Table of Contents P.01 P.02 P.03 P.04 P.05 P.06. Intro. Terminology. Creating Your Account. Research. Tweeting. Building a Following

Transcription

1 TWITTER

2 Table of Contents P.01 P.02 P.03 P.04 P.05 P.06 Intro Terminology Creating Your Account Research Tweeting Building a Following

3 P.01 Twitter Introduction Guide About Twitter Founded in 2006, Twitter is a social media platform, which allows users to share 140-character updates along with embedded media. For companies, it has evolved into a major- and in many cases, primary outlet for to share news, updates, and develops brand awareness. About the Guide In this introduction guide you will learn the terminology and primary features used on Twitter. You will learn how to professionally create your Twitter account. You will learn how to strategize and research the best course of action to take on this channel. You will learn how to share content through Twitter and the best practices associated with Tweeting. Finally, you will learn how to build your company following actively and passively.

4 P.02 Terminology Tweet A short update of 140 characters or less that is used to communicate to This is an account s profile name. symbol denotes the preceding characters are a user name. Timeline This is where all tweets from accounts you follow will appear in real-time in a chronological feed. #Hashtag A way to organize/categorize tweets. Hashtags are key words/phrases without spaces that appear in tweets with a # before them. They can be searched to discover other tweets with the same tags. Follow The act of subscribing to the tweets from another twitter account. Follower A twitter user that follows another Using an account in a tweet. This gives the mentioned user a notification. Retweet Repeating another user s tweet and posting it to your followers. This is done by clicking the looping arrow symbol button below the tweet. Reply When you click Reply (the single-arrow icon) in a tweet, you are tweeting to reply to that specific tweet. Once posted, the reply will appear in under expanded-view of the tweet you replied to, it also is published to the timelines of users who both follow you as well the user you are replying to (not either). All tweet replies appear on the Tweets & replies tab on your profile. Additionally, all tweets that begin with symbol are treated as a reply just as above. Favorite A way to acknowledge another user s tweet. The tweet appears on your profile page under Favorites Tab. This is done by hitting the star symbol under a tweet. Lists Twitter allows you to create lists to organize people you are following. You can create a public or private list by going to your Lists page, via the profile icon drop down menu in the top right navigation bar, and clicking Create list. You can then set a name and description for the list, and begin adding or removing members of your lists by clicking the gear icon. Once created, you may view feeds containing only members of your created lists, as well as tweet to a specific list. Tweet To Lists Works as a manual reply, open the tweet (Note: this is a very rarely used feature).@mention When replying, putting a period in front of symbol expands it s visibility to everyone who follows you plus everyone who follows-both you and the handle at the beginning of your reply. Pinned Tweet Moves any individual tweet to the top of your profile s feed as long as it is Pinned. To pin a tweet click the additional options icon ( icon) in your desired tweet and click Pin to your profile page. You can unpin following the same steps and selecting unpin tweet. RT (Manual Retweet) Known as a Manual Retweet, it is an alternate way to retweet without using the retweet button. The original message to be retweeted is manually copied and a new tweet is drafted, starting with RT (standing for retweet ) at the beginning of a tweet followed by a mention of the original tweeter s handle and a verbatim copy of the original tweet. This is the original way tweets were retweeted. Unlike automatic retweeting (done with the retweet button), this version of tweeting will show your account as the tweeter. MT (Modified Tweet) Stands for Modified Tweet. It is the same as a manual retweet, except it is pointing out that the original message is being paraphrased/shortened. DM (Direct Message) Short for Direct Message, which are private, tweet-length messages that can be sent between any two users who follow each other.

5 P.03 Creating Your Account Signing Up Before you start tweeting you will need to create an account. To do this, you will need to provide an address that will be linked to your account. If you are creating one for your company, be sure that whoever is posting has access to the inbox to prevent being locked out, and have access to update notifications, especially if you are not using a twitter tool. Remember, you will need to provide a new for each additional account you make. Setting Up Your Profile Once you ve created your account, you will need to set up a couple basic profile images and descriptions. Upload a Profile Photo A profile photo reflects your brand identity and personality. [400 x 400 px] [use.png] Create a Bio This appears under your profile photo and also appears if your profile is found in search. 160 characters to describe what you/your company does. Good place to describe company brand and vision. Use website links, #hashtags to related accts. Personalize Header Images The second-most important image for your profile is your header image, which is the banner image above your profile picture spanning the width of the page. Using a quality image is important. Opportunity to strengthen brand. If you have an action-shot of what [1500 x 500 px] [use.png] Personalize Background (Theme) Image When a user views an individual tweet posted from your handle, twitter will take them to a page with a custom backround image that you can set up yourself. This is another opportunity to add your own touch to your posts. Due to max size restrictions you may want to use part of the background (ideally the left-side) and match the remaining background to match your image. [recommend.png]

6 P.04 Research Before starting it is important to do research and put together a plan of how you will manage your account, activity, and resources. Ask yourself a few questions to get started as you do your initial research. Who is my target audience? What content does my audience already want/respond to? Blogs News/PR Engagement Promotional/Offerings/Campaigns Live engagement (e.g. tweet-chats) What do I want to gain? What do I (realistically) want to get out of having a twitter account? Brand awareness Leads How will I measure success? Engagement Followers Views Growth Who is already in this space? Who should I look for? Competitors Thought-Leaders Advocates Can you build off of their existing strategy of engagement? Can you join or contribute to the conversation? How much time and resources should/can I dedicate to this? If you expect to have more than one or two tweets a day, as well as additional engagement, you will need to allow your social media manager to dedicate more time to this, and possibly hire/assign someone the role of a full-time social media manager.

