I have had the pleasure of “meeting” Jennifer, from The Awesome Muse and found her lifestyle blog to be a breath of fresh air. Further, her social sense with Twitter and Instagram were excellent so I asked her to share more for my followers. Please enjoy! ~Kristen
If you are new to Twitter, you may find that it’s a great place to talk about your business but you may need some Twitter Tips. There are all kinds of people available for you to talk to with common interests with whom you may not otherwise cross paths. So when you are learning how to utilize the platform, there are some things you can do from the beginning to make things easier for yourself later.
Twitter Tip One: Following
Now that you are on Twitter, you need to create a following. When your account is new, it can be difficult to get other users to follow you if they do not know you. If you haven’t already, you’ll want to begin by inviting your in real life (IRL in Twitter speak) friends to follow you, but even before you do that, let’s make some tweets.
Set up your profile, complete it then do a few tweets before inviting and following so you look like a real account. #twittertip Click To TweetAccounts that don’t have very many tweets make people nervous. Particularly if you only have a handful of tweets, 3 followers and you are following 897 people. That looks like spam. So make some tweets so that people know you aren’t a spambot. Which leads me to…
Twitter Tip Two: What to Post
One of the most important things about Twitter is to realize that it’s not about you. Other than your mom, very few people are interested in following an account that only talks about you or what you are selling all the time. So you need to have an idea of what kind of content to post. You want to strike a balance between posts promoting yourself and content you share from others. So let’s talk about what performs well.
Twitter users favor posts with images and videos rather than plain text tweets. You have 140 characters to use to say something. That’s not a lot, despite the fact that Twitter lifted the character counts for usernames and links. So use an image or video to say more. A picture is worth a thousand words. That’s a lot more than 140 characters.
Posts with links are also popular. To rank them from highest engagement to lowest, it goes:
- Video
- Images
- Links
- Text Only
Twitter Tip Three: Creating Original Content
One of the most common things you’ll see shared on Twitter is inspirational quotes. Quotes get retweeted a lot, so that’s a great place to start for your first original content pieces. You may have graphic design experience and know Photoshop backwards and forwards, but if you don’t, that’s okay.
There are several great tools out there with an easy learning curve to create original material. I like Picmonkey and Canva for easy WYSIWYG design. You can also get images with a creative commons license from Pixabay. Canva has low cost images ($1) that you can purchase with a limited license, or you can purchase images from a stock photo company like Shutterstock. There are a lot of great photo options.
Kristen has a great blog post about image selection and why you should be selective and purchase all images for your website.
Twitter Tip Four: Twitter Lists
Learning to utilize Twitter lists is one of the most helpful time savers available on Twitter. What is a Twitter list? It is a way to sort through all of the noise, and there is a lot, and drill down to the people who are influential on a certain topic. For instance, if your business is related to beauty products, you may want to create a twitter list for beauty brands, one for beauty bloggers, and another one for beauty influencers. When you sort your followers (and even those you do not follow) into lists, it makes it easier for you to later find meaningful content to retweet. It is much easier to do this from the beginning than it is to amass a large following and have to go back and sort your followers later.
Learning to use lists is one of the best ways to save time on Twitter. #twittertips Click To TweetFor example, if you have an editorial calendar that says you talk about Makeup trends on Monday, you have your followers pre-sorted so that you can find meaningful content without having to search through the tweets on your home page.
How do you create a list on Twitter?
You’ll be glad to know that it’s really simple. From your profile page, you’ll see a gear. Tap or click the gear and a menu will drop down. One of the options will be View Lists. You’ll see the option to add a new list, or a + sign. Click this, and you will be able to name your new list. Now you’re ready to add people to your list!
How do you add someone to a list?
From their profile page, tap the gear, and you’ll see another menu appear. One of the options will be Add/remove from lists. Tap that, and you’ll find that it is a toggle switch. Tap once to add them (provided they have not previously been added to this list). You’ll be prompted to select the list you wish to add them.
Which means that can be a lot of work. But it doesn’t have to be. You can always use….
Twitter Tip Five: IFTTT
IFTTT is your friend. It’s a really phenomenal third party software that utilizes channels that you can connect to do things. Twitter is one of those channels. IFTTT uses what is called “recipes” to program specific functions. Using our previous beauty business analogy, if you wanted to add everyone to a list who uses a particular hashtag for a specific beauty brand, you can do that.
Once you create a FREE account at IFTTT (yippee!!!), you will want to connect your channels. Add Twitter, your other social networks like Facebook, Instagram and Pinterest, and you can even add your home security systems and thermostats. IFTTT can really do a lot. So once you set up Twitter as a channel, you can set up several recipes. Add people using a specific hashtag to a list, you can wish people a Happy New Year when the clock turns twelve, you can have your images from Instagram show up as photos rather than links in your Twitter feed, you can push your tweets to Facebook and other accounts. The list isn’t endless, but it definitely feels like it.
