Another 13 tricks of twitter

1.  Tweet in 140 Characters or Less

Millions of users. 140 characters. What started in 2006 as a micro blogging site for a handful of uses has grown to one of the biggest social media platforms on the planet. Twitter limits tweets to 140 characters, including punctuation and spaces. Or, said another way, the length of the last two sentences.

2.  Know Your Twitter Lingo

LOL! WTF? OMG. Twitter is full of abbreviations and shorthand, naturally born of its 140 character limitation. Necessity being the mother of invention, the Twitter community has created an impressive catalog of terms which can convey a lot of detail in only a few characters. Check out the Twitter Dictionary on our site.

3. Build A Trustworthy Brand On Twitter

Think back to the time you bought something with great promise and expectation, only to have it break immediately. It took time to trust that brand again, right? Same goes for social media. Your audience wants content they can relate to and content that provides value. No brand has ever been criticized for being polite, honest, and transparent with their customers.

4. Use The Twitter Hashtag Like a Pro

Justin Timberlake and Jimmy Fallon have mercilessly mocked the hashtag, but it does have incredible power on Twitter. Used properly, a hashtag can help your brand reach more users and be involved with what's trending. Creating your own hashtag can help create buzz for your own efforts, too. Salesforce has some more #ideas over on their page. You can also take a look at Webopedia's Twitter Guide to Technology Topics hashtags here.

5. Image Size on Twitter is Important

A picture says a thousand words. Good thing, because we have a limited number of words to work with on Twitter. Fortunately, users have the option of attaching up to four pictures with each tweet, albeit at the cost of 23 characters. PC Mag breaks it down for us, including tips on an optimum size for your photo.

6. Get More Followers on Twitter

It's tough playing to an empty theater, so try a few methods to increase your number of followers. Fully completing your Twitter profile (including pictures), tweeting interesting or funny content and making frequent posts are all good ways to boost your following. Don't get too hung up on follower count, though; some brands have been known to falsely inflate their number by purchasing followers, a practice which really stinks.

7. Use embedded Tweets

If you're writing a blog or posting to a news site, embedding a tweet can help drive engagement. When tweets are embedded in content, the article headline and related Twitter account will appear. This is a great way to simultaneously increase clicks on the article and boost readership on Twitter.

8. Use Twitter SMS Commands For Quick Actions

Get direct messages, mentions, replies, follower notifications and retweets on the go. Twitter can be a fast-moving news source, a freight train of information. For users who want to stay connected, activating Twitter's mobile updates can provide the opportunity to interact with followers instantly through SMS. Twitter's own support page is a great resource.

9. Use Tools to Schedule Twitter Posts

Not everyone feels the need to be constantly checking Twitter, glued to their phone like a kid to Saturday morning cartoons. Yet, it is critically important for Twitter users to post frequently in order to build a trustworthy brand. Fortunately, there are several third-party apps which allow users to schedule tweets ahead of time so you can compose a message to be deployed at a later date.

10. Manage and Track the Success of Tweets

Just as Facebook provides business users with analytics to track the success of your posts, Twitter also has tools with which to measure the reach (impressions) and engagement of your efforts. With analytics we can at find out if our Twitter audience is listening or if we have to repeat ourselves. Again.

11. Live Tweet an Event

The immediacy of Twitter is one of its biggest strengths, so consider live-tweeting an event which you think will be of interest to your followers. Whether one is actually at an event or watching it on live television, tweeting what you see, think and hear is massively appealing to Twitter followers. Create and use a special hashtag just for the event.

12. Show Your Expertise With a Twitter Chat

Ask the experts! Wait a minute… you are the expert. Successful brands parlay their expertise into Twitter engagement by scheduling a block of time in which they will respond directly to comments and questions posed by their followers. This is called a Twitter Chat. An exceptional way of bringing together a niche audience, a Twitter Chat could take the form of  a predetermined question and answer set.

13. Be Personal, Not a PR Department

While some high-profile celebrities employ a PR department to manage their Twitter activity, some of Hollywood's most famous have a great time chatting on Twitter. Check out some banter between high-profile people over on Twitter’s media page, and find a way to get celebrities involved in your Tweets.

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Top 10 twitter tricks

1. You Can Schedule Tweets On Twitter

Scheduling tweets is a huge Twitter timesaver, as it allows you to plan out your day – or even your week or month – well in advance and not have to worry about always being on Twitter to take care of business. You might already be using apps such as Hootsuite, Buffer or TweetDeck to schedule your tweets, which are all great tools.

But did you know you can also schedule tweets on Twitter.com? Yep: simply head on over toads.twitter.com, login (or signup if you haven’t already done so), click on the ‘compose tweet’ button and then the ‘scheduling’ tab. Et voila!

To view your scheduled tweets, click on ‘Creatives’ and then ‘Tweets’ and then the ‘Scheduled’ button. You can schedule both organic and promoted tweets up to one year in advance.

2. Twitter Has Keyboard Shortcuts

Some people are die-hard keyboard users and occasionally you get the feeling that they would rather touch a real mouse than the computerised one on their desk. Twitter feels their pain and has a ton of keyboard shortcuts that can have you whizzing around your tweets in no time.

For example, if you hit the ‘N’ on your keyboard whilst on Twitter.com, you’ll be able to immediately start writing a new tweet. Hit F to mark a tweet as a favourite, R to reply and T to retweet.

Check the visual below for all the details, which comes courtesy of James Traf.

3. You Can Embed Tweets Into Any Website

Embedding tweets into your website or blog is brilliant way to drive engagement back to your Twitter profile. Why? Because an embedded tweet is interactive, and anyone logged into Twitter can do all sorts of cool things (like reply, retweet, favourite etc) to your tweet when it’s embedded on your site (or any site). It’s also a far more elegant solution than doing a screen grab of a tweet and pasting that on your site, and even if somebody deletes the original tweet the embedded tweet will still be visible.

