Imagine a huge party, or pub or networking hall, where there are hundreds and thousands of conversations taking place all at once. It’s busy, it looks great fun – Welcome to Twitter.
Are you in one of those chats or are you standing on the periphery, looking on whilst the room continues to buzz? Whoever you are on Twitter, we have put together a guide on how to Tweet successfully in 2019…
First up, the basics – Your Twitter account.
Make sure you can tick off each of these:
ࠢ Your profile image – Something that represents you well
ࠢ Your completed and enticing Bio – These are crawl-able by Twitter’s search engine so vital the info here is exactly what you want to be known for
ࠢ A link to your website if applicable
ࠢ A pinned Tweet – A tweet that states ‘You’ in one hit
ࠢ A location (even just Country)
Basic promotion once the above is complete can include:
- Add your Twitter details to your website in plain sight.
- Add your Twitter details to your email signature and business cards.
- If you are a business with a location, display your Twitter details prominently in public areas.
So how do you join the party? Start with these –
- Follow relevant people (more info below on how).
- Like tweets that interest you / your business.
- Retweet tweets like the above, but do not over-do this.
- Reply to tweets (even if you are not part of the conversation), providing you can add value or expert opinion.
- Start a conversation and add a @mention (tag) another user(s) of influence or relevance to what you are tweeting about – something that starts people talking. The below is an example of a mention.
- If you are mainly looking to promote your business services within your personal Twitter account, try not to hard-sell the whole time, it’s never appreciated. Offering insightful and helpful tweets and replies are appreciated.
Small Party? How to get more friends…
How do I get more Twitter Followers? It’s a well asked question, there are plenty of answers. Some good, some not so.
Buying Followers – Just don’t do it. Ever. You will be wasting your money on fake profiles that will never interact in a meaningful way, or even at all.
Following others – Do it, but do it with care and focus. Think of your own interests and try to find like-minded users. There are a few ways of doing this:
-
-
-
- Use the search function within Twitter to find specific users and follow.
- Take a look at a specific user’s own Followers – There will be plenty here that you may wish to follow.
- Use the Twitter search function again, but this time search using #hashtags, see image. In the results, click the People tab to get best results. You can also filter these to a nearby location.
- You can also play detective and go through your email contacts as well as friends on other social networks. Make sure you add those that will be interested in what you have to say on Twitter. You can upload your email contacts directly to Twitter following instructions here.
-
-
Following other users will see a large uptake follow back. You can repeat this continuously monthly, and un-follow those that did not follow, if you wish – it will maintain a balanced following / followers ratio.
Once you have upped your following, repeat those first 5 steps listed above (this includes following more people!).
Now what?
Get chatting! Start to tweet interesting and unique content – or your take on the content already out there. Retweet and reply and mention away.
Schedule content if you can (we use Hootsuite for this). If you can plan content in advance, you stand a better chance of maintaining a good tweeting schedule. Take some time out at the start of the month, or at some point, and create some tweets on a word doc before scheduling as a batch.
You can use the search function in the same way to find interesting and relevant tweets. This time select Latest to get an up to date real time list of possible conversations – Perfect for starting a conversation!
If you are mainly looking to promote your business services within your personal Twitter account, try not to hard-sell the whole time, it’s never appreciated. Offering insightful and helpful tweets and replies are appreciated.
Use links in tweets. These are liked and RT’d (Retweeted) more often than tweets with no links.
Use Hashtags in Tweets. No more than 2 normally and not every tweet. A hashtag should represent either what your tweet is about or the audience it might be aimed at.
Tweet at a steady rhythm. When you overdo the number of tweets, you will lose followers.
Try to keep coming back, daily.
It’s time to mingle…
