When you start out on the mean tweets of twitter nobody knows your name (unless you are famous) and you have to start from the bottom. After 1000 tweets of many different methods you find yourself sighing and wonder if there is ever any hope, your follower count is still only your friends and your tweets are only shared by bots looking for specific hashtags. You feel ready to hang up your twitter boots and say ‘social media just isn’t right for my company’, but don’t. Social media works but it’s a battleground and you just haven’t found the right ammunition for your gun yet. Here is our handy guide of our Top 5 Twitter tips to getting your twitter account (personal or business) more followers. It might seem impossible but don’t worry, it will pay off.
Twitter Tip #1: Tweet regularly and don’t give up
There are times when it seems that whatever technique you try nothing seems to work. Twitter is a bit like the lottery, most tweets will just fail to be seen by anyone, even if you do follow all the tips in this guide. If you keep buying lottery tickets you might win, but if you don’t buy any lottery tickets you will never win. This is the same for twitter and this is why it’s important to keep tweeting and never give up. Studies have shown that accounts with less than 1000 tweets tend to have less than 100 followers compared to accounts that have over 1000 tweets having more than 100 followers. The important take away from this tip is that you can get followers but it takes dedication and time (and a whole lot of tweets). The next time you feel like there is no hope and you’ll never get any interaction on twitter just consider this: Katie Hopkins (@KTHopkins – we won’t link to her because of the vile nonsense she spouts) has over half a million followers. If she can do it, you can. Just look at the nonsense she puts out:
Twitter Tip #2: Optimise your profile
No one wants to follow a twitter profile that doesn’t look good. Firstly let’s work on your profile photo. This is the representative of your twitter profile, your avatar, your head of state – This is the first thing people will notice. You can imagine just how well it goes down if you don’t have an avatar then, or even worse: An avatar that is poorly cropped. An avatar which is a photo of yourself will always do well, or if you are a company just stick with your logo, just don’t make it too fancy (like your logo riding a unicorn shooting lasers at your competitors or something).
Your bio is also important. If your biography isn’t good people won’t follow you. Write something that you would be interested in reading yourself, use relevant hashtags and remember: Your bio will appear on Google when people search your name so you have to grab their attention. Write your bio and make sure it ticks all these boxes: accurate, exciting, targeted, flattering, intriguing, connected (hashtags and links) and most importantly – believable.
Twitter Tip #3: Use hashtags
If you don’t know what a hashtag is, it’s when you see a word which has a # symbol before it. An example would be #animals which would show up when someone was to look for tweets mentioning animals. It’s possible to be overzealous when it comes to inserting hashtags in your tweet which brings us to our first point – Don’t #put #too #many #hashtags in your #tweet. We recommend you aim for 2 to 3 hashtags per tweet as this is proven to be the optimum amount for a tweet to get big. It’s also important you don’t force hashtags into your tweet. A tweet about computer parts is not related to star wars so please don’t put #starwars into your tweet, it just makes you look desperate.
As you use Twitter you will see some pretty regular hashtags (for us it would be #PPCchat or #SEO) which relate to your business. This is a good area for you to aim your tweets at, but it’s also a good way to find people related to your business who you can follow or interact with. An easy way to get followers is to just follow other people, they often follow you back but aren’t always interested in what you have to say. This is a ‘dead’ follower, someone who is just a number on your follower count but isn’t really bringing you any benefits. It’s up to you if you want to measure your success by the number of followers you have, but we think it’s better to have fewer followers which love to interact than having lots of followers who don’t care about your tweets.
Twitter Tip #4: Specific words make a difference
“Words are, of course, the most powerful drug used by mankind.” – Ruyard Kipling
It’s important to choose your words carefully. Some words will make your tweet much more likely to be interacted with, where as other words might make your tweet avoided.
Here is a list of some of the words you should aim to use:
- You
- Please
- Retweet
- Free
Here is a list of words you should avoid:
- Game
- Going
- Haha
- Lol
- Tomorrow
This list isn’t complete, nor is it absolute, but it’s important that you are at least aware that the language you use in your tweet will affect how far it gets. Before sending any tweet read it to yourself and make sure it flows. The last thing you want is a tweet which sends someone to sleep, unless it’s a tip on how to make people sleep, but then they would be asleep and wouldn’t share your tweet. Nobody said Twitter would be easy!
Twitter Tip #5: Construct your tweet correctly
So you’re finally ready to tweet. You’ve spent time on your profile, got your head around hashtags and finally understand the power of words, but now it’s time to start tweeting. It’s difficult when you only have 140 characters to work with but here are some of the most important parts of a tweet.
A link will get a tweet far more interaction than a tweet without one. There are many websites out there which will shorten your link (We use https://bitly.com/) so you don’t have to worry about using too many characters. We suggest that you also aim to put your link within the first 25% of the tweets characters as this is proven to be the most interacted area of your tweet.
An image is also a fantastic thing to put into your tweet. The image below is a perfect example of the kind of image you could put into a tweet, and it also gets across just how effective imagery is:
Do you have any tips and tricks for Twitter to add to our Top 5 Twitter tips list that you recommend people use? Let us know in the comments below!