Ten Twitter Tips For Beginners

New to Twitter? Then you won't want to miss my ten top tips designed to get you off to a flying start with your tweeting.

#1 Optimize Your Twitter Profile

Your Twitter profile is the first place someone will look when they go to your profile. If they find an egg instead of a picture and no bio details, your credibility is instantly called into question. Take some time to create a professional bio with a suitable profile picture. Use a close-up headshot of yourself or the logo of your business. In 2014 Twitter changed how your profile image appears so that you now have more options to brand your profile. Take advantage of this by adding a quality cover image to your profile to reflect your brand values. Add some relevant keywords and a link to your website to help people find you.

#2 Use Hashtags Wisely

A hashtag on Twitter is a very popular way of creating and monitoring a conversation around a particular topic and can be a great way to engage your followers. To create a hashtag, simply place # before a word. A word of warning though - when #you use #too #many #hashtags your #tweet looks like #spam. Don’t use more than 2 hashtags per tweet. Tweets with more than two hashtags get 32% LESS engagement.

#3 Use A Link Shortner 

Shortening long links in your tweets makes for a more streamlined experience for you and your followers. As an addded bonus, a url shortener like bit.ly also gives you useful real-time information about who's clicking your Bitlink.

#4 Forgo Automated Services

A common rookie (and not so rookie) mistake is the use of automated tweets (for example an auto message thanking your new followers). You may do it with the best of intentions but an auto-DM (automatic direct message) is often viewed as spam. Never auto-DM a link to your website or service. 

#5 Avoid Too Much Self-Promotion

While Twitter is a good place to promote your business, too much self-promotion will lose you followers. It’s ok to share your own content, so long as you balance it out by sharing content from others too. Some social media experts suggest following the 80/20 rule - posting content for your followers 80% of the time and for yourself 20% of the time - but there are no hard and fast rules on this.  In the same vein constantly retweeting people who praise you makes you look boastful and self-serving. 

#6 Schedule Tweets

The internet is global and if you want the spread of your content to reach further than your own backyard, you need to hit multiple time zones. Scheduling tweets allows you to reach followers when they are most likely to be online (even if you aren’t there at the same time) and allows you to maintain a regular and consistent online global presence. A scheduling tool like Buffer or HootSuite will help you manage a steady trickle of valuable tweets throughout the day. 

#7 Tweet Less

You may have 140 characters at your disposal to say what you want, but this doesn’t mean that you must use them all. Twitter science shows that tweets with less characters are retweeted a lot more, with tweets with under 60 characters seeing 1/3 the engagement of longer tweets (Source:Simply Measured).

#8 Create Twitter Lists

Twitter lists allow you to listen to relevant conversations, identify influencers and filter out the noise so that you can focus on the people and topics you care about. Creating a list is easy - simply click the List link on your profile, click Create A List, enter the name of your list, a short description, and select if you want the list to be private (only accessible to you) or public (anyone can subscribe to the list) and finally, click Save List. 

#9 Add Images To Tweets

According to research, tweets with photos get 18 percent more clicks and 150 percent more retweets than those without. 

#10 Engage With Your Followers

Twitter is about conversation; it's about making it more about your audience than you. Mention other users by their Twitter username (preceded by the @ sign) in your Tweets. Retweet (preceded by RT) interesting updates from your followers. Make it more about your followers than you!