Photo by thesocialskinny.com
Diana Urban posted 50 Tweetable Twitter Tips You Wish You Knew Years Ago on Hubspot. Here is a smaller selection of 30, for your convenience:
Optimizing Your Twitter Profile
1) Make yourself easy to recognize by using a close-up headshot of yourself as your profile picture.
2) Make the most of your Twitter bio. Show off your skills and uniqueness without over-hashtagging.
3) Twitter’s new profile design dimensions: header photo = 1500 x 500 px | profile pic = 400 x 400 px.
What You Should Tweet
5) Structure your tweets like this to increase clicks: KEY MESSAGE – LINK #HASHTAG AFTERTHOUGHT
6) Don’t be self-promotional on Twitter. Mix up your content and interact with your followers.
7) Curate content you tweet from a wide variety of sources to keep your followers interested.
8) Share images in your tweets to increase engagement, since images now appear inline on Twitter.
9) Be real. It’s okay to tweet mundane things like weather commentary or what you’re eating SPARINGLY.
Increasing Twitter Engagement
10) Engage with others and show appreciation for their tweets by using the favorite button as a “like.”
11) Be responsive on Twitter, not a robot. If someone asks you a question on Twitter, answer it!
12) If you retweet every single tweet you’re mentioned in, followers will think you crave attention.
13) If someone regularly retweets or replies to you, add them to a list so you can return the favor.
14) Twitter is a two-way conversation. Tweet questions to encourage your followers to interact with you.
15) Nobody HAS to share your content on Twitter. So if someone authoritative retweets you, thank them.
Making Sense of the Chaos
16) You don’t have to follow back everyone that follows you. Doing so would clutter your stream.
17) Use hashtags (#) to join relevant conversations and make your tweets easy to find.
18) Use lists grouped by industry or topic to follow people you want to pay attention to on Twitter.
19) Create public Twitter lists (vs. private) so members know when they’re added and likely reciprocate.
20) Save time by using tools like Buffer or HubSpot’s Social Inbox to schedule tweets for the week.
21) Blocking people doesn’t “block” them from your tweets, but removes them from your Twitter stream.
Optimizing Your Twitter Stream
22) Use landscape-oriented images on Twitter, using approximately a 2:1 dimension, for the best appearance on the Twitter feed.
23) Try incorporating an image into every three to four tweets so they’re more prominent in a user’s feed.
24) If Twitter is your morning task, schedule tweets throughout the day instead of posting them all at once.
Getting More Twitter Followers
25) Measure your Twitter success not by your number of followers, but by the quality and level of engagement.
26) Don’t follow more than a couple hundred people per day. Twitter might mistake you for a spam bot and suspend your account!
Having Good Twitter Etiquette
27) If you wouldn’t say something to someone’s face, don’t say it to them on Twitter.
28) Don’t start arguments with people on Twitter. A friendly debate is fine, but respect others’ opinions.
29) Don’t be a troll, no matter how angry you are. For most, Twitter isn’t really anonymous, and your public anger could come back to haunt you later.
30) If you tweet spoilers while live-tweeting TV shows or sporting events, use the right hashtag so people can filter it out.
Check out the rest of the tips on Hubspot!
Maria, to answer your question, yes I use Socialoomph daily and schedule tweets for the next 24 hours. I schedule 1-2 tweets per hour and also make sure that at least every hour there is one tweet that directs the readers to my blog. I tweet lots more about others rather about my own books. Also, I get on Twitter daily once or twice to RT lots of people’s stuff so that my timeline is diverse and not just listing my own tweets. The other benefit here is that if I tweet a lot manually every day, Twitter won’t reject my automatic tweets later as you must have a larger presence as a human rather than a bot!!
That is a *lot* of work! As one of the lucky beneficiaries of your commitment, I can only say thank you!
Thanks for addressing my question, Fros! That is indeed a lot of work! However, in your case, with over 5K followers it has paid off. Good for you!
It may sound like a lot of work but it only takes me 15 minutes or so a day. That’s it! The trick? I don’t manually type the tweets. I have them all in one .txt file and just copy-paste at will. Socialoomph even allows as you know to shorten the link and occasionally, I run reports to see how many hits each one of the abbreviated links has got me. It is an eye opener. Hope you are using this feature guys! Anyway, this set up grants me monthly 800-1000 new followers which is a bit less (by 200 approx) than when I used the automated free service Begware, that is no more.
Thanks, Fros! Yes, I’d figured about saving tweet templates in a .doc, but (typical me) I hadn’t gotten around to doing it. I’ll definitely try out Socialoomph. The tool I mostly like about the free HootSuite version I’ve been trying out is a Hootlet bookmarklet that sits on your toolbar, and when you’re on a site you want to tweet about, you just click on it and it automatically generates a tweet with its shortened link which you can share both on Twitter and on Facebook.
Buffer does that, too, allowing you to place the update in your buffered tweets/FB updates. You’re right, it’s very handy!
Puzzleflip also records your retweeters so that you can check the list and RT their stuff too manually if you wish. I think they offer this for the free accounts too but I dont use this any more as they really mucked up the automatic tweeting option. It’s now only manually possible to tweet from Puzzleflip which is pointless, really.
I use SocialOomph’s paid service, which is around $6 each month. I find it to be great value for money!
Thanks for confirming Nick! I expect then that this is what you recommend, ie that there is no FREE service out there that does what I need?
None that I know of, no.
Reblogged this on Sally Ember, Ed.D. and commented:
C+ for me, so far. #Learningtotweet
I only started working my twitter account last November. We’re all on the same boat here! 😀
These are great. I have a couple of people who retweet me on Twitter and I always have trouble retweeting them back, simply because it’s not something you can check a couple of times a day – I find I can only really keep up if I have an app that shows the tweets as they come in. So I’ll have to wait until this year’s mobile phone contract is up before I can do any meaningful interaction.
Cheers
MTM
Keeping up with the tweets is a never-ending job! 😀 I use Plume (an android app) to keep track of tweets on my mobile; it’s really handy!
Very good points! Nicholas, I’ve recently installed HootSuite, and I’ve got a grasp of what it involves, but I have a tweet scheduling question: is there a way (in Buffer let’s say) to perma-schedule tweets i.e. to schedule for a specific tweet to go out four times during the day, every day? Or do you have to schedule the day’s tweets each and every day? HootSuite is really cool, but as far as I’ve seen, once the scheduled tweet goes, you have to reschedule… Not very time efficient 🙁
I haven’t used HootSuite, but I do use SocialOomph to schedule repeat tweets. Unlike Buffer, it allows you to place a tweet at the end of a queue as soon as it’s sent. This means that you can schedule a dozen tweets to be sent, say, every 18 hours, and it will do so ad infinitum. Since it also allows you to send tweets with images, it’s very helpful. 🙂
Very informative post, thank you Nicholas! On the subject of scheduling tweets, I have been trying to find a site that allows me to set the schedule once and then have stuff tweeted on a loop, pretty much like you described. But are you sure Socialoomph does that? I use a free account and it doesnt offer this option. I presume you have a paid subcription there maybe? Do you know if any of the other sites mentioned here provide the option I need with a free account? Would really appreciate the advice as it’s been bugging me for some time!! Thanks!!
That’s exactly what I’m looking for, Fros! Seeing you tweeting your wonderful blog posts daily, I thought that you were using such an app. Does that mean that you schedule tweets on a daily basis? It’s funny, as when I was about to email you and Nicholas about that subject, Nicholas came up with the post… 🙂