Alongside Facebook and Digg, Twitter has become the digital marketer’s platform of choice when it comes to reaching an increasingly content-hungry audience. In its simplest terms – recycling (or re-tweeting as it is now known) your Twitter content is a cost efficient and incredibly powerful way of pushing your content to a wider audience.
Twitter is presently free to use and is fast becoming an essential part of many businesses’ communications strategy.
Using Twitter to Spread the Word
In this article we’ll look at some simple strategies to get your content moving across the digital highways and byways.
1. You Get What You Give
A simple philosophy that can be applied to most areas in life, yet one that is often overlooked by digital marketers. If you interact with others, they are more likely to interact with you – which in this case means re-tweeting their content.
Be selective in terms of quality, because after all it is your name that will be associated with the re-tweeted post. Don’t forget to include @reply so that the author is aware of your reposting.
2. Use Hashtags
Assuming you know what a hashtag is (if not, visit Hashtags.org), be aware that they should be used appropriately as opposed to liberally. Organised into relevant and clear categories, hashtags are an excellent way of spreading your content amongst like-minded folk interested in a particular niche or topic.
3. Keep It Short
The whole basis of Twitter is built on the notion of short, concise snippets or statements that retain the reader’s interest. As such the format features a 140 character limit on all entries.
With this in mind, the secret is to get as much information across as possible in as few words as possible. Not so easy when you consider that the allocation can easily be consumed by shortened URLs, @reply, hashtags and re-tweets.
So, unless the entry you’d like to see re-tweeted is short and sweet, it may end up sliced and diced by Twitter when re-posted by someone else.
4. Choose Your Moment
Whilst there have been a number of studies concerning the best time to launch content for maximum response and exposure – there is little in the way of concrete evidence to support a theory one way or another. Instead, consider at which points during your working day you give tweets the most attention, and then use this as a basis for a structured posting strategy.
This may not be the most scientific approach, but is surely better than randomly launching tweets in to the ether and hoping for the best.
5. Ask and Ye Shall Receive
Here’s probably the most obvious but overlooked option of all – request a re-tweet in your entry. Call-to-action is one of the most basic marketing principals, and certainly has its place in the realm of social media. Of course one may need to exercise a little more restraint and subtlety due to the medium, however it is still a valuable tool when used strategically.
