ProBlogger: 10 Top Twitter Tips to Improve Your Engagement

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10 Top Twitter Tips to Improve Your Engagement Posted: 18 Jul 2016 07:00 AM PDT This guest post is by Josh Sayers of Adventure Connections One of my biggest bugbears in the world of marketing are people that do not have Twitter. It's a free platform that has over 310 million active users, and unlike the monster that is Facebook, doesn't meddle with your timeline (too much). Whether it's engaged with is a completely different matter but with these Twitter tips you should see a rise in your performance! Retweets and reply tweets broaden your network, your audience, and your profile – which in turn drives traffic to your blog and customers to your product or service. Ready to jump in? Share other content I could say that the key to success is being unique but that would just be a down right lie. Hundreds of people are becoming "Twitter famous" for quite frankly, stealing other people's content. The most notorious being The Fat Jew and most controversially The Lad Bible – both whom now give credit to their original posters. Retweeting popular and unique tweets is a great way to boost how your brand is perceived. If you are sharing content that people like, people will begin to follow you as their source of great content. It's also a lot more ethical than claiming other people's tweets – something that may actually decrease your brand perception. Just remember to only share posts that you think your fans will like. If you're selling Harley Davidsons, don't share anything to do with Justin Bieber. Remember to geotag The geotagging tool was added to Twitter in 2014 and is a fantastic way to boost your engagement and add extra flavour to your tweet. Rather than simply tweeting "bbq" you can add a location such as "Vondelpark, Amsterdam" and all of a sudden your tweet becomes a lot more exciting and much more relatable. People that are interested in the location / event will be searching for the location and you'll be in the mix. Add some colour to your profile If a picture is worth a thousand words, and the average length of a word is 5 characters, then adding an image to your tweet boosts your character limit to 5140. Almost every tweet includes an image in 2016 and why wouldn't you? The average media post quadruples the length of the tweet! Quotes tend to get me the most RT's, they're relatable, shareable and it gets me onto more feeds. A great free tool I use to create free graphics is Snappa. After 100 million GIFs were shared in 2015, Twitter rolled out their new GIF searching tool in February 2016. An amazing tool to add emotion and reactions to a tweet but you can also use GIFs to boost your sales – yes, a direct way to improve your ROI! Create your own Gifs using Gif Maker or Make a Gif and create beautiful clips to show your special offers! You want a treat? For 4 days only, everything on Bezar is 25% off! Enter code HOWBEZAR25 at checkout. pic.twitter.com/aakNpGZhiu — Bezar (@bezar) July 9, 2015 Twitter are now not including media links within the character limit so you no longer have to choose between good content or an image. Make your account appealing Making your account visually friendly is a surprising way to improve your engagement. Make your icon memorable and different. It's one of the only things that makes you stand out on the timeline. A great tool I've used in the past is Tricked-Out-Timeline which merge your icon and header. Just ensure that your icon is still works on its own. Ask your fans Struggling to see what your fans like? Ask them! Twitter has its very own poll feature which can give people the option to vote anonymously to your question. If you're looking for a more personal answer it's always best to simply tweet the question and people can reply directly. Remember to pin your question to your profile so that it has a longer lifespan! When you've grown your brand you can even hold a twitter chat, encouraging people to engage with you! Optimise your content Optimisation is a word that is engraved onto every marketer's skull, but with Twitter's limit you are limited to what you can say. The SEO god that is Dan Zarella recently produced a table featuring the most retweeted words, which include "you," "blog" and "top." As always, experience is the key to success, see what time you are getting the most engagements and work from it. Across the board, the best time to tweet is 13.00-15.00 – aka lunch time but if you are an international brand you will have to tweet at various times and see what's best for you using your Twitter analytics. If you're struggling for content, ensure that you are reposting the same content. Twitter isn't going to penalise you for duplicate content, and as there are roughly 6000 tweets going out every second, your customers probably didn't even see your first tweet. Just spread them out so if people browse your profile it's not blatantly obvious that you are regurgitating your content. I use Hootsuite to schedule my content, writing a few different tweets about the same blog / page one after each other and then spread them out across the week. Whether you like it or not, emojis are on the rise. They add emotion to your tweets and brighten the mood, changing your brand perception from "robot tweeting machine" to "actual human being". This is a good thing but beware that emojis are not universal and whilst some people may see a smiley, another may see sarcastic yellow face. Follow sprees How to boost my followers? The question on every Twitter users mind. Whatever you do, do not buy them and don't bulk follow people from your competitors. Instead follow relevant businesses. If you see a post that is relevant to your business then follow people that also liked it. You then begin to build a loyal, organic fan base that are actually interested in what you are posting. @ people If you're writing about a topic and mention another writer's work, @them. You're giving them more coverage so chances are they'll also promote it to all of their followers! You can tag up to 10 people in images, a great technique to notify people without using up your character limit! If you're writing about a subject that has already been covered, or improving on another similar article, use Google's search operator to see who has previously shared the similar article. They liked the other one, so they'll also like (and share) yours too! Note that it will not list the post if they used a URL shortener. Use links wisely If your CTR is slacking, statistics say that placing a URL 25% through your tweet is much more successful than placing it at the end. I'm a big fan of URL shorteners such as Bitly. It makes the tweet look a lot cleaner and friendlier. However some people may have trust issues as there's no way of seeing where the link leads to. Just remember not to include a sales link in every single tweet. You want your account to be 80% friendly, light-hearted content and 20% sales. Make use of hashtags Hashtags are without a doubt Twitters most successful tool. It's how people find content, how people share content and a fantastic way of establishing your brand. When posting about an event, hashtag a location, most cities have auto-retweeters that will automatically share your content to their thousands of followers, all of whom are interested in the location you are posting about. Just remember: #don't #hashtag #every #word. It breaks up the flow of the sentence and although it broadcasts your tweet further, tweets with a singular hashtag are 69% more likely to get retweets that those with two or more. Plus, nobody searches irrelevant hashtags such as #the. Post a tweet and then schedule another with a different hashtag. Twitter is all about trends, always jump on the bandwagon. If there is something remotely related to your industry, use the hashtag. Thousands of people are looking at the trend and if your post is of a high quality, you're bound to get a retweet or two. You just have to be on the ball and post on the go. I recently tweeted about the Game of Thrones episode as it was the number 1 trend and got 30 likes within 6 hours. They’re never going to beat that episode. 10/10 #gameofthrones pic.twitter.com/rGgvlHJ8sY — Josh (@JoshSayerss) June 20, 2016 If you try my tips, I'd love to know how they helped you! I look forward to reading about your experiences in the comments! Josh helps manage the Adventure Connections website, who specialise in organising corporate events in the UK. The post 10 Top Twitter Tips to Improve Your Engagement appeared first on ProBlogger.       Related Stories How Facebook Gets It’s Creep On and Knows What Ads To Show You How to Rock Instagram to Promote Your Small Business 7 Steps to Snapchat Success

