Advanced Twitter Techniques: Reaching the Highest Ground – Part 2

As it was said, in order to start making your Twitter profile more professional, you need to write short tweets, 100 characters long; use Twitter Deck so as to keep an eye on everything that is going on in the Twitter ether in real time; check out Advanced Search options, and answer your followers almost instantly.

In today’s article, we are going to go deeper into Twitter’s options, such as keyboard shortcuts, URL shorteners, getting more retweets, careful planning and scheduling your tweets, as well as doing a seasonal clean-up.

Keyboard shortcuts

If you want to start using Twitter as your everyday marketing tool, this will demand speed. Twitter offers keyboard shortcuts, such as pressing the letters g and h to go Home, or Ctrl+Enter to send a new tweet.

If you want to see keyboard shortcuts, just press question mark (?) on any Twitter page and the following menu will appear. At first, you are probably going to use it more often, and then you will end up learning the whole table by heart.

Shortening is the key

The importance of short tweets was already discussed, but what was not mentioned is that you need to shorten your content as much as possible, including links.

Links can be your biggest enemies, so you need to keep them under control. Twitter already has a built-in t.co URL shortener, but there are great shorteners on the web, too, such as bit.ly, ow.ly or goo.gl, which offer the option of measuring your click-through rates and performance.

Break grammar rules

Your English teacher (or whatever your native language is) probably taught you that you should end all your affirmative sentences with a comma.

However, this rule need not apply for Twitter if you want to improve visibility and allow your users to see all your conversations no matter if they are following your co-speaker or not.

Thus, start your sentences with a period (.) instead of an ‘at’ (@), and your followers will see the entire conversation.

Monitor competition

Twitter can be a great tool for monitoring the industry and checking what your competition is doing and how they are reaching a wider audience.

Mind you that monitoring does not mean that you should copy everything they are doing, but rather see what current trends are and announcing that you too have something to say about them and contribute with your work.

Increase customer loyalty

Customer loyalty should be one of your top priorities. Remember that Twitter is not a selling tool, but a social media at its most refined form. Make sure that you provide your followers with valuable content and learn when you need to pull the brake.

Be resourceful and you will receive more engagement. However, if you are clogging their news feed and promoting low-quality content, the odds are that your audience is going to run away.

If you want to share content and see it being shared more, do not hesitate to ask for a retweet. Data say that if you use the word ‘retweet’, the odds of actually being retweeted are 86% more likely to happen, so use this information in your advantage – and get more retweets!

Rituals and Buffer scheduler

Starting a business may be easy if you look at it from a wider perspective. However, what awaits you later is a thing that should be carefully planned. This means being awake when your followers are awake, and communicating with them when they want to communicate. Make a ritual out of checking your account once or twice a day.

If you want to find out when your followers are active the most, you can use tools such as Moz’s Followerwonk, Social Rank, Tweriod, etc. to know when to be there, reach them, and get the highest click-through scores. After you collect this data, determine the time and schedule your posts.

Since Community Managers are people of flesh and blood, who have lives which include family, sleeping and eating, you can employ a robot to help you with this task. Buffer scheduler can help you with that. This Buffer will help you set the exact time and day you want your tweets to be published, even while you are asleep.

Clean up

And finally, since you have been using Twitter for quite some time now and your aim was probably to get as many followers as possible, your community has probably died out a bit, so you will have to do some cleaning.

Unfollowing is a normal thing, so what you need to do is go through the list of the accounts on Twitter and see which ones are:

• Inactive
• Those not following your back
• Brands and commercial pages, not real people

and unfollow them.

Clients are at the core of every business, so you need to focus on your community. This can be a task of your Community Manager, who would decide on who should go and who you should keep following.

Even though some of these techniques are not cutting-edge or newest advancements, they do exist for quite some time now and proved to be useful. Tell us which ones you use and if you have any other tool to recommend or a useful application, please do not hesitate to share it with us in the comments section below.