This is how to get a famous person to reply to your tweets

Twitter is an incredible opportunity to connect with your idols, but how do you actually manage to strike up a conversation? Quora user Shefaly Yogendra jotted down her thoughts.

I am often curious about why anyone might want a famous celebrity to reply to their tweets. It is not like we are all impressed by the same celebrities, or even see the same people as celebrities.

Never mind that!

Some famous celebrities do not manage their own Twitter streams, they have teams and you can be certain the “reply”, if any, comes from that team. Such celebrities are likely to be self-promoting and not necessarily keen on “engagement”. Your probability of getting a reply from such celebrities is slim, unless engaging with you somehow increases their cachet.

Some famous celebrities do manage their own Twitter streams. They follow people back, regularly engage, debate issues, and make mistakes. Your probability of getting a reply from such celebrities is finite.

To answer your question therefore here are some “tips” from randomly garnered experience:

1. Aim for a celebrity, who engages not just self-promotes. e.g. JK Rowling is famous for engaging — including with trolls.

2. Know when they are most active. e.g. I am a very early riser in the UK. I routinely converse with people in the Bay Area who are active on Twitter during their post-dinner hours. That is how I have engaged in a lot of back and forth with Marc Andreessen when he was active on Twitter. He is a bona fide Bay Area celebrity.

How to engage to “get attention”:

1. Participate in a thread/ conversation instead of doing drive-by tweets at them.

2. Amplify their message if you agree, or engage constructively if you disagree. Among the engaging-type celebrities, only the thin-skinned get upset or block people for making smartly argued counterpoints that challenge or expand their worldview. In other words, add value.

3. If you cannot better the discussion, don’t say it. e.g. Tim Ferriss was asking yesterday what people might like to see in an updated version of his book The Four Hour Body. I replied from the point of being an XX chromosome person older than him that I might like him to address building age defying fitness with the changes in bones and hormones as we age. That is a pretty specific input and as of this morning UK time, remains the most “liked” — including by him — reply to his question. I mention the “most liked” because it appears that the OP cares about such metrics. I also mention it to show that it is not rocket science to get attention.

4. Don’t waste your time waiting for “celebrities” to reply to you. Twitter, for all its bad reputation, is a great tool for learning. Many celebrities have not a lot to say that, if you have a wide network, you may not already have read or heard about.

This article originally appeared on Quora

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