Back in March, I wrote an article on “How to Use Twitter to Market Health Care Services.” If you followed our suggestions, you’ve probably realized what a difference it makes to use certain “Twitter-tactics” as a part of your marketing campaign. But now that you’re more familiar with the twitterverse, it’s time to take it a step further and take full advantage of your platform. Yes, there are many other parts to Twitter still to be discussed! There are so many nuances when it comes to tweeting that many people never would have guessed.
Here are 5 Twitter tricks that will help you engage your audience better:
Track Mentions
There are so many ways that people can engage in conversation with you. Most times you might not even know it. Being on Twitter means you have to be constantly active. You can’t let 2 or 3 days roll by without taking part in conversation — you’ll miss so many opportunities. The key is to make Twitter habits a routine. A great way to keep on top is to track mentions, this means doing your research on who’s talking about or with you.
There are three main ways to search your brand keywords or company name to see who’s talking about you:
- @YourCompanyName
- #YourCompany Name
- Your Company Name
This will yield plenty of results on who has mentioned you in a tweet. Do not forget to track misspellings as well. Twitter does not have an autocorrect feature, so oftentimes people tweet misspelled names without realizing it.
You can also use Twitter’s “Advanced Search” option, which can be found after you complete a search. Go to “More Options” > “Advanced Search.”
Be Aware of Private and Public Conversations
This is a old trick, but it still deserves to be mentioned because it is such a common mistake. Whenever you tweet beginning with a handle “@Username,” you only direct that tweet to the person you mention and anyone who follows both of you. It won’t appear on anyone else’s timeline otherwise (other than yours of course). However, if you put a period, “.@Username” or any other character before the mention, it will be seen by everyone who follows you. This is important to keep in mind when you want to answer a direct tweet but still want others to see it on their timeline.
Retweet With Purpose
It’s easy enough to click the “Retweet” button and regurgitate someone’s message, but it would be more beneficial to add a comment or quote the tweet. You want to engage yourself in the conversation, not be a messenger owl.
If you’re adding a comment, don’t forget to use relevant hashtags, mentions and insightful comments or responses.
You can also quote the tweet by copying it and pasting it in a new tweet with “RT” (retweet) or “MT” (modified tweet if you’ve changed the original content) in front of it. Add your two cents, images or whatever you think it relevant to the conversation and tweet away!
Familiarize Yourself With Twitter Analytics
Twitter analytics (analytics.twitter.com) is open to everyone to use. It’ll give you a great sense of your engagement through stats and insights. There are a few key areas you want to look into to maximize the potential of your tweets, they are:
- the interests of your followers
- followers by country
- who your followers follow
- type of engagement
- tweet reach
- significant sharers
- time of day analytics
Buffer Social wrote a great article on how to use Twitter Analytics inside and out. Play around with the tool, familiarize yourself with the different functions and start to adopt effective habits.
Make the Most of Images and Videos
Twitter ran an analyses on millions of tweets and found out that photos average a 35% boost in retweets and videos get a 28% boost. Visual tweets simply get more attention when it comes to fuelling conversation. We know you should be adding more photos and videos, but did you know:
- You can tag people in your images like you do on Facebook? Selecting a photo will prompt a “Who’s in this photo?” option. You can tag up to 10 people in one image. Alternatively, you can also turn off the tagging option in “Settings” so that others are unable to tag you in photos
- You can add 4 images to one tweet to create a photo album
- If you use your iOS or Android Twitter app, you can add alternative text to images to make your tweets more accessible to the visually impaired
- Image size does matter on Twitter. If your image is smaller than 440×222 pixels, it wont appear on your followers’ timeline. Bigger images will be cropped, they can’t be bigger than 3MB and must be JPN, PNG or GIF format
- Applications like Instagram aren’t as compatible with Twitter as we think. If you share an Instapic on Twitter, it appears as a boring old link. Programs such as IFTTT, “If This Then Then That,” allow you to natively tweet Instagram photos
Twitter is a perfect tool for extending your reach and audience. It’s in your best interest to take advantage of all of its unique uses and tools. Know these tips so that you can work around the small obstacles to get to the bigger picture.
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