In my last post, I wrote about my experience with using Facebook in marketing. In this post, I’ll talk about how I use Twitter and the result that I get from various tweets.

How to Post in Twitter – 3 Basic Tips

Just like posting in Facebook, sometimes posting in Twitter requires that you post more than once a day. But personally, what’s more important is what do you post or alert your followers about?

Some people might see it as a chore to be tweeting multiple times a day but if you take social media (in this case, Twitter) as an important platform for others to get to know you and understand what you are about, then you can turn this into a passion about educating others on your interests.

Have you seen the thriller movie Secret in Their Eyes? Well, Julia Roberts in her role as ‘Jess’ said, “Passion always wins”. And so in Twitter, you turn your passion about something into the subject of your tweets.

If you are already using Twitter, you would realize that there is so much noise there in that the moment you click on ‘Tweet’, there will be other messages drowning what you want to say. Not to mention that you ARE limited to just 140 characters!

How then do you get yourself ‘noticed’? The two factors below are not some hard and fast rule in using Twitter. They are purely based on my experience – that I discover through my tweets :

1. The subject of your tweet – whether your followers or people in your niche would be interested in what you have to say
2. The kind of people who ‘follow’ you and those you follow – Are they in the same niche? If so, are they the kind who are just ‘promotional’ – directly (sometimes blatantly) marketing their programs/services? Then you might want to stay away from them. This would help you reduce the ‘noise’ and focus on issues which are important to you, your followers and those who follow you.

I understand that some people say it’s not just about the number of followers you have. However, it IS the number of followers that give an indication of how ‘influential’ you are in your niche. So the content below is how I have used Twitter and the results I get from my tweets.

Tip 1 – Subject

As my followers are mostly Internet marketers, I don’t usually tweet on the mouth-watering sundae I just had (although I occasionally share photos on interesting places I travel to).

Under my Twitter (Internet Marketer) account, I usually share blog posts (from my blog or others), marketing tips, strategies, resources that I think would be useful to other online marketers. This can be anything from how to improve content marketing to tools such as image creators that marketers could use in their business.

Tweet Idea 1

Just providing links in your tweets would not be engaging to those who come across it, so I would add something like,

“How is a content marketer similar to a journalist? – link“

Tweet Idea 2

Tweeting or re-tweeting content by bigger guys in the same niche definitely helps. The image shows the little ‘exchange’ between CoSchedule and myself after I tweeted on a post from their website that I thought could be useful to fellow marketers.

NOTE 

Posting direct affiliate links don’t bode well with Twitter users. I’ve tried this and it was that same day that I lost between 7 to 10 followers! So the moral of the story – you might get away with posting affiliate links in Facebook groups, but it’s best that you refrain from doing it in Twitter. It would be better if you tweet on a link to your blog post instead.

TIP 2 – Technicalities

This is common sense, really. Twitter allows 140 characters so it’s best to shorten the links you want to point to so that you would have more allowance for the actual comments you want to put in your tweet.

Using @Who?

I use this most often when I re-tweet somebody else’s tweet (usually a link that’s educational, funny, etc). This way, that person would know I re-tweeted their tweets. Apart from getting appreciation from those re-tweets, I notice that I sub-consciously increase my followers just by that simple act.

Using Direct Messages (DM)

Honestly, I don’t DM people in Twitter and I don’t receive many DMs either. When I did receive DMs, it’s usually from those who want me to check out the programs they’re promoting or some books they’ve written.

Personally, I don’t see anything wrong with sending DMs, but I feel you should use discretion when you do. You can DM people when you want to chat with that person, give suggestions but not send him your affiliate links right on the first DM.

How to Use #Hashtags in Twitter

I don’t use #hashtags in each and every tweet but when I do, I see some positive results – I gain followers and people start to include me in their lists, (something I shall elaborate more on below).

So if I find some article on say, improving content marketing that I want to tweet about, then I would add #contentmarketing in my tweet, simultaneouly pointing to the article link. And yes, you can use more than one hashtag in a tweet.

 

TIP 3 – Timing and Frequency

This is a little tricky for me, because most of my ‘audience’ are on the other side of the globe (in the United States, Canada). So to get round this, sometimes I post a particular tweet twice a day – one in the morning and another in the evening.

Lists in Twitter

You create lists in Twitter based on interests or subject,  which would help in categoring the streams from the Twitter users.

From your ‘profile and settings’, let’s say you have created a list on “traffic generation”, the next time you go to that list, you would only see tweets by those you have included in the lists.

This helps particularly if you are looking for ideas on generating more traffic to your website. You would not get distracted by other subject matter that’s not of interest to you then.

Automate Your Tweets

I use some Apps to automate my tweets and a free one is Buffer. For a free account, you get to include three different social media accounts (that can be from Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, etc). In addition to automating your tweets, you would also be able to automate your Facebook posts, for instance. This can be useful especially if you have more than one tweet to share in a day.

Although Apps such as Buffer and Hootsuite would help in managing your tweets, there’s nothing like being in Twitter itself to engage with your followers. Just like in brick and mortar business, you can get someone to oversee the operations for you but you would have to come down on site to see what’s really happening.

So those tools would help you but they don’t replace you – as the person others want to know more about.

Finally …..

I don’t claim to be an expert in social media but what I’ve been doing in Twitter has shown some encouraging results.

I would love to know your thoughts on this post and if you are already on Twitter, please share your experience (below) so I too can learn from you. Thank you!