These 5 tips should make life easier for you when you are just getting started with Twitter. Get the hang of these, and come back for another set of helpful Twitter Tips! Should you have more questions, feel free to leave a comment below and either myself or Kristen would be happy to help you.
While you are at it, feel free to stop by my The Awesome Muse blog and see what awesome blogs we have to share for social media, beauty and more – we ARE a lifestyle blog – it’s a catch all.
~Jennifer
Guest Posted by:
Jennifer Quisenberry of The Awesome Muse
It was such a privilege to guest blog for you. Thank you for having me! I look forward to writing more about Twitter and Instagram for you soon!
YAY! I am excited too! It was great! Thank you! I’m actually using it this week since you shared mine. 😉
Awesome tips! I’ve shared on my social 🙂
Thank you Kayla and thanks also for sharing!
Thank you Kayla! I’m so glad you liked it and shared it!
We are on twitter for our business, but to be honest, it can be quite frustrating. It doesn’t seem like there are many conversations going on, just everyone posting their own things. Not like facebook.
Any thoughts/advice?
They are definitely different, Dan, and it’s harder to get folks to see your stuff on FB due to all of the filters (thank you FB for that)… and well, with Twitter, you have to do the work too. Find folks that you want to engage with and start there. As you build, it will build as well.
Hi Dan. Thanks for stopping by! I find that the more I engage on Twitter, the more people engage with me. A lot of people treat twitter like it’s the kitchen sink, but there’s some really great things out there. I would suggest starting some conversations. Do you participate in Twitter parties? (That gives me an idea for a new post.) They are a great way to meet like minded people.
Great info about starting with Twitter. I find that Twitter is very fast paced and there’s not much conversation. But apparently people like what I tweet because my following has grown to over 5300 with very little effort on my part.
I have Social Quant Carol and mine has grown from 2000 to 10k in about 9 months… but I have also noticed that as I grow, there are more conversations.. so maybe I am getting to some of the right people and those that want to chat with me do… kind of like FB and the filters, it’s done for you (which I don’t agree with) but does that make sense?
Thanks for stopping by Carol. I have had the same experience as Kristen. I find that as I grow on Twitter (both in followers and expertise in how to use it) that my conversations grow. I’ve met some incredible people on Twitter. If you’re looking to have conversations, I find the easiest way to do that is to speak up. A lot of users will engage. I think that a great person to look at for how he handles Twitter conversations is William Shatner. He’s always talking with his friends and his fans about something. And he’s funny!
I really learned a lot from this post. Am really a Twitter neophyte and did not know about lists or IFTTT. Now I have a tool to get to that next level with Twitter. Thanks?
I’m so glad you found these tips actionable! These will really make things easier for you to be active on Twitter. Thanks for stopping by Alene!
So glad you learned a lot from it Alene. I haven’t been running after Twitter myself but know there is value, for sure.
Lots of great information here. I especially like the ifttt.com feature and am working on getting it get up!
I’m so glad you find it handy! It’s really easy to use and is such a time saver. It looks like I am on Twitter all the time, but I really only spend about 15 minutes a day there. IFTTT and a few other favorite tools take care of that for me so I can go in and be responsive. Thanks for stopping by!
Awesome Candess… glad you found the value! Hope you enjoy getting to know IFTTT
Awesome tips! Looking to take my “Twittering” to the next level, and this will be a great resource.
I’m so glad this was useful to you Robin. Thanks for stopping by to read it.
YAY! I am with you Robin!
Great twitter tips. I’ve created some lists and I’ve been added to some but I’m not sure how to effectively use them:-)
One of my favorite ways to use Twitter lists is when I am attending an event. Let’s say I am attending a conference that will be using a specific hashtag. I’d like to follow along with conversations at the conference so I can chime in, add value, and connect with and learn from my peers. I can go to IFTTT prior to the conference to set up a hashtag recipe for those using that hashtag, and then during the conference, I can easily see what the users are following. Whenever I do this, it makes it super easy for me to find and connect with other attendees, I get valuable insights as others put their spin on the same content I’m taking in, and frankly, I get a lot of twitter followers from doing so because people are like, “wow, who is curating the list for the event?”
Yea, same here Tandy, I have the lists… but they too are a little overwhelming as well… and quite honestly, I wish they were a little less time consuming and faster to create/change.
Haha, still remember the first time I use twitter, I don’t know is that it limits the characters. I wrote a very long status, and then my effort wasted.
Sounds like this could be helpful for you then Kevin. Hope it helped.
This is great! Twitter has been my weakest social media link. Now I have a much better idea of how I can make it work for me. I especially list the idea of being able to have a Twitter list.
I feel you Joyce.. it has been mine as well.. but I am getting there too!