Some of my good friends are finally starting to ‘get’ Twitter, and as a result, I find myself tweeting and sharing more. Below are some of my top Twitter tips for noobs and veterans alike.
Schedule your tweets. This may not make much sense, but nobody wants their timeline filled with rapid fire tweets from the same person. Schedule your tweets with tools like HootSuite or Buffer and never flood your followers’ feeds again. Chances are, you’ll probably end up being unfollowed.
Share news that you’d want to read. Seems simple enough, right? People are still tweeting about their breakfast, their cats and other random things that nobody cares much about. By sharing news that would interest you, the benefits are two-fold. Firstly, your tweets become more compelling and secondly, you will start attracting and interacting with people with similar interests to yours.
Give more than you receive. Social networks are all about sharing. Help other people on Twitter. Give advice where you can, help solve problems and answer questions in areas where you consider yourself an expert. You’ll gain more trust and become the go-to person in your particular field. Who doesn’t like being an expert, right?
Keep it real. Be yourself. Nobody wants to follow users that only tweet links. Spice up your tweets with sprinklings of your own personality. Found a link you want to share? Let your character shine through by adding a short review of the content in the tweet. Don’t be scared to say what you feel and stand up for what you believe in. Also, be honest. Make a mistake? Own it. People are more forgiving if you own up to mistakes rather than making excuses for them.
Remember your manners. Someone tweet a really cool link? Give them the credit by either retweeting them, or tweeting the link and mentioning them with a ‘via @whoever’ in the tweet. On the flipside, if someone retweets you or mentions you, say thank you. A little bit can go a long way. Asking for something with ‘please’ could also make all the difference. Especially if you’re asking for some retweets to get a message out to a large group of people.
If it doesn’t fit into 140 characters, you don’t get it. Tweets are meant to be concise. Short, sweet and to the point. Don’t tweet an essay. Nobody wants to click on a link to be taken to an external site to read your whole tweet. If it doesn’t fit into 140 characters, don’t tweet it. Post it on Facebook. Or Google+.
Cool!
- Would also add, if you do schedule tweets then go for odd times – not on the hour or half or quarter, so 2:13 instead of 2:15 (the majority of people schedule for normal times so if you schedule outside of that you’ll cut through the clutter.)
+ don’t RT your compliments you look like a douche.
Mel, interesting what you say about the odd times as out of habit I do odd times for publishing of tweets, and blog posts for that matter – It started years ago with blog posts and has always stuck like that as it makes it look like mess of a machine. That being said, are people on Twitter, who are acting in realtime, really going to notice the difference between a tweet at an odd time or “even” time? I mean, if I read a tweet at 15h00, I wouldn’t think it was automated, IN FACT, I probably wouldn’t notice the time at all?
Agreed, RTing compliments is douchey!
Hi guy, I don’t think anyone cares about the time – I meant it from a point of view of trying to stand out, avoiding the rush of scheduled tweets that 80% of people would post at the ‘usual’ time – so if you post in between those times there are fewer tweets and your tweet is therefore more likely to be read :)
I should probably look into scheduling my tweets a bit as well – especially considering that I’d like to reach people who might be awake when I’m asleep. I know the one guy I follow must be doing it as well … it’s either that or he never sleeps. xD
@Mel – Yeh, that’s a good piece of advise, most people schedule for similar times, so if you can catch people inbetween, you’ll definitely get more eyes and clicks!
@Jaydon – What’s useful is finding out where the people who follow you live, if they’re in a different timezone, then scheduling is excellent. I often schedule blog posts and/or tweets for the early hours of the morning here in SA so that it reaches my International audience. It has proven quite effective.
There’s a handy little Google Chrome Plugin called Social Bro, which analyses when the best time to Tweet would be, and advises you accordingly. Because it ties in with Buffer quite nicely, you simply export that schedule and you’re done.
Nice one Alessio, I’ve been doing that for a while and have been “split testing” the results based on the intelligence I feed from Social Bro to Buffer App :)