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Why You Should Think Content First in Social Media Marketing - DailyBlogTips

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Why You Should Think Content First in Social Media Marketing Posted: 18 Jul 2016 04:39 AM PDT Often times when brands or businesses think of social media marketing, they immediately think of community management first. I don't blame them. Since its debut, social media has opened doors to customers that otherwise we restricted to phone calls and emails. However, to truly drive business results with social media marketing, you need to think content first. Here's why: Consistency Have you ever had those days where your customers just aren't talking about you, asking questions or, frankly, complaining about you on social media? It happens all the time. When it does, brands are left with "gaps" – periods of time where nothing goes out on their social media channels. No engagement or no content. Just static. By thinking about content first, you're ensuring that your channels, regardless of customer activity, will be active. Content like photos, videos or even just plain text with a link can provide cover for those slow customer service periods. Those brands who think customer service or engagement first, often find themselves scrambling to remain looking relevant. At the end of the day, that's stress on your business’s resources, and you look inconsistent to consumers. Legitimacy Content has an amazing effect on consumers to show them that you’re legitimate. In a world of online scams, thinking about content first can ensure that at any point if a potential customer checks up on you, your content is front and center. That content helps the prospective feel comfortable working with you or spending their money on your products or services. Brands sometimes have the tendency to not see the big picture with their social media strategy. What do all the pieces of content put together look like? What story does it tell? Ideally, you would have thought about this before and ensured you have common language, graphics, themes and campaigns. All of which would run in conjunction with each other across multiple social networks. There's no better feeling as a consumer than hitting a brand's Facebook Page, then their Twitter account and finally the website and seeing a common thread. Inbound Marketing Lastly, there's inbound marketing. The entire concept hinges on being able to produce material that will activate consumers around call to actions. The same applies to social media marketing. Creating content that will get someone to act is first and foremost the key to get customers. So, just like you would create that email or direct mail marketing campaign with an enticing subject line and call to action, the same should apply to your content on social media. Entice users, lure them in and have them watch that video, like that photo or click that link to your website. Next Steps Now that you understand why it's important to think content first in your social media marketing, let’s discuss what steps you can take to create a content strategy that will work with your overall marketing goals and objectives: Resources Very simply, don't try to create content you don't have the resources to execute. For example, don't think you can create weekly vlogs on YouTube if you don't have a staff member to do it or can't pay someone to do it for you. Look at who you have on your team, their skills and talents, or the budget you have to spend, and try to figure out senseable, scalable content. Often times, photos tend to be the most economical, especially with all the free and paid photo sharing platforms available today. While video would be a bigger commitment, it would likely drive better results. Content Calendar You've likely heard this one before, but having a content calendar allows for you to see what you're creating and when. It also ensures that you're not repeating your work, and allows you to easy share it with any other internal constituents in the company. As a visual person, like many, it also makes it easier to digest. I would recommend doing your content calendar a month in advance to ensure you have enough time to fill it out, gain approval and then start working on it. Try to use colors for various content types and themes and ensure the calendar has the ability to slot in days and times. Many social media management tools have built in content calendars to help you plan and automate social campaigns to ensure a constant stream of content across your social accounts. Engagement Hours While engagement on social media is very important, limiting the time and resources spent on interacting with potential customers is more important. Otherwise, your entire day could just be looking and trying to contact them. To specify, this is not in reference to customer service, where responding in a timely manner is even more important. Rather, this is referencing actively searching and trying to engage with people who you think would be customers. By setting certain hours for this type of work, you can ensure you're being responsible with your time and resources. Analytics/Reporting At the end of the day, the proof is always in the numbers. With this or any strategy, you should always set yourself up to succeed by having tools in place to track the results. Tools like Google Analytics and Facebook or Twitter's native analytics systems can be a great start to see inbound activity and actions. Whether a success or failure, everything can be a learning opportunity for your brand. In closing, your ability to create consistent, timely and interesting content will be a big driver in your social media marketing success. It's a cliche, but still very much applies to social media today – Content is King. Eleonora Israele is an analyst at Clutch, where she is responsible for research on marketing software and digital agencies. Clutch is a Washington, D.C.-based research, ratings, and reviews platform for B2B services and software. Wanna learn how to make more money with your website? Check the Online Profits training program!

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