5 Things to Know about Twitter
We’ve all heard of twitter, we’ve all heard of celebrities, politicians, and sports teams using Twitter. How do you leverage the instantaneous social media platform for your business? With these 5 things you need to know about Twitter, it might be able to help you get started.
1. Twitter Characters?
140 characters or less is fine. But adding images, GIFs, stickers, and videos provides extra context. They increase engagement significantly and also stand out in people’s news feeds. Images also allow you to show more complicated data than through the text. People may not care what you have to say but if you have a funny GIF or image, they would be more inclined to interact with the tweet. Providing video might even work better than linking to a web page or video source. They don’t have to leave the app and get all their information in one place.
2. Hashtags
Using hashtags is great to get into the conversation. People are always trending topics and something is always happening. You can use these trending hashtags to increase exposure to your account and create conversations. Using one hashtag is ideal, using more than two will actually bring you down and make it seems that you are trying to hard to other Twitter users. Engaging in real time is important since most trends last about an hour. If you’re going to participate, make sure you do so asap.
3. What did you say Twitter?
Speaking of conversations, make sure the conversations your are holding are short. Keep them short so that others can read and respond quickly. Tweets between 100 to 112 characters have been found to have greater engagement. Just a few words can get a point across!
4. Stay in Touch
If you want to stay in the loop of within your industry, create a Twitter list. A Twitter list allows you to segment your timeline into mini-news feeds so that you can find exactly what you’re looking for based on news, industry topics, and influencers. You can also create and use lists to monitor the competition. See what they’re doing and how they’re succeeding or not. If you have active, engaging followers you can also make a list of them to make sure you’re always engaging with them.
5. Validate Tweets
There is a tool called the Twitter Validator. This allows you see how your tweets will look once it’s posted.
There are 4 types of twitter cards:
- Summary Card
- Summary Card with Large Image
- App Card
- Player Card
The great thing about each of these cards is that they all provide data. You can then analyze which ones work best for your account.
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