But every week, over a billion tweets flow through Twitter exploring every imaginable subject and a wide variety of writers are using Twitter to make their presence known.
Tweets are composed of 140 characters or less, and are the method you use to communicate on Twitter. It may take a little time to get used to, but there is little that’s not achievable, even within these limits.
Here's the essential tips when you using twitter:
1. Etiquette
Manual retweets, which is where you tweet another person's tweet with 'RT' at the beginning, are generally frowned upon unless you're adding commentary. If you leave the content of their tweet unchanged, use 'RT'. If you modify or remove some of it, use 'MT', which stands for modified tweet. Finally, if you tweet a link, for example, because you saw someone else tweet it first, use 'h/t', which stands for 'hat tip'.
2. Mute
A recent Twitter function, the ability to mute people means you can avoid the awkward politics of unfollowing people. If you are fed up with someone's garbage clogging up your timeline, simply go to their profile page, click the cog on the right hand side and select Mute.
3. Include photos
Whenever possible, always add a photo to your tweet. The engagement rate for text only tweets against tweets with images attached is somewhere between 2x to 5x. If nothing else, it saves your followers having to click through to another site to see a photo, which is especially useful on mobile.
4. Turn off retweets
A Twitter user may produce great original content, but have terrible taste in other peoples tweets. If you want to only see their tweets and not the tweets they have retweeted, go to their profile page, click the cog and select 'Turn off retweets'.
5. Download your archive
It's basically impossible to trawl back through months and months of tweets. But if you want a full archive of everything you've ever tweeted, all you have to do is ask. Click the cog on the top right of the screen -> Request your archive.
6. Schedule tweets for the future
There are a number of third-party applications that let you schedule tweets so you don't need to be at your desk or on your phone to send a tweet. The most popular applications are Buffer or Tweetdeck. Buffer is primarily used for tweeting links – simply install the Buffer browser extension and then click on it when you're reading an article you want to schedule to be shared on Twitter. Tweetdeck is a tool for high-powered tweeters that also offers functions like constructing multiple timelines in separate columns.
7. Reply to your own tweets
Many thoughts are difficult to condense into 140 characters. But that doesn't matter if you think of Twitter as a stream. Divide your content into several segments and tweet each in order as a direct reply to the previous tweet. Twitter will thread them together so they appear as a continuous thread. Note, you don't need to @-reply yourself, Twitter will know the tweets are connected automatically.
No comments:
Post a Comment