Are your Twitter efforts focused in the right place?
Twitter is a no-brainer for publishers, if they are using it correctly.
What is your Twitter strategy? Professionals should not just be using Twitter because “everyone else does”. That statement would make Twitter pros cringe. To find success with Twitter, you have to have an organized plan for disseminating your content.
Since Twitter is a micropublishing website, it should be a very natural experience for content publishers. All publishers with a website for their publication are already pushing out content to their audience; Twitter just helps in this process and allows publishers to target and follow other users who share passion for the same subject matter.
For those who are publishing on Twitter, are your efforts targeting the following core goals?
5 Core goals for Twitter users
Core Twitter Goal #1: Send more traffic back to your website – Behind well optimized content on search engines, Twitter has become one of the top sources of direct website traffic for content publishers.
Twitter Goal #2: Create more leads, sales and email signups – Sending interesting tweets with catchy headlines will help get new users to your website for the first time. From there, if you have conversion architecture on your site, you have the opportunity to convert these visitors to users or customers.
Twitter Goal #3: Solicit and join conversations – In order to do this, you have to find conversations that you are qualified to speak on. Fortunately there are tools to help in this process.
For instance, SocialMention can be used to help you find topics and top users that are being talked about on the social network.
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Twitter Goal #4: Establish yourself as an expert in your niche – The best way to establish yourself as an expert is to tweet often and share your best content and insight whenever possible.
Twitter Goal #5: Discover what your competitors are doing – Following your competition is a good idea on Twitter. This way, you can see how they are using the social network to interact with their audience, which of course, is the audience you share.
One tool you can use to help find competitors is wefollow. After entering a tag into this site, you will be given a list of the most influential members who are associated with that tag.
Twitter Goal #6: Use the right “netiquette” when interacting – Are you familiar with Twitter lingo? If you aren’t, your commentary may be lacking, which will make you appear like an outsider. As a quick tutorial, here are a few things to remember while interacting on Twitter:
-The @ Sign: This symbol is used to display a mention. Here’s an example of a tweet received at the Mequoda Daily: Great headline, @Mequoda!
-RT: This abbreviation stands for retweet. Users implement these when sharing tweets composed by other individuals.
-Hashtag # – Hashtags are used to facilitate conversations on the same topic. For instance, a hashtag like #EmailMarketing would include tweets all about the topic of email marketing.
Are you past the basics of Twitter and looking to utilize strategies that the most successful publishers on Twitter are using? If so, join us for our Twitter for Editors webinar on May 3rd.
Are these goals you have while interacting on Twitter? I’d love to hear your thoughts.
