It is undoubtedly the micro-blogging platform of choice for sharing interests and thoughts. In just 140 characters or less and a click of a button, using Twitter sounds simple enough. But if you are looking to maintain a well-balanced and professional presence for a business, there are some practices to keep in mind.
1. Let Tweets Breathe: If there’s one thing I dislike on Twitter, it’s when people clog up my feed. If you’re a personality on Twitter you may be excused, but for a business? Less is more. Refrain from sending too many tweets too often, for no reason at all, and looking like spam. You will find that followers will often read and re-read posts again.
2. Create Great Content: Everything you tweet should be useful to your followers, relevant to your brand and to the industry you are in. Although self-promotion is expected, remember to balance it out by sharing some fan-generated content, blog posts, or even news articles from other sources. But don’t forget to give credit where credit is due!
3. Less Is More: Yes, I know it’s already hard enough trying to fit everything into 140 characters, but the shorter the tweet the better. By leaving some room in your tweets, it not only allows people to manually re-tweet, but also add in their own comment too.
4. Watch Your Hashtags: Twitter is the mother of hashtags, so use them well. Use tags that your audience may be using or searching for, and specifically ones that are relevant to the brand to help your content b discovered. But don’t overdo it and risk your tweet looking like #spam. Keep in mind that tweets with more than 3 hashtags are said to have lower engagement, and CTR, than those with less than 3 hashtags.
5. What’s Trending: Pay attention to what’s trending and what people currently like, and try to incorporate it into what you decide to post. As exciting as some trends can be, make sure to stay relevant to your brand.
6. Monitor And Respond: You don’t have to glue yourself to your phone 24/7 to properly monitor your feed. Instead, look to turning on notifications for new Twitter activity. Remember to respond to all comments, this including the bad ones. A quick and well-thought out response to a bad comment could change the followers mind in an instance, while ignoring them could make the issue worse.
The way you present yourself on social media is a direct reflection of your brand. So, how are you presenting yourself to your current and potential audience?
