Even if you’re 22, be on Twitter instead of being on LinkedIn. Twitter is where you get opportunities 10x better than what you get on LinkedIn. Twitter is social proof. If you can demonstrate your knowledge, add value, and build social proof, opportunities will come your way.

https://twitter.com/pitdesi/status/1298666128772800513?s=20

Last month alone, I have made money in six figures with 0 capital, just through twitter connections alone, in the last two months. Be it freelance projects, investing ideas, or some other business deals, sales for my company, I have gotten such deals from Twitter connections.

I have been able to gain access to few trading ideas I couldn’t have, if I had sheltered myself by only reading stuff that others wrote. I wrote, people connected with me, I connected with people over DMs, and in the process of exchanging ideas, have come across few strategies.

I got to work with a few traders on backtesting systems for them, and also building websites for companies, blogs for traders, ecommerce websites for few others, etc., all of which has brought different sources of cashflow and broadened my personal & professional network.

And one more important thing is, on Twitter, whoever I connect with professionally, I also talk to personally, at a certain level. On Linkedin, that rarely happens. @david_perell rightly said that Linkedin is the academic conference, Twitter is the bar where academicians meet.

Twitter makes it easier to keep it professional, and at the same time interact at a much more personal level than LinkedIn. If you aren’t using and leveraging the power of Twitter, especially in 2020 when Twitter has only about 600-700m people in the audience, you’re losing out.

For perspective:
Facebook has about 2.5Billion monthly active users.
Instagram has about 1.1-1.2Bn monthly active users.
Twitter has only about 300Mn odd monthly active users.
This is expected to grow at least 2-3 fold in the next decade. Might definitely happen sooner too.

So, if you aren’t leveraging the power of Twitter to document your evolution in your chosen field of profession, or whatever field you look at as something you want to do for life, making connections, and leveraging those connections, you’re missing out.

On LinkedIn, you don’t get to interact with big CEOs, founders of companies you’re applying to, the people in the positions of power. There, you only link with the middle management. On Twitter, you do things right, you’ll get noticed by the top 1% of the world.

Just for perspective:
Paul Graham had liked one of my comments and also replied to it. (humblebrag)
Rithesh Agarwal follows me (I don’t even know why, probably because I was tasked to do the blog for Oyo, but then COVID put the project on hold)

I was also able to reach out to many people who are considered inaccessible or out of reach in the field (finance, trading, investing) for a chat on the podcast, from a portfolio manager to a fund manager managing millions - a lot of people have responded.

And, I am not even an expert in Finance or that accomplished. But that’s not the point here. What people want to do is see your timeline here and get to know what kind of person you are. Your timeline reflects your quality of thoughts.

If you provide value here on Twitter, no matter the field, and you do it consistently, your efforts will amplify 10x in terms of the opportunities that Twitter sends your way. You have NO CLUE until you actually do it and take Twitter seriously.

So, if Paul Graham thinks the comment from some random guy in India who has less than 4k followers (back at that time) is interesting enough to like and reply, that’s true meritocracy for you. You get noticed for the quality of your thoughts and the value you bring to the table.

So, twitter is a truly capitalist platform, but also 100% meritocratic. There definitely are flaws to the system, but you can’t sustain for long exploiting the system or succumbing to the flaws. Done correctly, you can gain 10-50x at least from Twitter than from LinkedIn.

So, all I would tell you is to start sharing. Don’t involve in petty arguments, don’t indulge petty people. Make sure to provide value with every tweet you put out - whether it saves money for people, gives knowledge, or entertains people, let it be valuable.