Back to Social Media basics: Twitter
Everybody uses Twitter, but what is the right way to use it? You only have 280 characters to get your message across, so it’s important to make every word count. With the potential to amplify your marketing messages beyond your target market and generate leads, figuring out how to use Twitter effectively will make sure you no longer miss out on the advantages it can offer your business.
This post will take you back to basics to help maximise your Twitter presence and visually present your business and brand the way you’ve always wanted to.
Align your aims
Before you venture out on the Twitter journey, make sure you have clear aims and a strategy in place, as you need to be confident that you are using the platform for the right reasons. Your content needs to be relevant and of value, so make sure you are continually building relationships, talking to your customers and becoming part of the broader discussion. A great way you can do this is through mentioning other accounts through the @ symbol.
Image is everything
From your profile picture to your bio, to the content you tweet, your Twitter profile should always be representative of your brand and also reflect its identity through areas such as corporate colours and tone of voice. Twitter, as well as other social media platforms, is another great tool to use to position both yourself and your company as a thought leader. By sharing media coverage, relevant articles, engaging with customers, partners and publications, it shows that you have knowledge of the industry and that you’ve built up a network of other like-minded individuals and organisations. Plus, it’s another avenue for keeping up to date with current affairs.
Keep it short
Although Twitter has recently doubled its character limit to 280 words, this does not mean you need to use the entire allowance. Try and keep to the one sentence rule for the majority of your tweets because you want people to focus on the message, rather than any superfluous waffle. With tweets a great way to drive people to your website or blog, make sure to use a URL shortener to condense any web links and keep that word count down. The key is to keep your tweets snappy and engaging.
Use those hashtags (#)
Hashtags are the perfect way to gain visibility of your content beyond the walls of your followers. #Hashtags classify your content and group it with relevant tweets. So the best advice is to keep up to date with the #trending box so that you can view those hot topics and choose what to engage with. Yet, despite the growing greatness of the hashtag, make sure to limit how many you use per tweet; the general rule is to not go over two or three.
Maximise the multimedia
Don’t let text be all you tweet. Spice up your content with pictures where they are relevant because at the end of the day a picture can speak a thousand words and when you are limited to 280 characters that’s always handy. For this reason, photos also generate more engagement than tweets, so they are an excellent way to stand out from the other 500 million tweets sent every day. However, don’t neglect videos as they are a great way to encourage people to engage directly with your content, but again keep it short, 30-45 seconds is more than enough.
Using Twitter might seem complicated at first, but it really doesn’t need to be. Within no time at all, using the platform will become second nature. However, using a PR agency (ahem) with social media expertise can combat the problem altogether, as they can take care of Twitter for you.
