Twitter, the online texting service on steroids at only 140 characters is often a challenge for those with a traditional marketing mindset. It’s more about brutal brevity, smart succinctness and simple shortness than monstering the masses with multi-media sensory overload.
It’s all about doing more with less.
Creating and then marketing content with Twitter is more about tempting the click than revealing all your secrets at once. Twitter should be seen as the teaser social network. It offers the promise of much more beyond the link.
It’s unsophisticated ways are its charm and its fatal attraction for celebrities who dare to tweet while under the influence of substances, emotion or plain stupidity.
The Twitter torrent
Twitter is sometimes seen as an inbox when it is more like a fleeting torrent that streams and screams its content past you. Often never to be seen again. It pushes the “I don’t want to miss out” syndrome.
This led to the creation of Twitter tools like Hootsuite that organises Tweets into lists for reading later. The corralling of Tweets into hashtag categories can be an effective way to manage Twitter that is sometimes seen as similar to the ungainly management that is like herding cats.
3 key elements to a tweet
There are 3 core elements to a tweet. Get these right and you are on your way to using Twitter well. They may seem simple but they are often poorly executed or ignored.
So what do you need to hone, polish and include to make your tweets sing and dance?
- Headline – tempt the reader to click the link. That’s its job, nothing more nothing less.
- Links – It was 4 years ago that I watched a video that said “don’t waste a tweet without a link“. It sort of made sense.
- Hashtags – Drive those tweets into Twitter searches and lists that are relevant. It is becoming the glue for social. This is the role of a hashtag.
What are your goals?
Stumbling onto Twitter with poor intent can lead to wasted time and effort. You need to have some specific goals in mind.
Some goals that are worth considering.
- Do you want to drive more traffic to your blog, website or online store?..So tweet and automate the content but not the conversation.
- Is it sales you are after? Use tweets with links to landing pages that have something to sell. Or tweet a coupon that can be claimed in-store or via a Facebook page.
- Are you wanting to connect and engage with influencers, customers and prospects?…Tweet their content, offer to help.
There are more goals than this but bait the Twitter hook, get focused and strategic and maybe those tweets will lead to blogging nirvana.
10 tips for Twitter content success
So here are 10 top tips for creating, marketing and sharing content on Twitter.