Tips for Your Twitter World
Today’s SIPA Twitter Chat at noon EST will focus on renewals. These weekly Chats have produced some excellent dialogue on various topics—mobile, e-learning—so we encourage you to tune in. (See bottom for details.) It also has been a good primer in the world of Twitter. Like anything else, there are ways to take better advantage of what Twitter has to offer.
Allie Townsend, social media producer for TIME has somewhere upwards of 2,870,423 followers on Twitter. Her comments last month on the Folio: website are interesting to read. “You’ve only got a few seconds of someone’s attention (at best) on Twitter, so what you’re writing needs to earn their click. Don’t be afraid to be urgent, funny, maybe even a little sarcastic if the story calls for it. It’s all about humanizing your digital presence. We want readers to glance at a TIME social account on any platform and know automatically that it is not run by robots. Instead of traditional headlines, I’m digging into the story for the right fact, joke or quote to tweet. My name is attached to the account because we want people to know that this was handpicked. Our social curation is about the human experience. We’ll joke when it’s appropriate, but we’re also not afraid to call an African famine ‘heartbreaking.’ It may break a few traditional rules of journalism, but it’s also one of the reasons TIME has adapted to Twitter so well.”
Here are some other helpful hints for using Twitter.
– Think of it as a search engine. “It is a search engine, in that it’s a real-time way of finding out what’s going on about what you care about and about a specific topic, too,” said Kevin Cheng, a Twitter product manager.
– Gather market research. “Marketers ultimately see the platform as a huge public opinion or market research vehicle,” said Adam Bain, Twitter’s revenue specialist.
– Customers can feel more connected to your writers/analysts. Many customers like the idea that you can keep in touch with people that you wouldn’t normally have access to. If you have columnists or bloggers, definitely have them Tweeting to develop a larger audience.
– Put your information out there and let customers decide what they want and when. “I follow now almost 1,000 different accounts,” said Cheng. “And I don’t expect to read all of them, right? I think of it more like a stream that I dip my feet into every so often.”
– Think about using Twitter to get dialogue going or for customer service queries. After complaints about Comcast’s customer service went viral online, the company launched an @ComcastCares Twitter channel that turned used rapid-fire, responsive answers to customer questions to help turn around the company’s reputation. Best Buy also turned to Twitter to improve their customer service.
– Twitter allows you time and space to create your persona, your outside voice. Pick a style or a method and see how it works. If it draws followers, then stay with it. If not, try something else.
Finally, Jessica Lillian, editor, Solar Industry Magazine, also wrote her Twitter best practices on the Folio: site: “One of the most important things is not being robotic. With magazines in particular, there’s a temptation to send out headlines and get people to click on them. You have to surround that with conversation; engage, reply and talk to followers. Hashtags are used in the majority of Solar Industry tweets. Using the most appropriate hashtags in a magazine’s topic or domain, and using them consistently, is key. We use “#solar” because simple often works the best. When Solar Industry hit Facebook, all stories were being fed into both social sites. It was meant to be temporary and wasn’t really well received; people don’t want to see the same thing twice. Today, Twitter is used for short headlines and spreading news; Facebook gets its own set of content.”
SIPA Twitter Chats take place Wednesdays, noon – 1 pm EST – using the hashtag #NicheInfo. Today’s topic is renewals. How do you participate? If you don’t already have a Twitter Chat client, we recommend TweetChat.com. Once you are on their site, simply log in through your Twitter account, type in the hashtag #NicheInfo, and you will see all of the Tweets in the chat, including your own! By using TweetChat.com, all of your Tweets will automatically include the #NicheInfo in each tweet. If you are using a different Twitter client, please remember to reference #NicheInfo so others can see the conversation.
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Have a happy Thanksgiving!
We’ll be back Friday for the Week in Review.
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