer. Writing for the newsletter wasn't his only job. He was also given another job title: social media editor. Toby would manage the Morning Brew Twitter account. Here's the catch, Toby had no social media experience.
Toby Takes Over The Twitter Account
Morning Brew had 30,000 Twitter followers when he began running the account on March 30th, 2020. Four months later, the account now has more than 66,000 followers.
Many people would find taking over a brand account daunting. For Toby it was an opportunity. His inexperience proved to be his biggest asset in his battle for attention on Twitter.
Morning Brew’s Twitter Voice
Any reader of the Morning Brew knows it's not just another newsletter. It's the go-to newsletter for millennials in the business world. The style, the formatting, the voice is the same for every newsletter.
Toby knew the consistency and voice were key. He couldn't tweet about anything. If the tweets didn't represent Morning Brew's voice, the account wouldn't gain traction.
Toby the Meme Expert
One of the best ways to showcase Morning Brew's unique voice is through memes. No one is a better meme creator than Toby. Toby spends much of his time immersed in meme culture. Toby remarks:
“I’m looking around at what other people are doing. My big concept right now is to borrow freely. It's been said a million times. I'm even borrowing that concept. If you go on Tik Tok, you'll see 500,000 videos using the same concept. I'm using the same background music with tiny little variations. And so that's basically how I structure my kind of meme creation”
My favorite meme from Toby is below. It's also his most viral meme.
The tweet resulted in 5.1K RTs and 17.4K Likes. It had over 1 million impressions.
Toby's immersion in the meme culture played a large part in the success of this tweet. Following accounts like Ramp Capital, a finance meme account, helped Toby understand what memes would and wouldn't resonate with the audience. Toby might not know what tweets will go viral, but it sure as hell helps to understand the audience.
Asking Your Audience Questions
Tweeting memes and tweeting at celebrities isn't the only way to grow a following. Toby, from time to time, will pose a question for his audience. A few weeks back Morning Brew tweeted:
The tweet generated over 2,000 responses. It also built on a previous strategy Toby spoke about, "borrowing freely". He copied a tweet he saw that said write a horror story in three words or less. He added the word business and used it for a Morning Brew tweet.
Twitter Hijacking
Lastly, Toby would keep alerts on a few Twitter accounts and reply when they tweeted. For example:
As Toby explains:
“I call it hijacking a timeline because some of our most viewed, our biggest impression tweets are just responses to Elon Musk tweets. If you think about it, he's a direct vein into 65 million Twitter timelines”
In over four months, Toby Howell more than doubled Morning Brew’s Twitter followers. Using a combination of meme creation, Twitter hijacking and various other strategies to grow the account. Most importantly, the strategies used stayed true to the Morning Brew voice. You don’t need to be a social media expert to build a large Twitter following. As long as you add value and entertain your audience, people will follow you. Maybe, one day Morning Brew will retweet you.
Check out my podcast with Toby Howell. Watch on YouTube. Listen on iTunes.