21 Simple Twitter Tips That Everyone Should Utilize

Social Media Management is the core service that we offer at Strong Social. We exist to help create and curate content, post to your pages daily, grow your audience, and help generate leads for your business, I can tell you that Twitter is one network we work on with a 100% performance rate. This means that we can guarantee success on Twitter based on a number of factors.

After years of testing and refining methods, I can tell you that Twitter can work for almost any type of business you can think of. Twitter is by far our favorite Social Media network and for good reason since it still bring us over 80% of all our new business on a monthly basis. But for some, unfortunately it can still be very challenging trying to figure out what works for their business, so today we want to pass on some basic but necessary tips to help you optimize your Twitter profile, and fine-tune your social media habits to fast-track you to success.

The following 21 tips are designed to be simple – but necessary if you want to start your page on the right track.

1. Profile Picture-Perfect

Your profile picture is what someone sees in their mind’s eye when they think about your social media profile. That’s the whole point of the profile picture being there – you aren’t talking in person, so someone needs to be able humanize the voice you’re showcasing on social media in place of that eye contact connection.

Because of this, it’s imperative you find the right picture to use on your profile. This picture should be a headshot and professional quality. Twitter’s can sometimes decrease the quality of the photo you use, so uploading an image that already contains .JPG dust can only compound the blurriness of the low-quality photo.

Business accounts, on the other hand, don’t have the same luxury of having a face to showcase. In this case, a high-contrast brand image should be used. Look at Twitter accounts like Netflix, Amazon and Samsung. You can see they utilize as much of the icon space as possible with a simple, contrasting image. Make sure that your bio pic is good quality and visible.

2. Upgrade Your Twitter Bio

Your Twitter biography is something of a 30 second sales pitch. Your goal is to showcase as many of your talents and offerings, in a very short space while still including a human touch of personality. This short blurb is how you display yourself as a unique person and is what can help someone decide to follow you or not.

Consider the most important aspects of your personal brand identity. Are you a CEO? A thought leader? An activist? Think of important buzzwords that describe you as a person, as well as any important information that aligns you with a certain industry or movement.

Brands, again, have to shift this advice slightly. A brand isn’t a single person, so therefore they’ll need something more akin to a mission statement. What does the business do? What goals is it looking to accomplish?

3. Always Have a URL

Whether your URL is a promotional link, your LinkedIn page or a business site, it’s crucial to include an important link in the space provided on your Twitter biography. If you want better lead conversion stats, it’s imperative to have a working CTA link somewhere on your profile, whether in your biography or in the URL section just below your  Twitter bio.

4. Know Your Dimensions

Above we mentioned how using a low-quality profile picture can make an already bad picture look worse. Another way to avoid this is to be aware of the image dimensions Twitter uses for all profile images – a.k.a. your profile picture and header photo.

For profile pictures, the dimensions required are 400 pixels by 400 pixels. The header image, however, is obviously much larger. To use the most Twitter-friendly image possible, 1500 pixels wide by 500 pixels tall is necessary for optimization.

Another important aspect of your images is to understand the size of the images you’re allowed to use. Header images can be a max of 10 MB, while profile pictures can have a maximum size of 100 KB.

5. The Best Tweet Formula

If you’re not sure about how to formulate your tweets for optimum success, try this simple formula on for size:

[Key Message] [Link] [Hashtags]

When you order your tweets in this way, you tell a story that has flow. You inform someone of your message, give them a CTA to utilize and then align yourself with movements, trends and/or tags. This formula will bring you more likes and clicks than any other way.

6. Keep Tweets Short

While Twitter has been in talks to lengthen tweet character limits, we’re confident the limit will sit comfortably at 140 characters for quite a while. However, tweets with images will take away some of these characters. In order to add images to tweets, 114 characters are the maximum you can use, making your tweets 26 characters shorter than normal.

Twitter is already a platform that requires brevity, so reducing this character limit any more can be challenging. Start practicing shortening your tweets to only include the most important pieces of information, eliminating words that aren’t necessary.

7. Vary Your Content Sources

Followers on Twitter are obviously interested in what you have to say – otherwise, they wouldn’t have followed you. However, people that do nothing but self-promote can be boring to follow. These accounts seem more like digital advertisements than a social media account.

Part of being social is sharing; not just what you’re thinking and feeling, but also what others are thinking and feeling.

Start retweeting and posting content that doesn’t directly involve yourself, your business or your brand. If you’re a company that focuses heavily on marketing, look to blogs like HubSpot for relevant, thought-leader marketing information that you can share. This tells your followers that you’re focused on giving them value, instead of just marketing gimmicks over and over.

8. Be Human, Be Humorous

Not every tweet you post has to be strict and business-focused. Followers connect with businesses that inject humor and human personality into their social media posts. This also applies to other interested tidbits – look through your list of followers and see what content you can retweet that will be interesting to your audience demographics.

9. No More Headlines

Say you post a blog to your website and want to tweet out a link. Your first instinct will be to copy over the headline, paste the link and hit send, right? That may be what you think works, but there is a better way for some networks.

Followers need to be enticed into clicking links in a different way on Twitter than while they’re scrolling down your blog.

For instance, take this blog title. “21 Simple Twitter Tips That Everyone Should Utilize.” Instead of copying this to Twitter, consider “We’ve recently found 21 Twitter tips that can help you have success.” How many are you utilizing right now?” This surmises the purpose and content of the article while being different and more engaging than a simple headline.

10. Use Quotes and Questions

Piggy-backing off the above advice, another way to promote content is through quotes. A big, standout quote can cause some buzz. You also showcase a sample of the content, which can cause someone to become interested. Think about being in a supermarket. If you sample a great food first, you’re more likely to buy a larger amount if you really like it.

Also consider questions when promoting content. In the above example, we utilize this idea – “How many are you utilizing right now?” It’s human nature to want to answer these questions, and they also lead to engagement through responses, comments and quoted retweets.

11. Images, Images, Images

Above we mention the shortened character limit required for tweets with images. You may feel like you may or may not utilize this information and can exist with 140 character tweets. However, tweets with images boost engagement and retweet value by having an interesting visual attached.

It’s been found that tweets with images and videos do better than text-only tweets, so use high-quality images with 440 pixel by 220 pixels dimensions. Just remember – tweets with images get 35% more retweets, and that’s a great stat when it comes to your brand or business visibility.

12. Know Retweet Statistics

Consider the following information. The descriptor is the included tweet component and the percentage is the number of retweets content containing these components receive.

• Hashtags – 16%
• Digit – 17%
• Quote – 19%
• Video URL – 28%
• Photo URL – 35%

Using all or most of these components in one tweet can greatly increase its chances of being retweeted.

13. Consider Psychology

It’s important to gear your Twitter habits towards what followers engage with, and you can decipher what all this entails by taking psychology into consideration. Most marketing plans and ploys consider the human psyche and behavior during the creative process, and your tweet strategies should take notes from this concept.

One example is how people are curious creatures. They love learning new information and answering questions when asked. Phrasing tweets that appeal to this curious nature is how you get more click-throughs.

Another way to appeal to human nature is to touch on the subject of self-improvement. Whether it’s bettering their productivity output or how well they cook, people love to think they’re quickly and easily bettering themselves as person. This is why blog articles about helpful hints and tips are so popular.

14. Understand Engagement Components

Tip 12 tells you what tweet components are necessary to up your engagement, but it only explains it in terms of statistics. You know tweets with hashtags get retweeted 16% of the time, but what do they do for you? Why do they increase engagement?

In the case of hashtags, they’re actually a pretty vital component to tweets because of how Twitter’s search functions work. While it is possible to search and advance search phrases on Twitter, the easiest way to find what you’re looking for on Twitter is through hashtags. These hyperlinks also create communities and movements, like hashtags related to sporting events or social activism.

Engagement is all about getting reactions, and what better way to do that than ask for these reactions? You can do this by directly asking (“Tell us what you think!”) or through starting conversations. One of the best ways to get engagement is to give engagement.

15. Know What the Mistakes Are

For as many right things as you should be doing on Twitter, there are just as many mistakes you can fall victim to. Here are a few mistakes that you should definitely avoid at all costs:

• Don’t spam your followers. Schedule tweets and post content on a regular, consistent basis. Also, don’t directly link your website to people unless there is a reason – i.e. someone complaining about a problem that you’ve recently blogged about a solution to.
• Don’t feel like you need to follow every single account that follows you. This clogs your timeline with information that may not be in line with your business or brand.
• One, two or three hashtags are okay to include in a tweet. Using more is overkill.
• You may be mentioned frequently on Twitter, and it’s okay to acknowledge all of these tweets with a like, but you don’t have to retweet them. Pick and choose which offer you the most value and retweet those on a consistent basis.
• Sending out automated DMs is tricky business. While a well-crafted automated DM is one way to get leads, it’s important to only put effort into an automated message you know will work. Otherwise, automated DMs will go ignored.
• When you’re engaging with someone on Twitter, keep the conversation short outside of a DM. Once you have two replies a piece, offer to move the conversation to a private DM to keep from clogging timelines.

16. The Biggest Mistake

The biggest mistake on Twitter is one that deserves its own tip. You’ll encounter negativity on Twitter; it’s practically unavoidable. While on your personal Twitter accounts you can decide whether to engage  with negativity or not, but business and personal brand accounts are where you must act as professional as possible.

You alienate your audience when you promote negative activity, and this can be through “clapping back” at Twitter trolls or promoting this kind of behavior yourself. It’s important to not be negative on business accounts, and instead promote positivity. Ignore or block Twitter users that repeatedly mention you in unnecessarily negative conversations.

17. The Image Formula

We’ve already gone over how images are perfect for increasing visual engagement, but there’s also a sort of rhythm to using them. It’s important not to make every tweet image heavy, but there is a magic number. When you add an image to every third tweet, your image usage stands out when someone looks at your timeline. This also applies to your original content. Vary this pattern by retweeting content with both images and text-only focuses.

18. The Time Zone Secret

Your business may be located in Canada, but what if you offer services to international businesses. Not all businesses can appreciate this if they’re more specialized in their location focus, but international businesses have a definite place on Twitter.

The problem is while you’re in one time zone; the businesses you want to target are in various others. The best way to solve this problem on Twitter is to follow the six hour rule. This means tweeting at 12 AM, 12 PM, 6 AM and 6PM through scheduling. This is the best way to get your tweets seen on any timeline no matter what time zone the user is in.

19. Speaking of Scheduling…

…this is definitely something you need to do. When you schedule your content, you don’t run the risk of over posting or tweeting infrequently. You also make more time for other work while you don’t have to log in and out of Twitter all day, or constantly keep the tab open. Automating your Twitter posting is a great way to alleviate some to-do list tasks and focus on other areas of your business or brand.

20. Don’t Count Out Analytics

As many times as we’ve talked about analytics, there are still holdouts that don’t use these tools to help improve their performance – or they don’t utilize analytics tools in the best ways possible. Using A/B testing and analytics platforms can give you vital information, like the best times to tweet or how your users are responding to specific tweets.

21. Always Engage

In order to find better ways to engage with more people, start utilizing Twitter’s advanced search function. If you want to start targeting niche markets or specific demographics, Twitter’s advanced search function can help you narrow down the audience pool you’re looking for and allows you to engage with them directly.

Other advanced search features include locating users based on specific location, mentions, date specifications and the negative or positive slant of a tweet.

———————-

These 21 Twitter tips are pretty basic but still surprising that most people aren’t even close to following any of these guidelines. If you have any to add to the list I would love to hear from you. And as always if you have any specific questions in regards to social media or digital marketing feel free to contact me here.

Jason Gordon, Founder – Strong Social

from Strong Social http://ift.tt/2bxXEnv
via Strong Social ref=da&site=blogger">IFTTT