A guide to Twit­ter best practices

I’m mak­ing a fairly safe assump­tion here that every­one read­ing is at least aware of if not famil­iar with the web ser­vice called Twit­ter. For those who just now had their first intro­duc­tion; Twit­ter is sim­ply a web site that allows com­mu­ni­ca­tions between two peo­ple through short (140 char­ac­ters or less) mes­sages com­monly called, ‘tweets’. You can exchange mes­sages between peo­ple on the Twit­ter web site or use one of sev­eral third party clients that facil­i­tate Twit­ter use (just Google for ‘twit­ter client’).

I want to start by giv­ing my offi­cial and hon­est assess­ment of Twit­ter; “I think Twit­ter has a long-term poten­tial as a per­sonal and busi­ness com­mu­ni­ca­tions plat­form”. That said, I talk to many busi­ness own­ers and mar­keters that find Twit­ter to be point­less and use­less. I usu­ally sug­gest that they may be expect­ing a dif­fer­ent expe­ri­ence from Twit­ter over what they have seen because of the way they approach Twit­ter. I rec­om­mend those indi­vid­u­als to this guide of Twit­ter Best Prac­tices.

Best Prac­tice #1: Following

Twit­ter (from a busi­ness and mar­ket­ing stand-point) is all about audi­ence.  You want the most amount of peo­ple that you can to see your tweets.  Every time you gain a fol­lower, you gain an account that can see you tweets. Notice I said account and not per­son.  A fol­lower could very well be an unmanned account that is sim­ply trolling the twit-verse for cer­tain key­words and then fol­low­ing the peo­ple that use those key­words. Your fol­lower could also be a real live human that wants to see what you are tweet­ing about. It should go with­out say­ing but the fol­low­ers you should be hop­ing to attract are the real live ones!

There are a few typ­i­cal approaches to this that we will review but gen­er­ally speak­ing you can gain fol­low­ers by actively select­ing who to fol­low or use a third part ser­vice that can mon­i­tor you account and auto-follow other Twit­ter users.

There are three com­mon ways to attract followers:

Gen­eral Auto-Follow

• The auto-follow approach will gen­er­ally increase your fol­lower count sub­stan­tially, but is there a trade off? The answer is yes, the trade off is that a good major­ity of your tweets are likely to fall on deaf ears (mean­ing most of the fol­low­ers you acquire would be from unmanned accounts). Auto-following gen­er­ally attracts other accounts that auto-follow, which are typ­i­cally unmanned robot accounts with the sole pur­pose of gain­ing as many fol­low­ers as pos­si­ble. This type of auto-following looks for the most basic key­words and hash-tags (e.g … mar­ket­ing, inter­net … etc) and is gen­er­ally used just to boost the fol­lower count.  You can spot peo­ple that do this by find­ing accounts that have thou­sands of fol­low­ers but also fol­low thou­sands of peo­ple. So what’s the point? Why would some­one want to do this? There is a school of thought that places value in the van­ity of a Twit­ter account; the higher the fol­lower count the more pres­tige that account is thought to have because they view it as ‘x-thousands of peo­ple’ want to read that person’s tweets. I don’t quite see it that way; I would place more value in the tweets of some­one that had 400 – 500 fol­low­ers and only fol­lowed 20 – 30 peo­ple over an account with sev­eral thou­sand fol­low­ers who also fol­lows sev­eral thou­sand peo­ple.  To me, a greater fol­low­ing to fol­lowed by ratio would rep­re­sent some­one who actu­ally has inter­est­ing or valu­able things to say because their tweets attracted fol­low­ers with­out giv­ing any­thing in return (fol­low­ing back).

Relevance-Follow

• Far less worse than auto-following in my opin­ion but rel­e­vance fol­low­ing is still tech­ni­cally a type of auto-following.  This method is just a much more refined approach to auto-following, rather than auto fol­low any­one that uses the most basic key­words and hash-tags you set cri­te­ria that looks for nat­ural speech pat­terns or very spe­cific state­ments.  Rel­e­vance fol­low­ing will still inevitably attract a sub­stan­tial amount of unmanned accounts but is more likely to attract real live accounts than gen­eral auto following.

