1. Blog

Why you should still bother with Twitter and how to get yourself noticed amongst the dross

Social media marketing: You might feel like Twitter's time is up, given the way it has been used and abused of late, but it's not about you. If any of your potential clients still use it, you still need to be there. So here's how to make the most of it.

A close up of the yellow beak and eye of a seagull staring down the camera lens menacingly. The background is a bright blue sky, causing the bird's white plumage to stand out.

As a platform, Twitter is pretty discredited. It’s noisy, it can be downright unpleasant and the blame for all sorts of terrible things are laid at its door. It’s brought us Brexit, Trump, Russian bots and the downfall of all that is good and civilised, if you believe even a tenth of what you read. Even if you read it on Twitter in the first place.

And it’s true, it can be a rather toxic environment where people seem determined to take down others, where opinions seem rarely moderate and where the sheer tsunami of content means that being noticed is fiendishly difficult.

But there is still value in using Twitter. There is a part of your audience who are there and who go there every day and who, against expectation, find perfectly interesting content that they want to like, read and share (possibly even in that order). They may be journalists, people in your industry or even the mythical ‘influencers’, but there’s always a bunch of people whose attention is worth grabbing.

To make sure they find you, your job is to find the best ways of making your Twitter profile visible to those potential ambassadors, amplifiers, customers and clients to make sure you get a decent reward for the time and effort investment you’re making.

You want suggestions as to how to do that? Try some of these:

Engage, don’t broadcast

Where many brands and companies fall down is in using Twitter as a broadcast mechanism rather than an engagement channel. They just tweet and then go away for another day. If you want to grow and engage with your audience, then you should be actively pursuing new customer interactions with your Twitter account(s). Respond to comments, have (brief) conversations with the intelligent users, and try and find new people to converse with. Many companies simply interact with the customers who are already engaging with them, whereas they should be using these conversations to connect with people who aren’t engaging.

Go out of hours

You’ll need to watch the reactions to your own posts but there’s plenty of research out there that suggests going to times when people are more likely to browse through their feeds, rather than sprint through their timelines. Weekends, out-of-hours and (it will be so again) commuter times can be fruitful moments to grab people who are actively looking to be distracted. Tweeting at less-crowded times, given we never switch off anymore, means you’ve a better chance of cutting through. It’s your call who in your team gets those anti-social shifts.

Be brief

Attention spans are limited. Shorter sentences work. They grab attention. They feel urgent. Try it. Pretend you’re Hemingway. It also makes quote tweets (now encouraged by Twitter) to be less daunting on the eye. That last sentence was too long. Go short again.

Use hashtags

Hashtags can be useful (but don’t overdo them). They attach you to a wider conversation while signalling your topic to the casual reader. Try and keep it to one hashtag - two at the absolute most, or it looks messy and needy, and keep the hashtags themselves short and tidy. #noonelikessmartarsehashtagsthataredifficulttoread.

Use links...

If you’re linking to your own site, make sure your links pull through the pictures on the page to make it more attractive to the eye. If not, add a picture. But try and always use a link, especially to your own site. You’re trying to create a user journey here. The click-through rates will be low, but you’ll still have established your website in people’s minds, even if they don’t click this time. You are building brand awareness brick by brick and the chance for cut through and a genuine user journey, and even a purchase, is low. But it should be there.

… And images

And if there are no photos on your pages you should (a) sort that out and (b) add pictures to the tweet. Adding a photo to a tweet can, according to some estimates, increase engagement by 87%, as users see the message visually as well as in writing - converting attention to engagement much more quickly and effectively. Adding gifs or embedded videos can have the same effect, and users watch the videos inside Twitter so don’t leave you to do so.

Encourage re-tweets

The way to spread the message is for it to travel beyond your followers. So encourage them to re-tweet, by producing interesting content with authority. Easier said than done, of course, and having a decent size Twitter following will improve the scalability of that, and having ‘influential’ and supportive followers will help too. But the core remains - have good things to say which people will want to repeat. And don’t be afraid to go needy - and ask for RTs. People mind less than you think.

Take notice

There’s any number of Twitter management and analytics tools which will tell you what’s working and what isn’t. Use whichever you like but there’s no tool which stops the need for you to pay attention. Look at what tweets work, and do more like them. Look at which ones don’t work. Do fewer of those. Simple really…

Do all that and you’ll increase follower numbers and engagement. There will still be days when Twitter looks like a cesspit, but keep on keeping on. There are clients in there somewhere.