Everyone has a favorite social network. Although stats on globalwebindex proved that Twitter is only 4th according to last year’s leading list of active social platforms, it is still my absolute favorite. I’ve heard of people who dislike using it or even young people who think it’s just for “old people,” or whatever the reason it ranked 4th. I’m here to help you understand the use of Twitter tweets a little better so you can use it to benefit you and your business best. First and foremost, don’t be afraid to start exploring. The only way to understand something is to gain some first-hand experience. So go ahead, create an account if you haven’t done so already!
Now, I hope you can follow my simple instructions. I will try to make them as easy to understand as possible.
4 Highlights of a Tweet
First and foremost, you must never forget that you only have room in each tweet for 140 characters. That means, you should always keep in mind that “short and sweet” is what will get you points with your audience! Now, let’s go through the basics and the important bits of a tweet that can drive interest to it:
Hashtags
Surely you’ve seen words with a number sign (#) in front of it like this, #TwitterTricks. This is called a hashtag, which is used to help others find labels, keywords, topics, and data. Say you want to search for dog biscuits. If you put those words into the Twitter search bar, it will pull up everything with either dog, biscuits, or dog biscuits. It won’t be as specific. If you enter #dogbiscuits and you have a marketing campaign going on using #dogbiscuits as the hashtag, you can track it more easily and a specific audience with similar interests.
In February, Becky McNeer and I went to the NY Toy Fair to meet some clients. It lasted a week and there were a whole lot of people in the fair. However, we were able to keep up with some of the great events that were going on throughout the show by following the hashtag #NYToyFair2014 on Twitter.
Mentions
Mentions are a great way for you to tap or tag someone. You’re including someone’s name so that they can see what you wrote to or about them. You include the symbol “@” in front of the person’s Twitter name. For example, my Twitter name is vB_mama. If you want to be sure to catch my attention, you would include my name in the post like this @vB_mama. Your post might look something like:
I just got back from a shopping trip with @vB_mama at the #GroveLA.
See where I also included the hashtag?
Link Shorteners
Not every post has to have a link. Sometimes I like to post random things about my life that I know people can relate to or that perhaps others might find funny. However, there are times when I need to share things on my blog to help it gain some traffic. So I include the link for that post. We all know that links can sometimes take up a lot of space, which is not something we could afford to lose since we are only limited to 140 characters.
There are many sites that offer shorteners. Two that I like most are bit.ly and Hootsuite. Their platforms are no brainers. You simply enter your full link into the place it asks you to and click the button to shorten it then copy the shortened link. See the following bit.ly images if you’re confused:
Place to paste your long link
Then …
Copy the newly shortened link
Once you’ve copied your shortened link, go ahead and paste it onto your tweet. Here’s an example:
Looking for the simplest explanation to boost your exposure through your tweets? http://bit.ly/1ijuV5z
Pictures & Videos
“Pictures say a thousand words” and when you’re limited to 140 characters, you want something that can create sudden interest. For me, my eyes usually get larger when I stream through tweets and find that one image that keeps me there or maybe even keeps me interested enough to click on a link attached to it. Pictures tell stories. When you’re having to stream through tweets, your eyes would naturally go through the pictures first before the words, am I right?
Take a look at the following example:
voiceBoks has a food blog where information are tweeted through the @voiceBoksFood account. There are a lot less engagements and activities for the posts that have no picture in comparison to those that do.
Go ahead and click on some of the pictures found on the left side bar of their Twitter account and compare it to the posts without pictures found on the stream at https://twitter.com/voiceboksfood. When you click on the images, find the link in the tweet that has the URL start with pic.twitter … and click on it. It will take you to the tweet itself and show you how many people retweeted it or placed it in their favorites. Do you notice the difference?
To my knowledge, picture links can’t be shortened. When you upload it onto Twitter and try to shorten the link, there’s a chance the picture might not show up. Also, I never try to do it because if you have another shortened link with that post, people might get confused as to which one to click onto.
Here’s an example of a tweet using 3 of the highlights I mentioned above:
Feel free to click on it if you’d like to retweet or engage
If I wanted to mention @CasdonToys I would have to shorten my message, which was not necessary here since they were already keeping track of the hashtag #CasdonToys.
Additional Tips
Use hashtags to find and drive interest to your own account. Reply, retweet, and mention when you find something interesting.
Remember the saying, “jack of all, expert of none?” Well, that also applies to relevance with your account. You will most likely have the attention of people who will continue to follow you when you provide a certain interest rather than if you are all over the place.
Keeping people interested is key to helping your account grow. Just think about this one a second. You’ll get it. So … if your account focuses on stuff to do with social media, then maybe you can provide inspiring quotes by Mark Zuckerberg, maybe provide some social stats, or anything that you think your audience could find interesting.
Twitter can be daunting at first, especially when everything moves so fast. Just don’t give up, because once you get the hang of it, you WILL love it. Perhaps in another post I can tell you the reasons it is my favorite compared to the other platforms.