While there are many social media venues in which you can market your business, blog or brand to current and potential consumers, the leaders of the pack are Facebook and Twitter. Facebook offers the ability to communicate with visual messages, status updates and links while Twitter restricts each correspondence to a mere 140 characters. When marketing your brand or business on Twitter, space is at a premium. It is important to master effective tweeting so other users not only read, but retweet your content as well.
Twitter feeds often move quite rapidly as most users follow hundreds of other accounts. Your tweets must capture a reader’s attention and urge him or her to follow your link. Without an effective strategy, your Twitter marketing campaign can fail to generate interest in your brand and can become an ineffective use of time and effort. Maximizing exposure on Twitter is one of the most important tools needed to grow your brand or business following.
The Perfect Tweet Speaks To Your Readers
While it is a great strategy to engage your followers personally on their own tweets, it is equally important that your brand posts are interesting to a large volume of followers. Keep your audience in mind while you compose tweets, presenting a range of content throughout the day. Links to your own website are an essential part of Twitter marketing – although, shameless and constant promotion of your brand may cause your followers to tune out. Presenting a range of links to websites, articles and products in which your Twitter followers may take interest will keep them engaged. Also, Dan Zarrella (from Hubspot) has found that links presented 25% of the way through a tweet get maximum CTRs (Click Through Rates).
The Perfect Tweet is Excellently Written
Before you begin a Twitter marketing campaign of your own, review the tweets in your own feed. You may notice that some tweets stand out more than others. Examine these tweets, determining what makes you pause to read them. Tweet with the aim of compelling your readers to click your links without allowing them to come off as blatant marketing pitches. Instead of selling a product or service through your tweets, focus on simply selling the attached link with engaging and descriptive copy.
While you may at first have difficulty fitting your ideas into 140-character blurbs, you may consider practicing to create excellent tweets. Consistently tweeting well-thought-out content will help to make followers routinely seek out your tweets. Tweets should be grammatically flawless. Social networking sites offer interaction through written communication and even the smallest spelling or grammar error may make you appear less credible than you actually are.
The Perfect Tweet Leaves Room for Retweets
One retweet can lead to hundreds of retweets in a matter of moments. Using the entire allotment of 140 characters makes retweeting a difficult task for your followers. The perfect tweet that you crafted may require curtailing, subjecting it to Internet shorthand or poor grammar, which you worked hard to avoid. Tweets should be between 120 and 130 characters. This is a rule that you may have to break from time to time, but the best policy is to leave at least 20 characters open for retweeting purposes.
Make sure your links are shortened properly from sites such as su.pr and bit.ly. While your audience may be excited about your tweets, they are unlikely to make the effort to provide new, shortened URLs merely for the sake of sharing them. Shortened links have been shown to receive more CTRs than links that are left in long form. Tweeting content on weekends and later in the day has also shown to accumulate more CTRs than during the week and in the mornings (courtesy of Dan Zarrella from Hubspot).
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