Twitter tips come from a variety of sources. We are often asked to share best practices with our clients and others. Twitter can be one of your most reliable tools in social media marketing. It especially becomes effective when you coordinate your Twitter activity with your business blog. This happens when you streamline your process of creating content for Twitter (which is often the hardest part) and maximizing the value and impact of the content you've already created. It's all about developing a wrokflow that works for you.
Here are three Twitter tips to help you do just that:
1. Create Several Tweets For Each Blog Post.
Here's a creative way to keep your content fresh: draft four or five different headlines for one blog post, and then use those different headlines as four or five separate tweets that link to the same post. (Bonus benefit: it also keeps you fresh because it saves you time and energy. You get five social media posts for the price of one blog post.)
If you spread the tweets out, you will likely get a different audience each time. And for those who ignored your first tweet, your second or third headline might hook them in to click on it. Writing blog post headlines is something I struggle with. Using this tactic also allows me to crowdsource my headline ideas. I see which tweet gets the most engagement and try to learn from it.
Here's a suggestion from our partner Hubspot, that goes a little deeper than the example above: use different parts of the post to create tweets.
For example, if a company wrote a blog post entitled “4 Ways Our Product Will Boost the Bottom-Line of Your Business,” they could split the four ideas contained in the article into four separate tweets.
But not every blog post is a list article like the example above. For a more general guide, you can use the following areas of your blog post to create tweets:
- The post headline
- A snippet or quote from the article
- A subheader or thoughtful question
- An attention-grabbing statistic or fun fact about some feature of your FEC or your industry
In addition, it is better to write these tweets soon after you finish your blog post so the content is fresh in your mind.
When you're stretched in five different directions running your business, you don't always have an abundance of time to spend on marketing. This is why finding ways to re-purpose one blog post can make your small business social media marketing go further and accomplish more with less effort.
2. Shorten Your Links
Besides promoting your blog posts, Twitter should also be used to point your followers to other great content you've found online. Content you know will be valuable to your clients and potential clients. If someone discovers a fantastic piece of content on your Twitter feed, he or she will suddenly see your feed in a warmer light and want to return to it. Sharing value-add content helps build trust and credibility.
When sharing content, you always want to use a link shortener like BITLINKS. You feed your original link into the link shortener, and they spit out a much shorter link that points to your original link.
Another idea is to use Sniply. This is how it works: You write a tweet about the the history of your industry, and you link to an informational website also sharing this type of content. Instead of using the standard link shorteners, you use Sniply. When someone clicks on your link and goes to the website, they will see an ad appear on that website that invites people to visit your site or view your latest promotion.
In other words, Sniply makes it possible for you to gain exposure on any website on the Internet, as long as you use the shortened Sniply link you created.
3. Go Bulk: Why Long-Term Scheduling is Great
This is another Hubspot gem, and it is a valuable, time-saving one.
Once you’ve written one post, do what Hubspot does and schedule social promotion for that post for the next six months. Repeated promotion of one post, with multiple variations on the same tweet (as explained in detail in point one), gains exposure for your blog post and maximizes its lifespan. Hubspot cites studies showing that this has doubled social referrals for one blog post. It also provides plenty of Twitter content for your account so you don't fall behind in your social media marketing.
This is how Hubspot pulls this off:
- They create four different tweets for one article.
- They post two of those tweets today, one tweet tomorrow, and then one tweet per month (recycling the same tweets by adding little variations) for the next six months.
Hubspot adds this poignant observation about this strategy: “Memory on social is short, but a well-written blog post deserves longevity. While this approach helps me save time and ensure my content has a longer shelf life, it's important you don't use this as an excuse to neglect your social accounts for six months.”
When you combine the three tips above, it helps you create more content with less effort, and it helps you expand the lifespan of each piece of content that you work so hard to create.
Contact us for more helpful tips on social media marketing.
