Social Media Marketing: How to Optimize Your Twitter Experience

Twitter and Facebook occupy the front two seats of any social media marketing vehicle. You cannot read an article or watch a video on social media marketing without spending the majority of your time learning about these two platforms. So, despite negative information concerning the platform, such as our recent article, “Study: 25% of all Tweets ‘Not Credible’,” using Twitter and using it efficiently continues to be a worthwhile goal for everyone from large companies pushing their brand to teenagers seeking traffic for their first blog. Your mission, should you chose to accept it, is to make credible tweets which drive traffic and earn the trust of your followers, thereby building your brand. Fortunately for us, there is no shortage of “experts” on the Internet willing to tell us how to do this.

Wasserman and the Buddy Media Study

Blogger Todd Wasserman wrote an article based on a 2012 study by Buddy Media (now a part of Salesforce) which includes a few bullet-point suggestions as to how you can create effective tweets for social media marketing purposes. For instance, you should try to keep your tweets below 100 characters, and include relevant hashtags in your tweet to double engagement. I always try to include hashtags which are both relevant and trending if possible. Wasserman also warns not to include more than two hashtags in a tweet. Include a link (with a space before and after) and a picture if you can, but be sure both are functional. Another suggestion is to ask your followers to retweet your message. The 2012 study cited by Wasserman suggests that tweets which include “RT” or spell out the word “retweet” are retweeted 12 – 23 times more often respectively.

Time of Day and Frequency

The time of day and frequency of your tweets also make a big difference in their efficiency. Referring again to the 2012 study by Buddy Media, tweeting four times per day or less is ideal, with the most engagement being seen on the weekends. Also, the most effective time for tweets runs inverse to the effective time for Facebook posts. Therefore, sending out your tweets during the peak hours from 8am-7pm and then posting to Facebook between 8pm-7am can be an effective strategy which combines use of the two social media powerhouses for maximum effect.

You may be asking yourself how to schedule your tweets so you don’t have to sit in front of your computer all day. I use the free platform at Futuretweets.com to schedule my tweets, which include all hashtags and links. You manually enter when you want these tweets to be published, and the platform will send out each tweet at the time you specify. You must enter each tweet manually when you schedule them (due to Twitter’s ToS), but once scheduled, you then do not have to be there when they post.

Further Information

In addition to knowing what to put in your tweets, having the right third-party apps is a necessity to getting the most out of your Twitter account. In addition to Futuretweets.com, which I mentioned previously, I also use Tweepi.com, and another author here has made some suggestions in the article, “5 Great Twitter Tools – and 3 Useless Ones.” You can also peruse the hundreds of sites dedicated to the issue of marketing via social media platforms, such as the resources available at SocialMediaExaminer.com. Whatever method(s) you use to incorporate Twitter into your social media marketing strategy, we’d love to hear what works. Please give us your insight in the comments below.