13 Useful Twitter Tips For Small Business (or anyone!)

Being on Twitter is one thing, but using it well is another. Here are a few little tips and hints I’ve picked up along the way that might make your time on Twitter a better experience. These are particularly handy if you use Twitter for the purpose of marketing your business or organization.

1. Write to get the retweet – In order to maximize your efforts and experience the viral nature of Twitter, you want to get retweeted. Hopefully your content is worthy of being retweeted. But the problem is that if someone wants to retweet your post and it’s too long, many will just give up rather than try to shrink your tweet. So don’t think in terms of 140 characters. You need to take into account the length of your username plus the spaces needed for the terms “RT” or “via”. Thanks to Twittercism there is a formula.

subtract the length of your username + 8 characters from 140

In other words, my username is: @Inkling_Media which is 14 characters long. If I add 8 to that, I get 22. I subtract that 22 from 140, and my maximum number of characters should be: 118. That means that in order to get retweeted most effectively, my tweets should be no more than 118 characters in length. Many people won’t retweet something that requires them to edit or work. Plus you run the risk of someone editing your tweet improperly.

2. Use URL shorteners – There are two reasons for this. First, it allows you to add more content to your tweet (and be retweeted more easily). Secondly, if you use the proper URL shortener, you will be able to get some useful tracking and analytics. In particular, the best for this is bit.ly. Also, if you copy a bit.ly link and add a “+” to the end, you can see all the great tracking information for that particular link, including referrals. And bit.ly even has a variety of browser sidebars and plug-ins, as well as mobile apps to help you out.

3. Be Careful of Linking from Facebook – It’s often helpful to link your Twitter feed to your Facebook status, so that every time you update Facebook, it automatically pushes your status to Twitter. But with that in mind, we need to remember to keep our Facebook status short, and also use a URL shortener. Otherwise you end up with an awfully ugly, truncated message going out over Twitter.

4. Lose the Auto-DM – Hate them. Big time. Nothing says “I really don’t care about you unless you want to buy my products and services” than an auto-DM. Early in the Twitter time-line it was considered proper etiquette to thank people for following you. This is no longer necessary and just feels “spammy”. As a Social Media consultant, getting an auto-DM from another Social Media consultant, telling me they can help me out, just shows they aren’t listening or building relationships.

5. Don’t RT other people’s RT’s of you – I see this a lot. People get excited when someone retweets them, so they retweet the retweet. There is nothing wrong with self-promotion, but this is a bit over the top. If your username is featured twice in the same tweet, it looks cheesy.

6. Get an avatar – This is a no-brainer, and you’ve probably heard it before. In general, your av should be a picture of you. I use a picture of myself for my personal feed, and my logo for my Inkling Media feed. But if you merely go with the Twitter default av, it looks like you either don’t care, or don’t know what you are doing. Or both.

7. Use a desktop Twitter app, not the Web interface – I still can’t figure out why people use the Twitter web page. The web interface is not very user friendly and requires a lot more of your time than the well organized third-party apps that are out there. I use and highly recommend Seesmic Desktop. It allows for multiple accounts and columns, searches, lists, and even Facebook integration…and is rather easy to use. Another similar and popular app is Tweetdeck. And if you are looking for an incredibly small, simple, and easy to use application for just one Twitter account, try Twhirl. There are dozens more, so look around and find the one you like best.

And IF you are working off of the Twitter web interface, be careful when you RT. Not all 3rd party apps will see these retweets, so you’ll lose some effectiveness. I’m not a big fan of Twitter’s built in retweet feature. The 3rd party apps were doing this properly long before Twitter went down that road.

8. Lighten up – Don’t be so serious. Have fun and be a real person. And if you are using Twitter as a marketing tool, stay on message, but don’t be so stiff. This isn’t ad copy. Write conversationally.

9. Share and Promote – If you see something you like, tweet it. If a friend shares something you like, retweet it. Just make sure you give proper credit!

10. Respond to people – I’m just as guilty of this as the next guy, but when someone @replies to you, acknowledge them with an @reply back. And try to say something useful, not just “Thank you.”

11. Share photos – I love clicking on links to photos that my friends post on Twitter. You never know what’s on the other end. There are a number of apps for doing this, but I find Twitpic is the best, and works well for sending photos from a cell phone while you’re out and about.

12. Don’t do the Follow/Unfollow trick – A lot of people try to build their reach by following a lot of people at once, and then unfollowing them once they get that person to follow them. Got that? Read it again. Again, this sends the message that all you care about is yourself. Twitter is a conversation, not just a place for you to pontificate without listening.

13. Stay current – Read and subscribe to blogs that discuss Twitter. Stay up on the latest trends, rules, advances, etc. If you are using Twitter, chances are you are ahead of the curve when it comes to emerging technologies. This technology changes on an almost daily basis, so don’t get left behind.

What are you favorite Twitter tips that you’ve picked up along the way? We love to have you share them here.

Tagged as: Marketing, Social Media, Twitter