How-Tu Tuesday: Making The Most of 140 Characters
The most important skill any Twitterati can possess is being concise. Brands must communicate their message in a clear and engaging way and do so in 140 characters… Not always the easiest of tasks. Marketers are often left sitting at their desks mulling over one tweet and trying to re-shuffle and abbreviate words, which is not an efficient use of precious time and can lead to the key message getting lost and not reaching the target market.
Check out the tips below for making the most of what could be considered the world’s most famous (and often frustrating) character limit…
- Use Hashtags
Hashtags are one of the most effective ways to increase reach and track conversations. However, including more than two hashtags can be overkill; you only need to tag the most important word that represents the theme of your tweet. Hashtags can help reduce character count as simply featuring a hashtag which summarises the tweet negates the need to explain your message in detail and provides a concise snapshot.
- Mention People and Places
140 characters have never been so effective in developing relationships and networking with industry leaders, customers and other stakeholders key to your business. Mentioning either a person or place (using their Twitter handle) will encourage those people/businesses to retweet your message to their own followers, thus drastically increasing your tweet’s visibility.
- Think About The Click
As with all other social platforms, keeping people engaged is key. A user’s Twitter feed can often become a blur of mixed messages and in order to grab and retain the attention of your follower’s tweets should include a clickable link, whether that be a GIF, a video or a link to a website. It is also important to shorten links using platforms such as Bitly as tweets appear cleaner and easier to read.
- Timing and Volume
Like so many other aspects of life (both online and offline) timing is everything. Although Twitter is a constant 24/7 stream of content, there are certain times throughout the day when users are more active and are potentially more likely to be reading and sharing content. On average for each time zone, 12pm-1pm is the most popular time to tweet, with the fewest tweets being sent between 3am-4am. For more information regarding when to tweet in specific time zones, click here.
Compared to other social platforms such as Facebook and Instagram, users should not be afraid to tweet often, especially so during peak times. A user’s Twitter stream is constantly being updated so tweeting the same message or featuring the same link more than once will only help to maximise reach and click-through rates. A good way of ensuring a key message on Twitter reaches your followers is to pin the tweet to the top of your feed, meaning anyone visiting your profile will instantly see it, even if it is older than other tweets in your feed.
- Key Words and Phrases
When the word limit is as tight as it is, users should be maximising tweets by using the most effective words and phrases that are going to grab the attention of scrollers. Depending on industry, there will be certain words/phrases which are more appropriate and relatable to your customers and these should become staples in the make-up of your tweets and feature as hashtags. However, over and above industry specific wording, there are other key words which prove to be popular across all business sectors on Twitter. The most retweetable word on Twitter is “you”, which is reflective of brands developing connections with their target audience.
Other Twitter friendly words include:
| · Help | · Please | · Blog post | · Media |
| · 10 | · How to | · Check out | · Free |
| · Great | · Top | · Retweet | · Social |
Hopefully this article has helped you distill your brand message into a stream of engaging tweets. If it has, send us a concise tweet @tuminds!