To embed a tweet, find the tweet you want to embed, click on the more button (…) below the tweet (which is the ellipses symbol – the three dots in a row) and select ‘Embed Tweet’. Now just copy and paste the supplied HTML into the desired location on your website.

4. Twitter Supports Advanced Search Operators

Twitter Search is a super powerful but criminally underused part of the Twitter core. You’ve probably searched for one or two things in the past using the search box at the top of the screen on Twitter.com, but did you know that this also supports really advanced search operators?

For example, if you want to search for just tweets with links, you can use the filter:links operator.

Example: amazing filter:links

Click on the link above and see what happens (it opens in another tab). This is a search for any tweets published on Twitter that contain the word amazing and also contain a link. This is good stuff!

I wrote a whole article about Twitter search hacks – check here for all the details!

5. You Can Setup Multiple Twitter Accounts Using The Same Email Address

This one’s a real time saver. When you setup a new account on Twitter it wants you to use an original email address – that is, an email that isn’t in use anywhere on the system. If you work in a business or agency that manages lots of Twitter profiles this can be a real pain. Thankfully, there’s a fairly elegant way around it.

This tip requires you to have a Gmail account as your main email (or, at least access to a Gmail account). Most people don’t know that Gmail supports the use of the ‘+’ character to let you filter your main email. You don’t have to do anything on your Gmail account. All you do is add the ‘+’ and another word after the first part of your email address – the part before the @gmail.com – and you can use this as a “new”, standalone email address around the web. Here’s the sweet part: all emails sent to this “new” email will still go to your main Gmail inbox.

For example, if your email address was johnsmith@gmail.com, if you usejohnsmith+twitter@gmail.com on any website, any email sent to the latter would go to your inbox (johnsmith@gmail.com). Gmail knows that the part before the plus symbol is your username, but Gmail understands the part after the plus symbol, too.

If you use Gmail you can try this yourself now – fsimply send an email toyourusername+whatever@gmail.com, where yourusername = your Gmail username.

(You could even use the word whatever if you wanted!)

Now you can go ahead and use yourusername+twitter@gmail.com for a new Twitter profile, even if yourusername@gmail.com is already in use on Twitter. You could also set up Twitter profiles using yourusername+twitter2@gmail.com, yourusername+clientname@gmail.com, yourusername+facebook@gmail.com, and so on.

Even better, you can configure Gmail as usual so that it filters and labels these “new” email addresses however you want.

Cool, eh?

6. You Can Turn Off All Twitter Emails With A Single Click

When you join Twitter all the emails you receive can be a real PITA, and it seems like a month doesn’t go by without Twitter adding yet another email notification to its roster. Thankfully, you can turn all of them off with a single click: simply log on to Twitter.com, visit your profile settings and click on the ‘Email notifications’ tab. From here click on the ‘Turn off’ button to disable all email. Nice!

7. If You Start A Tweet With @Username, It’s A Reply

This is a mistake I see people who have been using Twitter for years and years make every single day. If you start a tweet with @username it’s a reply, and will ONLY be seen by the person you’re sending the tweet to and anyone else on Twitter who is following BOTH of you. Nobodyelse will see that tweet in their timeline as Twitter assumes it’s a reply and won’t deliver it (although it will be visible on your profile and in Twitter search results to everybody).

If you put someone’s @username ANYWHERE ELSE in the tweet but right at the very beginning, it’s a mention and will be seen by everyone who follows you. You’re welcome!

8. You Can Send a Promoted Tweet That’s Invisible To Your Followers

Twitter’s Promoted Tweet advertising tool is a powerful way to reach a targeted audience and drive engagement, awareness and clicks. But did you know that you can select to show a Promoted Tweet only to your target audience, and not your existing followers?

To do this, simply select the ‘Promoted-only’ option when you’re constructing your Promoted Tweet.

Why would you want to do this? Showing very specific content to a select group of people is a very effective way to drive new business, especially if it’s a promotion that may not be as valuable to your existing fans, or might be something they’ve already seen. Or, it might be something you only want to give to new customers – for example, 25 percent off of their first order. With a promoted-only Promoted Tweet, you can do that!

(Note: while promoted-only tweets won’t be visible on your timeline or be delivered to your followers, they will show up in Twitter search.)

9. Twitter Gives You Free Advanced Analytics For The Last Month Of Your Tweets

Did you know that Twitter gives free analytics tools to everybody? Yessir, they do, and you can get all the goodness by simply visiting analytics.twitter.com and logging in with your account.

From here you want to choose the ‘Tweets’ option which lets you look at detailed analytics for the last 28 days of your tweets, including overall impressions, engagement rate, link clicks, retweets, favorites and replies.

But here’s the best stuff – click on any tweet to load a pop-up of all the key metrics for that tweet, including impressions, clicks, favorites, follows, retweets and more.

Magnifico!

10. You Can Pin A Tweet To The Top Of Your Profile… Permanently

Twitter came relatively late to this party – Facebook has supported pinned messages on its Pages for quite some time now – but anyone can pin any tweet to the top of their profile, where it will sit permanently until it’s unpinned or replaced by another pinned tweet.

To do this, find the tweet you can to pin, click on the more button below the tweet (which is the ellipses symbol – the three dots in a row) and select ‘Pin to your profile page’. Click the ‘Pin’ button on the pop-up and that tweet is now permanently fixed to the top of your profile.

To unpin a tweet, click on the more button again and choose ‘Unpin from profile page’.

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