My friends, you're going to love seeing how and why I replaced my old Twitter account. I've now got a brand new account on the exact same address that my old account was on, which is at Jerry Banfield. You might wonder, well, why would you replace a Twitter account with 82,000 followers that you've had since April 2012, an almost 11-year-old account, with some brand new one? Well, I want to maximize the algorithm.
I saw a tweet that Elon put out yesterday about working on Twitter and reconsidering the recommendation algorithm and what it's using. He was talking about the recommendation algorithm using that absolute block count, and that got me reflecting on my old account. The key question is: how exactly did I get those followers? I explained it in a tweet on the new account. In 2014, I did follow-for-follow and got 80-some thousand followers doing follow-for-follow, because at that time I had no qualms with how I honestly presented myself online. My attitude was, if I have to do follow-for-follow and trick people into thinking I'm popular, I'll do whatever it takes. And that sabotaged the account. It really damaged the long-term health of it. It crushed my algorithm so that my tweets, no matter what they said, rarely went out.
Why a new channel changed everything
I was recently inspired to do this, especially off of my new crypto channel. I made this new crypto channel on YouTube, and the videos have done well. If you look at the most popular, I already have one video with 16,000 views and several more with over 5,000 views. My average video is getting over 1,000. Maybe I sub-for-subbed about 100 of them. But I made all kinds of different videos on wildly different subjects, from Steam to AdWords to TikTok, Ethereum mining, Facebook marketing, dating, even tutorials. And doing all of that trashed the algorithm on my main channel.
For years I suffered and struggled with the question, "What am I, a crappy creator? Why does nothing go off in the algorithm?" Then I literally just created a new channel, and my crypto videos started ripping in the algorithm. And I thought, oh my God, this crappy quantity of followers from my main channel has been holding all of my potential back. My main channel was the anchor. After seeing Elon's tweet yesterday, I realized I think my Twitter account is getting fouled up in the same respect. It has all these junk followers, and probably 95 percent of them don't even see my posts. But how many of them went through and blocked me at some point? How low is my engagement rate because of all these followers who never see my posts?
I'm really excited to see how this experiment goes. So if you're interested to see how it works out for me, you can watch both of these accounts over time. I'm also interested to see how many real followers I have, because with the old account, when I get new followers, I can't really tell how many I've earned honestly. Do I actually have a thousand followers, ten thousand? I don't even know. I like that this new account is real. This is honest. I'm very happy to see I've already got 15 people, plus I followed myself, within a few hours of creating a new profile. Fifteen people cared enough to actually follow.
How I made the switch
Now, if you're wondering how I did this, here's exactly what happened. This morning I hopped on my computer, stuck an underscore in the old handle, and changed the name to Jerry Banfield Classic. And for a minute, my butthole puckered as I realized I had to get this new one locked in fast, lest somebody go squat the username. So as soon as I got the old one changed, I logged out. I also changed the email, because I didn't want it tied to the same email, and I took the phone number off. Then I went over and created a brand new Twitter account.
I'm impressed that Twitter did it so fast. This handle was immediately available, so I jumped right on it and signed up. Then it took a couple of hours for the caching to stop showing the old profile. So it was still showing the old profile for a while if you went straight to twitter.com/JerryBanfield, but now it's got the new one correctly. Even on the mobile app, when I clicked the old one, it sent me back to myself. I edited the bio on the old account to send people over to my new profile and to give people the idea that this is an archive of my old stuff. The old account has 18-some thousand tweets, most of which were posted automatically with various programs.
I've debated whether I want to do auto-posting or not on the new account, and I do. I definitely want to automatically share my content. However, I have a consideration here: if I want the highest quality engagement on my Twitter profile, I probably want to organically post videos. So I'm probably going to test putting videos on this Twitter profile at some point. When I tested that on my old profile, my algorithm was so garbaged up that we couldn't even tell if the test was successful or not. For now, I'm just sharing links out to my YouTube videos on this Twitter profile, and I'm doing that automatically. I made a video showing how to do that in Zapier. I did have to go into Zapier and change the Zap account, because it thought it was working but it just wasn't running, all because of how I'd changed the URL. So I'm really excited for this change to get off the old account where the algorithm's dead and get on this new one.
Short-term pain for long-term gain
Now, the last point I'd like to emphasize for those of you hardcore enough to read the whole thing is the willingness to take short-term pain in the consideration of long-term gain. This is why, for years, people suggested: start a new channel, Jerry. Start a crypto channel. Start a gaming channel. Start a business channel. Stop putting all your videos on this dead main channel where your new videos are lucky to get a few hundred views because the algorithm's all junked up. It took me a long time to be willing to go through that short-term loss when I first started the crypto channel.
When I very first began the new crypto channel, I thought I might get fewer views on my videos, and at first, I did. When I first put them up, these videos didn't have nearly as many views. One had like 50 at most, another had less than that. When I first put them up, they hardly got any views. In the short term, I would have gotten more views by putting them on my main channel. However, once I got to about the Gala Games one, I started to get some search traffic on them. Then videos actually started to go out in the browse feed, because my algorithm wasn't trashed. Now the least-viewed video on that channel is at 140 views, and that's about the average of what I was getting on the main channel, maybe a little less. You'll notice now almost all of my videos are getting at least 500 views, which is way more than I was getting on the main channel. I'm impressed with how quickly this new crypto channel has been doing so well, and it's given me the inspiration to look at everything else the same way.
I can't sign up for Twitter Blue for 90 days on this new Twitter account, but I'm impressed with the replies I'm getting. For example, I responded to Supoman's tweet. Now, keep in mind, this is a brand new account, and according to Twitter's documentation, they're not as likely to push my tweets out on a brand new account. Back when the old account was on Twitter Blue, some of the replies I got got like 10,000 impressions. Now look at this one from Michael. He put out a tweet that got 46,000, and I actually got about a fourth of what he got on my reply, with a brand new account. I'm thinking that's a really good sign. Why? Once I get this account established, continue to use it, and continue to build it over time, we're looking at the algorithm working correctly on a fresh account, plus eventually being able to get Twitter Blue. I should be able to way outperform the old account, which appears to be permanently stagnated because of so much negative feedback from doing follow-for-follow.
I'm grateful to get a fresh start. If you want to go deeper on this kind of thing with me, I share much more of my thinking in my YouTube Coaching playlist. I appreciate you spending this time with me, and I'll keep updating you on how everything is going with my business in future posts.