5 Things I Learned About Twitter in a Year
If you have not used Twitter, where have you been? It is a high paced social media site that allows for you to essentially voice out your ideas, observations, and general propaganda in 140 characters or less. It can be used for socialization, marketing, or general enjoyment. It is a powerful tool to get short bits of information out to people on a larger scale in short quick bursts. I have been on Twitter for close to a year now an have been using it to market and tell people about my general game development cycles. Here are 5 of the main things that I have learned about Twitter and how to get things done on it.
1. Tweet Every Day
The average life-span of a tweet is near 0 minutes, especially early on. You cannot expect to gain any real following of people about your product or movement if you simply tweet once every few days. Take the time to make sure that you have a consistent and scheduled tweet pattern and get into a groove of it. I use Buffer myself to make up 6 scheduled tweets a day.
Using a scheduling tool you can take 15-30 minutes in the morning and get them all out of the way and throughout your normal work day it will seem like you are tweeting to the world at a consistent pace. You will also be able to them reach more of the worlds population more regularly because you can schedule tweets at times that you are sleeping or generally not able to stop your life and use Twitter.
2. Be Yourself
People like other people. Keep that in mind. Twitter at it’s core is a game and a marketing engine. If you have a purpose do not hide it, and do not try and be something you are not. I am a game developer and I want to market myself as that, so I do. I tweet out mostly about that stuff and I attract mostly people who enjoy that content.
Don’t just create a Twitter account for marketing your product, truth is, on Twitter, people could care less about your product at first. You have to grab people with personality, which believe it or not all humans have. It is often the tweets that come from the heart, that are odd and unpredictable, that gain the most momentum on Twitter. So do not be afraid to stop and say something that you would normally just drop on your friends. It will gain peoples trust and those kinds of tweets are very entertaining.
3. Don’t Be A Serial Follower
What is a serial follower? If you follow everyone you see that says anything remotely interesting you could be a serial follower. If you follow everyone back that follows you, you are a serial follower. Make sure you hand out your follows to people that you really are interested in. If you notice somebody more than once or see that their feed is full of great content follow them. Make sure you are using Twitter for good reason, not just to gain followers by following others. If you see that your number of followers is almost the same as the amount of people you follow you are probably following too many people and fall into the serial follower category. You are OK when you are new to Twitter to follow more people than follow you, but as you get a presence start to deviate from following more than follow you.
4. Images, Images Are Your Friend
It is all over the internet that images help your tweets get noticed. It is true they do help, but not everything needs an image. You can feel free to throw together images for everything using things like Pablo and they do work well. I noticed that images in large quantities do not necessarily get you what you are looking for. they seem to attract people outside your followers, but your own followers don’t really care too much if you always use them. I try and use them 2 or 3 times out of 6.
5. Give Back
Be more than a person that talks about themselves. Help others get their stuff noticed. Retweet good content, ask interesting questions that are not about your project. Learn to be outgoing and converse with the community. Be a part of the larger Twitter universe not just a sole voice yapping about your project 100% of the time. You can have a strong number of your own content tweets, just make sure that you include the rest of the world in your conversation or it just ends up like a bad date.
I have lot more when it comes to Twitter, just thought that 5 would be enough. Keep at it and Twitter is very rewarding for you and you project. Enjoy it and try new things and in the end tell us all your tips and tricks so we can all keep making Twitter a better place to market and socialize.
If you have not checked out my current project…
Facebook – join the conversation
