If you are looking to make an impact on Twitter as a small business, you want to get noticed by as many fellow users as possible. Once you are getting noticed, you will naturally accumulate more followers. Keep at it and chances are things will start to snowball.
But how do you get noticed? Well, by crafting tweets with your audience – and these four points – in mind, you’ll give yourself every chance.
- Is it interesting? Good tweets will be of interest to a Twitter user’s followers. Avoid the oft-quoted “had cornflakes for breakfast” and try to keep in mind whether you would find something interesting, were you to see it come from someone else.
- Shorter than 140 characters Try hard to give yourself about 20 spare characters in a tweet, because this makes retweeting it a much easier task for people. And retweets are really what you want, because they will help spread your name far and wide – remember, a retweet from someone means all of their followers will see it too. And they might have 100, 500 or even 10,000 more followers than you. Whatever the number, importantly they will be a different set of people than who make up your follower base.
- Contains a link You can judge how well you are doing by follower numbers. But that’s by no means the most important number. To judge engagement (or how much your audience really cares about what you are saying), add a link to your tweets. When you shorten this with a third-party application, this will let you know how many people have clicked it. A good first target is to aim for an average of five clicks on a link you post.
- Invites a click “Five ways to win more customers”, “If you like cute cats, you have to see this” and “Footballer of the year revealed” are all great hooks to try to encourage people to click your link. When hoping to get people through to, say, your website, try to master the art of giving a little bit away without giving too much away. The way you phrase things can have a big impact on the clickthrough numbers.