Active Fol­low­ing

• Active fol­low­ing is my favorite and is really how I think twit­ter was meant to be used. Active fol­low­ing means just that, you actively select who you fol­low and gen­er­ally means that you will have at least some inter­est in read­ing what the user is tweet­ing (mes­sag­ing) about. This also means that you prob­a­bly wont fol­low thou­sands of peo­ple your­self but after all, that is the point.  You only fol­low those whom you have an inter­est in and those whom have an inter­est in you will fol­low you.  Your goal should be to cre­ate an inter­est in you and your brand, so peo­ple will want to fol­low you.  Do this by send­ing out use­ful and rel­e­vant tweets, don’t send out junk, adver­tise­ments and spam.

Best Prac­tice #2: Qual­ity Tweets

The sub­stance of an indi­vid­ual tweet is extremely impor­tant and will sub­stan­tially con­tribute to your over­all suc­cess on Twit­ter. There are other forms of pro­mo­tion that you can use like; putting your twit­ter name in email sig­na­tures, includ­ing your twit­ter name in the pro­file sec­tions of your other social net­work­ing accounts and good ole’ word of mouth adver­tis­ing but by in large the qual­ity of your tweets will greatly deter­mine your twit­ter suc­cess (unless you already have non-twitter related fame which is a dif­fer­ent ball game altogether).

If you want your tweets to actu­ally be viewed and the con­tent of be con­sid­ered by actual eye­balls, you are going to want to care­fully craft your tweets. Your tweets need to be rel­e­vant to your over­all online pres­ence theme. For exam­ple; if I am a fit­ness expert, my fol­low­ers are prob­a­bly expect­ing health and fit­ness related tweets from me. If I start tweet­ing about video games or the lat­est trends in Sil­i­cone Val­ley I am most likely going to lose fol­low­ers or attract fol­low­ers that are not inter­ested in my core product/service which is health and fit­ness. It makes it very dif­fi­cult to mon­e­tize an audi­ence that either does not exist or is not inter­ested in what I am offer­ing or rec­om­mend­ing.  Addi­tion­ally, you can’t build cred­i­bil­ity as an author­i­ta­tive source if your not rel­e­vant to what an audi­ence is expect­ing from you.

Its very easy to get scat­tered and start rec­om­mend­ing and tweet­ing about the next great­est thing that you think will help you mon­e­tize an audi­ence but you have to remain focused. Cer­tain top­ics, prod­ucts and ser­vices will not have as great of a fol­low­ing or inter­est as oth­ers, but the point isn’t about hav­ing the biggest audi­ence it’s about hav­ing the biggest rel­e­vant audience.

Here is an exam­ple of rel­e­vancy related to qual­ity tweets:

• You have 10,000 fol­low­ers on Twit­ter and let’s say that only 1,000 of them are inter­ested in what your say­ing or rec­om­mend­ing, that’s a 10% poten­tial con­ver­sion rate.
  • This may mean that a sub­stan­tial amount of your fol­low­ers were acquired through auto-following or because your tweets were off topic and attracted non-relevant followers.
• You have 700 fol­low­ers on Twit­ter and let’s say that only 210 of them are inter­ested in what your say­ing or rec­om­mend­ing, that’s a 30% poten­tial con­ver­sion rate.
  • You may not have the largest audi­ence ever but because you send qual­ity tweets that are rel­e­vant to your audi­ence you are able to poten­tially mon­e­tize 20% more of your audience.

