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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.
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.
