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Breaking down what might be the best Twitter content marketing campaign of all time
Helloooo content connoisseurs.
It’s Perrin from Content Bites.
I’ve always found Twitter really hard. And that’s why I love seeing people who have completely hacked it with amazing content — especially if it’s part of a business launch. Today, I’m going to show you the best one I’ve ever found.
Appetizers: Links from Intercom, CXL, Animalz and more…
Main Course: Maybe the best Twitter content campaign of all time
Let’s dig in.
Appetizers: Content about content 🤯
Don’t Build It, Yet: How Content Can Validate Your Next Product Idea (link)
Competitor Comparison Landing Pages: 3 Unique Strategies (link)
Insights From 4 Content Marketing Tests (link)
How to Gain Your First (or Next) 1,000 Instagram Followers - 26 Tips (link)
How Displaying More Posts on the Blog Page Improves Crawl Depth (link)
Main Course: Breaking down what might be the best Twitter content marketing campaign of all time
Case study for you guys today.
This is brilliant. Tactical. And maybe even a little bit funny.
We talk in this newsletter about the more “core” parts of content marketing: mostly publishing content on your website and promoting it a bunch of different ways.
There are, of course, lots of other ways to do content marketing.
It’s usually just a little more rare to see ultra-successful examples of businesses using them.
But I did find a great one…
And that is a company called Autopilot.
Autopilot is a consumer fintech company that helps its customers invest money.
There have got to be how many of those companies out there? Maybe a million? Tough niche. Even tougher content marketing.
But the team at Autopilot (as far as I know, there’s no actual content marketing team there; it’s just a couple of founders and a small, general team) had a brilliant idea.
And not only did they pull it off; they seem to have achieved true viral escape velocity, and have used one content campaign to launch an entire company.
Even better, they did it on Twitter.
Twitter is good for a lot of stuff, but lots of times, conversions can be hit or miss, at least on the consumer side.
Autopilot, on the other hand, knocked it completely out of the park.
So today, we’re going to break down their content campaign, and then we’re going to brainstorm how we can do something similar.
Autopilot’s brilliant Twitter content / campaign
This content strategy is almost so simple it hurts.
First, a little more about what Autopilot does.
Autopilot is an investment platform, but not just any investment platform. It’s an investment platform that allows users to set up investment portfolios that copy the best investors in the US.
So, for example, you could set up a portfolio that tracks Warren Buffet's portfolio exactly. You have a portfolio, Buffet has a portfolio, and when Buffett makes a trade, that trade automatically happens for you, too.
In other words, the value proposition could be summed up as: there are lots of people better at investing than you; instead of making your own stock picks, you can just copy those investors directly.
Cool, but a bit slightly difficult to explain.
If the average Joe-schmoe content marketer were to take this and run with it, we might expect content explaining the pros and cons of copying popular investors, how to do it, and probably something about the features of the platform.
Boring, right? But jeez louise, it’d be tough NOT to be boring, too, right?
The Autopilot founders had a much, much better idea.
Instead, they created something sensational.
They created Twitter accounts for the biggest celebrities they have on their roster of “pilots” that publicly track and publish stock trades of those “celebrity” investors.
They didn’t even do it a lot.
They just did it for the top three. One Twitter account each. You can see them here:
Then, they would post content about:
And then it was just a flood of content. All the accounts would retweet each other.
In case you don’t want to click, here’s the spoiler: they all have MAD followers.
As of the time of writing, the Warren Buffet tracker has 103,000 followers. The Michael Burry stock tracker has 249,000 followers. And the Nancy Pelosi stock tracker has 345,000 followers.
That’s a combined 697,000 followers.
And they haven’t even really BEEN on Twitter for that long. All the accounts are just over a year old.
The result?
Autopilot grew to over $1M in annual recurring revenue in 4 months. FOUR.
The founder, Chris Josephs, reports they hit that number without spending a dollar on advertising (screenshot).
It was just content, content, and more content built for – and distributed to – a very specific audience on a very specific platform.
How can WE use this?
A lot of times, when we look at case studies, it’s pretty easy to steal and retrofit the tactics used by top 1% content marketers.
Here, it might not be so easy.
There are just so many stars aligning here: the platform, the ability to leverage other people’s celebrity, and timing (Twitter wasn’t in as much of a death spiral at the time).
Still, I think we can steal some of this to try on for size.
To figure that out, let’s think about the main takeaways here. What makes these Autopilot Twitter campaigns work?
I’d say it’s because:
They leverage other people’s celebrity
They tap into an endless supply of content
They’re shareable
They’re a way to monitor some kind of trend
So let’s try to do it with an imaginary business of our own.
To use an example I’ve used before, let’s pretend we have a print-on-demand hoodie business.
How would we make this type of strategy work? Here’s what we might do.
1. Create “hoodie trackers” for celebrities that tend to wear lots of hoodies.
I’m not doing anything special here. Literally just thinking about hoodies and trying to remember which celebrities I’ve seen wearing them.
The ideas I came up with were:
If I sat here for a while, I’m sure I could come up with more, but these are nice, fat, easy targets.
For every one of those, I’d create a Twitter/X account. The profile picture would be a picture of each celebrity/celebrities.
In the bio, all of the accounts would link to each other, and they’d link to the hoodie shop, similar to what Autopilot does in its Twitter bios (screenshot).
2. I’d post content daily, looking for juicy angles and leveraging “throwback” content.
I’d have alerts set up for each celebrity, and I’d be monitoring their socials.
Obviously, any time anyone shows up in a hoodie, I’d post it instantly.
Because I wouldn’t expect that to happen daily, I’d also be posting throwback pictures with commentaries, similar to how Autopilot’s accounts also post general information about investing (but with juicy angles).
3. I’d promote similar hoodies in the comments & DMs.
For every hoodie posted, I’d have a designer create a similar hoodie for my print-on-demand store.
Then, I’d use some combination of social media automation tools and people on my team to:
Post promotional links on Twitter threads that get over 25 likes – the promotional
I’d DM people who liked it & offer discounts to similar hoodies
4. I’d create “collections” content on my website with hoodies that are similar to each celebrities hoodies.
Think, blog post listicles ranking Kanye’s hoodies.
THESE can themselves be promoted in all the other ways you’d normally promote content: on your socials, in organic search, even with a little paid traffic.
This kind of content can also encourage multiple purchases and can have lots and lots of CTAs throughout.
I think the BEST version of this is a truly large machine.
I also think it’s kind of a coin flip about whether or not I could get this to work. But if it did work, I’d be building as many little celebrity hoodie silos as humanly possible.
Riding celebrity coattails is a very tried-and-true way to promote stuff, and building “trackers” is a super cool, innovative way to do it.
If I had a product that was tough to promote in other ways, I’d be investing in stuff like this for sure.
Summary for how to do this yourself
Find the intersection of celebrities and your products
Build a tracker, ranker, or any other kind of juicy content conveyor belt for multiple celebrities
Roll them out on social platforms where you have either the largest existing audience or the most resources/experience
Have those accounts promote each other
When any piece of content gets traction, use it to promote products
If it works, scale it up with more trackers/rankers/etc.
Measure & repeat
That’s the issue. If you missed last week’s issue, you can read it here.
Go forth & conquer.
—Perrin
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