Resources
How To Guide: Twitter Page
Twitter is a social networking platform unlike any other. For businesses, it’s a place where like-minded industry professionals and customers can share stories, ideas and useful content. It’s also a great place to meet people in the industry or connect with high-level contacts that would otherwise be hard to reach.
To Keep In Mind When Preparing Your Institutions Twitter Page
ESTABLISH YOUR BRAND IDENTITY
Add your official name, logo, location and elevator pitch to your bio to help people understand you and to give them a reason to follow you.
To Keep In Mind When Tweeting
Posts – or tweets – are often the first impressions people have of your business, so make sure they attract and engage potential customers, supporters or champions. Use these best practices to reach your business goals with posts:
Keep it short
Add your official name, logo, location and elevator pitch to your bio to help people understand you and to give them a reason to follow you.
Don’t overuse hashtags
Use your hashtags wisely and sparingly; try limiting them to one or two hashtags per tweet.
Use popular hashtags to increase your chances of being found and followed. Otherwise, create your own unique hashtag and use it in relevant tweets.
Add visuals, especially video
Bold images, GIFs, and videos add a touch of personality and increase results. Twitter’s internal data revealed that there are over two billion video views per day on the platform. For effective, memorable videos: include your company's logo, if you can; add subtitles so people don't need headphones; and keep the video short (6-15 seconds is the sweet spot).
Don’t constantly self-promote
Self-promotion is allowed and even expected, but do it lightly. Twitter is not a static advertising platform or a bulletin board for your promotions. Always try to be useful on Twitter. Be an authority figure. Educate, inspire and be helpful.
Ask questions and run polls
Twitter is all about conversations. Asking questions is an effective way to interact with your audience, show your company’s personality and gather feedback.
Make clear calls to action
Every time you tweet, ask yourself: “What do I want people to do when they see this?” Ask your audience to comment below, or to follow you, or to sign up. If there’s something urgent, emphasize it. Always make the next step clear.
Don’t tweet several times in a row
If you’re only able to tweet during a small-time bracket during the day, think about using a web-based Twitter programme like Hootsuite to help you space out your tweets.
Don’t follow everyone that follows you
Hopefully, as you start using Twitter to post interesting and helpful tweets, others will follow you. However, don't feel obligated to follow people just because they followed you. They might just be an average Twitter user that tweets about their breakfast and retweets other people's content.
Keep your following count at a manageable level. Actively search out tweeters in your industry who share useful and meaningful content that you can easily share or retweet to your own followers.
Tune in
Social listening is very important for businesses. It’s not all about saying something relevant. Listen out for conversations around your industry, paying close attention to everything being said about your brand.
Thankfully, Twitter enables listening through their advanced search tool; it lets you know what’s being said about your products and services. You can get even more insights from discussions on trending topics, and you can use this information to refine your content and tweak where necessary to build more trust and loyalty.
To get the most out of social listening, pay attention to what’s being said about your brand name, industry hashtags, your competitors as well as relevant topics.
Don’t ignore your direct messages
Direct messages are like emails between Twitter users. Perhaps you'd like to reach out to a fellow tweeter, but you don't want others to know, or the information you want to share is private – like an email address or cell phone number.
Do check and respond to your direct messages. And remember, you can send a direct message only to people who follow you.
Don’t ignore retweets or tweets about you
You might retweet something and then receive a tweet from that user thanking you for the retweet (RT). This shows that they appreciate what you've done for them. In this case, you should respond, by saying, for example: "No problem! I found your tweet interesting and thought my followers might like it." You can make your message more personal or shorter if you want.
If this was the real world, and someone thanked you for doing something for them, you wouldn't just ignore them and walk away. The same rules apply for social etiquette on Twitter. If someone retweets one of your tweets, you should thank them for doing so; it's the right thing to do.
Also, if someone tweets directly at you (using @your_username), for whatever reason, you'll want to respond quickly. You don't want to leave your followers hanging.
- Be conversational.
- Keep your wording short and sweet.
- Use images, GIFs and videos whenever possible.
- Monitor events and trending conversations.