7 P.05 Tweeting Once you have created your Twitter account and conducted research, it is time to begin tweeting. By understanding the anatomy of a tweet and what activities support growth you will be able to set a plan in motion for your campaigns and activities. Tweeting Once you have created your Twitter account and conducted research, it is time to begin tweeting. By understanding the anatomy of a tweet and what activities support growth you will be able to set a plan in motion for your campaigns and activities. Anatomy of a Tweet Text A single tweet gives you the space for up to 140 characters, including spaces. As a rule of thumb, it is always safe to keep your primary message at or under 110 characters. This can allow you to safely account for the potential space taken from links, images, #hashtags, that will be outside of the message. Links Tweets that share links are much more highly engaged with than ones without. Twitter will truncate an HTTP (unshortened) link pasted into a tweet to 20 to 22 characters, leaving behind only 120 (or fewer) characters. Using link-shortening tools like tinyurl, and bit.ly, or your own custom-branded shortlink will help reduce the characters lost when including links. Photo Attachments Tweets that include images have 23 characters taken away from the message. Media Imagery Including imagery in posts helps drive stronger engagement, as it catches the eye for users scrolling through feeds. Strong images often include a simple-to-understand message and adhere to branding. Companies that use branded template imagery to share information perform strongly in engagement. Images are automatically cropped to in a 2 x 1(Width X Length) ratio in-feed but can be expanded when a user clicks on it. It s recommended to stick with a 2x1 ratio for most image templates for twitter to avoid image cutoff. To add an image, click the add photo button at the bottom left-corner of the pop-up window or simply dragging an image into the text field when composing a tweet. [.PNG and.gif images maintain the most quality on Twitter] Video Twitter allows for embedded videos, and works best with YouTube and Vimeo. Twitter embeds videos into tweets when the video link is pasted into the body of a tweet. Other Rich Media Besides imagery and video, Twitter allows for other rich media to be embedded, including animated.gifs, Vines, SoundCloud songs and playlists, as well as SlideShare decks. In most cases, linking to the asset s page itself will prompt Twitter to automatically recognize and embed it. Sometimes the asset page will provide a special link specifically for embedding in twitter.

8 P.06 Building a Following Engage your Colleagues Your best asset is your colleagues-especially those already on Twitter. They will help greatly by following your account, Retweeting, you in their tweets. They will greatly amplify your reach from the start. For those who are less active, reach out and encourage them to promote your content socially (such as new blog posts and tweets). Who you Follow While creating perfect tweets is important, building a follower-base that will read them is equally important. When researching, it is helpful to begin following influencers, and people engaged in conversations relevant to your topics, as well as people who have a history of promoting tweets similar that you plan to share. Make a plan to follow new people each day and follow back people who follow you if they are relevant. Note: Once you are following 2000 followers there are limits to the number of new users you can follow-which depends on the ratio of followers you have to people you are following. If this is slowing your growth, you may want to unfollow non-relevant and inactive users. Who to Unfollow While certainly not as critical as building a following, you do not want to be following dead or non-relevant accounts. Occasionally it is helpful to weed-out accounts that aren t providing you or your feed with information you are looking for. There are tools such as JustUnfollow that allow you to filter and isolate inactive accounts and unfollow them easily. Outside Promotion Outside of Twitter, promote engagement and following with your account whenever possible. Putting a set of social media icons linking to your Twitter account as well as other social media channels you have a presence will serve to validate the accounts and allow visitors to find it. If your website hosts a company blog, there are simple plugins you can embed in the page to allow users to share the content to Twitter and other social media channels. You can tune the plugin to mention your company s twitter account in the post, which will drive engagement. Passive promotion such as including your company twitter handle in your signature, your business cards and letterhead go a long way. Engagement When you are watching related events unfold, questions asked, or mention of a related topic, you have the opportunity to socially engage. This can be through a promotion of a user s comment through a joining a conversation by making a comment using the same #hashtag, or replying to a user. This is a proactive approach and helps build a following and relationship with other users and your brand. Depending on your company policies, it may be appropriate for social media managers to sign or initial each reply to personalize and put a face to 1:1 engagement with individuals. Scheduling Similar to how a newspaper has an editorial calendar, your Twitter should have a schedule for important posts, happening at appropriate intervals. Frequency Post frequency will vary on the amount of content you have, the behavior of your audience, and hype around the conversation you want to join. For instance, if you have a blog calendar once every week, you should plan to promote each new blog at the time of publication through Twitter. Tools There is a long list of tools that allow you to schedule tweets, such as Buffer, Sprinklr, CoTweet, HootSuite, and TweetDeck. Many tools, such as Buffer provide free service, and allow you to schedule posts in advance and across multiple social media platforms. Additionally, you should avoid using these tools to share the exact same message across different social media platfoms (e.g. do not use the same message from a tweet with #hashtags that have no meaning in LinkedIn). This will come across as unprofessional, with cutoff messages, vestiges of other intended channels such as #hashtags, awkwardly sized photos and redundant links. It is safer to write a post individually optimized for each channel.