Twitter is one of the more popular and powerful platforms of social media. If you have tried it out for your company, campaign, association or other professional effort and thought it wasn’t for you then you might be missing out on critical information about current events, your industry, and your competitors. Let’s look at a couple of ways to get better at Twitter.
1. Admit It Is Overwhelming
There are more than a hundred thousand tweets sent every second around the world and there is no way humanly possible for you to read and understand all of them. The first step to success on Twitter is admitting you will miss a few things.
When you signed up for Twitter, you were probably prompted to follow celebrity or big brand accounts like Oprah and CNN. We are sure you skipped over that step. If not, you are following a lot of accounts who aren’t doing anything for you professionally.
Clean up your follow list by eliminating the accounts which don’t make you money or don’t influence your line of thinking. The cleaner you make the lists of accounts the better you will be professionally. If you want to follow all the fun and games, get a second personal account. In fact, here is a list of fun accounts we recommend you follow.
2. Listen Then Tweet
Twitter is a much of a listening tool as it is a talking tool. You should be listening and learning from twitterers in your industry, your local community, or your influencers as much as you are blasting out tweets about your bake sales.
Listening will also to help you determine when your target and actual audiences are on Twitter. If your audiences are not seeing your tweets in real time, then the odds are they are not going to ever see them.
Average shelf life of a Tweet=12 min,Facebook post=80 min,Blog post= 1/2 day. Social media takes time and work. via @SeanMoffitt #SMCV11
— Terri Davies (@TerriDavies) June 3, 2011
Research shows average tweets will last mere minutes and popular tweets last around 48 hours.
3. Keep Your In-And-Out Balanced
When you begin on Twitter, it is easy to want to go out and follow 1000 accounts before you have even a few followers. Don’t do this.
Being a new account, with your profile filled out properly, you are setting expectations and outside perceptions to potential followers with every action you take. When people see you are following 1000 accounts and have 3 followers of your own, it makes you look like a spammer.
You don’t want to look like a spammer.
4. Hashtag Your Way to Success
As we have discussed before, hashtags are one of the most powerful tools on social media. They serve as a sorting tool for those hundreds of thousands of conversations taking place every second across multiple platforms.
If you want to be a part of, lead, or participate in conversations related to keywords and topics in your industry then you need to follow and use hashtags related to that industry.
By putting the # in front of keywords in your message, your tweet (or post) is now part of the conversation related to that keyword. Test it out by going to the Twitter search page and enter #hamburger or any other hashtagged keyword. We’ll wait.
Bacon is better than a plain hamburger.
The search engine just brought up real time and relevant conversation about your keyword. See any potential customers or competitors in the stream?
So there you have it. Four easy things to do to help you succeed at Twitter. There are many, many more ways to succeed so the secret fifth tip is to follow us @RocketGroup for the dozens of tips, advice, and interesting information we tweet every week.
Thanks for the time!