Qual­ity tweets have two core com­po­nents in my opin­ion; they are first rel­e­vant to your audi­ence and sec­ondly they pro­vide some sort of value to your audi­ence. I’m not going to pay any atten­tion to your tweets if they don’t cover sub­ject mat­ter that I am expect­ing them to cover. Addi­tion­ally, even if your tweets are on topic I need them to offer me some­thing that I prob­a­bly want or need. Your tweet might be rel­e­vant to what your audi­ence expects but if the con­tent doesn’t con­tain some­thing that I want or need then I am likely to ignore it.

Best Prac­tice #3: Frequency

How often should you tweet? Is it annoy­ing if you tweet too much? Will I get ‘lost in the crowd’ if you don’t tweet enough? Think of Twit­ter like a mes­sage board rather than a real-time com­mu­ni­ca­tions plat­form.  Yes Twit­ter can be and is used as a real-time com­mu­ni­ca­tions tool but not entirely. Twit­ter has the abil­ity to have the tweets of peo­ple you fol­low sent to your mobile device but that is not the default action, peo­ple have to implic­itly ask Twit­ter to do that for them. If some­one wants to know what your tweet­ing about then they are inher­ently will­ing to deal your tweets show­ing up on their account, whether they have your tweets sent to their mobile device is up to them.

I don’t think that ‘tweet­ing too much’ can get you in to as much trou­ble with your audi­ence as ‘tweet­ing too much about irrel­e­vant con­tent’ can. I would rather see 10 tweets an hour from some­one I fol­low that is rel­e­vant and of value to me than 10 tweets a day from some­one I fol­low that is just full of adver­tise­ments and affil­i­ate links. It’s the ole’ mar­ket­ing prin­ci­ple applied to Twit­ter, “Peo­ple are much more atten­tive when they feel engaged to the sub­ject of what they are lis­ten­ing to”.

Use com­mon sense about the times of the day when you tweet also. Are your tweets more likely to be seen dur­ing the hours of the week when you know peo­ple are likely to be hard at work or dur­ing typ­i­cal lunch times and evening times?

So there you have it, my three Twit­ter Best Prac­tices, using these meth­ods will prob­a­bly not get you an insane fol­lower count but they will get you a much more rel­e­vant fol­lower count with higher con­ver­sion potential.

Writ­ten By:

Ryan Huff
ryan@rthconsultants.com

http://rthconsultants.com

Ryan Huff is a free­lance web devel­oper, tech­nol­ogy coach, mar­tial artist, busi­ness devel­oper and an avid inter­net mar­keter. You can con­nect with Ryan here at The Code­Tree or at RTH Con­sul­tants, fol­low @rthconsultants on Twit­ter or at Face­book

Twit­ter has mas­sive poten­tial as a mar­ket­ing tool, know­ing how to use it and when to use it can deliver results to you like no other! Check out these tips below for some great advice on increas­ing your twit­ter exposure!

1. Explain to your fol­low­ers what retweet­ing is and encour­age them to retweet your links. Retweet­ing pushes your @username into for­eign social graphs, result­ing in clicks back to your pro­file. Track your retweets using retweetist.
2. Fill out your bio. Your lat­est tweets and @replies don’t mean much to some­one that doesn’t know you. Your bio is the only place you have to tell peo­ple who you are. Also, your bio is dis­played on Twitter’s Sug­gested Users page. Leav­ing it blank or non-descriptive doesn’t encour­age peo­ple to add you.
3. As @garyvee  says, “link it up.” Put links to your Twit­ter pro­file every­where. Link it on your Digg, LinkedIn, Face­book, blog, email sig­na­ture, and every­where else you live online. Also, check out the great feedburner-like badges from Twit­ter­Counter for your blog.
4. Tweet about your pas­sions in life and #hash tag them. Qual­ity con­tent cou­pled with an easy way to find it never fails. If oth­ers enjoy your con­tent, they’ll add you. Learn more about #hash tag­ging here.
5. Bring your twit­ter account into the phys­i­cal world. Every time I give a talk, speak on a panel, shoot a pod­cast, present slides, or hand out busi­ness cards, I fig­ure out a way to broad­cast or dis­play my twit­ter account.

More tips at Tech Crunch