Twitter, if utilized properly, can be one of the most powerful free marketing platforms out there. Once you know how to optimize your tweets, you’ll reach a broader audience and enjoy deeper engagement. From there, you can develop a relationship with your most passionate fans and confidently build your brand.
The Importance of Tweet Optimization
Twitter only gives you 140 characters to work with, so you’d better know what to do with them. Having a tweet blueprint handy can mean the difference between snagging dozens of followers a day and completely losing the interest of your audience.
With so many marketers bombarding your prospects with commercial tweets each day, you have to stand out to get noticed. Users will notice your conscientious tweeting, and they’ll follow you happily.
Frequency and Length
Here are the essentials: Don’t tweet more than 25 times per day, but tweet at least 5 times. This seems to be the optimal tweet frequency. Below 15, you’ll stay far under the radar, but send out more than 25 tweets and you’ll overstay your welcome.
If you do send up to 25 tweets per day, ensure that no more than 5 of them are self-promotional. This will force you to look afield for quality content to share.
Couple these tweets with a relevant hashtag, and you’ll quickly find that you can snag new followers relatively easily. If you send too many self-promotional tweets, on the other hand, even your most die-hard fans will tune you out eventually.
Additionally, while Twitter gives you up to 140 characters to work with, tweets with 100 to 120 characters typically perform the best. This is likely to do with the fact that many marketers cram their messages with links and hashtags. Their tweets lack substance.
Try to put as much thought into every tweet as you would into your headlines. If you can do this on a consistent basis, you’ll stick out from the crowd. The best tweets contain a short, punchy message that makes the reader want to take some action.
Link Management
Many marketers place links at the end of a tweet as an afterthought. Yet in most cases, the entire point of the tweet is to get a prospect to click the link. Your prospect isn’t unaware of this, so you might as well place the link in the middle of the tweet or even close to the beginning.
Recent research from social media expert Dan Zarrella suggests that most clicks occur when the link is placed at around the 25% mark. Twitter users are conditioned to click, so go ahead and give them the link first and the message second.
Engagement
If you use a Twitter automation tool such as HootSuite or TweetDeck, it’s imperative that you go in and manually respond to @Mentions and @Replies. If you leave out this crucial step, your fans may feel snubbed.
While it takes time to do this, the long-term benefits are enormous. Once you have a large enough following to justify the extra expense, consider putting an employee on the task.
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