DevRel Engagement and GTM Tactics on X / Twitter

How many times did the product manager ask you to promote a feature? How many times did the marketing folks reach out and asked you to like or comment on their LinkedIn? Ahh yes, the wonders of working in Developer Relations (DevRel). Ok so we’re all trying to farm some honest engagement and get a bunch of eyes looking at the cool tech we’re building, but how do you do it well?

I have a good bonus tip here for DevRel folks - I’ll give you a KPI for each of the tactics so you can propose measuring them too and A/B test.

So how do you create an engaging post? I’ll share a bunch of DevRel go-to-market (GTM) tactics that specifically work well on X/Twitter (to some extent you can copy this over to LinkedIn / Reddit).

Genuine Value

You can’t mess this one up. It can’t be some fluffy marketing announcement. Your company did an acquisition? fine, fine. Not interesting. Unless you’re a MAG7 company or there’s a very deep devtool relationship between the two companies then there is likely no actual interest to users.

Your news story to break has to be relevant and actionable to users to the point of them going into your docs, downloading the new version, trying it out, exploring more. Otherwise, you lost them. No one is interested in “Next month we unveil bla bla bla” and there’s literally no action to take on that, so what’s the point?

You have to deliver truly genuine, authentic and sincere tangible value to your users with that story.

What even is the story? Notice how I didn’t call this out. It can be:

• New product
• New 3rd-party integration
• New open-source template that builds on your product

All of those are great examples that resonate well with users of devtool companies.

DevRel KPIs:

So how do you know if your post would work? Easy:

• X gives you a “views” impression count, track that and compare it relatively to other posts
• Share it internally on Slack / Discord with your engineering chanel, was there a “wow” effect?

Unusual Story

As with many things unique to X, good things come in threads :-)

Your first post has to capture and be compelling enough to stand out. Optimize for the following:

• Short, concise.
• Compress the take-away to a sentence

Here is a good example from Hassan:

DevRel KPIs:

Time-To-Coolness-Factor: how many bookmarks do you have on the post? Bookmarks on X are often a good measure of how interesting a post is that users bookmark it so that even though they’re busy now and just doom scrolling a bit they can get back to what captured their attention before and deep-dive into it.

Visual asset

It’s hard to stand out with just text, and I hope you already know that social networks like X and LinkedIn has an algorithm that punishes posts with external link references so that’s a big no-no.

That leaves you with either a good visual image, or a short (<30 seconds) video to capture attention. Don’t mess this up. Show the value. Make it intriguing to explore more.

KPIs are similar as the above for capturing your messaging and storytelling - rely on “views” as an impressions metric.

The Gift

So far we focused on the first post. Next, comes the gift you provide developers. That’s the link that you can’t put on the first post due to algos.

Along with the link, make sure you tell developers “why”. Some examples:

• This allows you to build
• This is 100% open source
• This cuts your time by 50%, get faster

Note: avoid UTMs in the link unless necessary.

KPIs:

Referral source - track your analytics for referral sources from X/Twitter.

Extra Boost

To boost engagement on X, you can tag other accounts that are in some way related.

Here are some examples:

• If you’re releasing a product that integrates with company Y, tag them (in the second post, not the first)
• If you’re releasing an open source template, tag the relevant (and high traffic) accounts that the project uses/built-on

Example: