I’m a huge Twitter fan. I love the convenience and conciseness of it, plus I find it a personal challenge to get my point across in 140 characters or less. You might be on Twitter but are not sure how to get a handle on what can often seem like the Wild Wild West. Enjoy today’s guest post from Logan Strain as he serves up 7 juicy tips for nurturing your Twitter account with a little TLC.
With over a quarter billion active users, Twitter is one of the most powerful social networks you can use to build your company’s brand and drive traffic to your site. But with all the tweets and new accounts being created every day, how do you gain a foothold in this very noisy space? It can be intimidating starting with zero tweets and zero followers when other accounts in your niche might already have hundreds of thousands of followers.
No account becomes a valuable social media asset overnight. If you are taking the very first step towards establishing a presence on Twitter, here’s some advice to help you kick start your efforts.
1) Use Tweetdeck
Using the web or mobile client might be fine if you’re a casual tweeter, but pros like you need to use something more powerful like Tweetdeck or Hootsuite. Tweetdeck is fantastic because it’s a tool created by Twitter to help power users get the most out of their social network. You can schedule tweets, keep track of multiple feeds simultaneously, and manage multiple accounts. You can log in on the web, or (if you’re a Chrome user), you can use the handy Chrome app.
2) Follow (A Lot)
You can’t get if you don’t give. So if you want a flood of followers and you don’t have a strong brand name yet? You better start following people. While you shouldn’t be completely indiscriminate, clicking “Follow” every single time it pops up on your screen, it’s a good idea to start off with a ton of followed accounts. Some of the most successful tweeters literally follow tens of thousands of accounts.
Find all the biggest brands, thought leaders, and other personalities in your space and follow them all. Then check out who those big names are following, then follow lots of them too. When someone follows you, favorites a tweet, or retweets you, reward them with a follow. When you are actively following people, tweeters take notice, and you start earning followers in return.
3) Retweet And Favorite (A Lot)
Retweeting (posting other people’s tweets on your own timeline) and favoriting (marking tweets as your personal faves), are also part of giving. Retweeting is an easy way to add content to your feed with just a single click, but it also acts a compliment. It says “This tweet is so good, I want to share it with my followers too.” That’s a good way to endear yourself to bigger Twitter accounts and their followers.
Favoriting isn’t as strong, since it doesn’t add the content to your feed, but it still gives a hat tip to the tweeter. Feel free to favorite as fast as your mouse can click (or finger can tap) since it increases the number of times people see your name but costs you nothing.
4) Schedule Tweets A Week In Advance
In order to save time and be consistent, setup about a week’s worth of tweets in advance. This not only saves you time by doing all of your tweeting at once, it ensures that you schedule tweets for maximum impact.
What should you tweet about? You can:
- Share news stories in your niche
- Offer observations
- Crack jokes
- Be nostalgic
- Comment on current events
- Live tweet conferences
- Share links to your blog posts
When you should tweet?
Some studies suggest that the best time to tweet is between 9AM and 3PM, since that’s when people are most likely to check their feeds. Once you really start to build your following, however, you can more easily find when your best tweeting time will be with the online tool Brand Mentions. This is another free service that can tell you when your feed sees the most activity. Armed with this knowledge, you can schedule your most valuable tweets during the periods that you see the most engagement.
5) Be Hashtag Smart
Of course, you can’t simply tweet to nobody when you’re starting out. Twitter is like joining a giant cocktail party, and adding hashtags is how you join the conversation. People set up special feeds and alerts for their favorite hashtags, and can see when anybody (whether it’s a budding Twitter account or one with a million followers) is making a contribution. So it’s essential to add relevant hashtags to every single tweet you make.
But how do you find relevant hashtags? There are two main ways: either by checking out what kind of hashtags similar twitter accounts are using, or by using some simple and free online tools. One of the best ones is the related hashtags tool from Hastigify.me. Simply enter any hashtag, and you can find ones closely associated with it.
For example, if you are building a Twitter account for a hair care product, you can just check the hashtag #haircare. From there, you’ll see that people who use that hashtag also use #naturalhair, #beauty, and #bbloggers (the hashtag that connects beauty bloggers.) Now you’ll have several more hashtags you can add to your posts, and more ways you can be discovered.
6) Private Message People Who Follow You
If someone follows you, they’re probably following a lot of people. So how do you make an impression? Besides consistently offering interesting content, you could also simply send a private message through Twitter to your new follower thanking them. Since so few accounts do this you’ll stick out a bit more when they see you pop up in their feed, which increases the chances that they’ll engage with your content.
7) Connect Your Twitter Account To Your Other Properties
No social media account is an island. Provide a link to your Twitter account on your blog, your email signature, and even your other social media accounts. You want to give people as many opportunities as possible to discover your account.
Tweet Smart
That might sound like a lot of work in order get your brand’s account up and running. But the truth is that you don’t have to be a Twitter addict in order to build up an account and start gaining attention and traffic from this massive social network. Just 10-20 minutes every working day is enough to take you to zero followers to someone who is part of the conversation. Like anything in life, all it takes is a little persistence.
About the Author: Logan Strain is a writer for Crimewire, father, and podcast addict. When he’s not browsing reddit, playing with his daughter, or binge-watching Netflix, he’s creating viral web content.
