5 Twitter Tips for Beginners

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.

Accounts 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.

For 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