I’ll be the first to admit that I am not a social media guru; at least when I compare what I know about social media next to the experience that I have with paid advertising or SEO strategies. This post is the first in a series aimed at laying down the basics; a guide that I can refer to and hopefully that others find useful too.
Please retweet or share with your social network if you find this useful. Thanks!
Use Hootsuite
Personally I use hootsuite to manage my posts, following people, for shortening URLs of posts that I am linking to, for sheduling posts to dispense at a later time and date, to search for keywords / hashtags, and lots more that I can’t even think of at the moment. So if you are not using a productivity tool to manage your twitter activities then make sure you check out hootsuite.
Click here to go to Hootsuite.com.
How to Get Retweeted
share shortenend links in your posts & use a URL shortening service to shorten your links, report the news, report compelling subjects, keep your tweets short (less than 120 characters), state “Please RT” to request your followers to tweet, teach something or give away free ‘how-to’ information, quote interesting people relevant to your network.
For more info – 10 ways to get retweeted.
Engaging Other Tweeps
Mentions / Replies
To make it so that your message gets in contact with another Twitter-er you write - @username (of the other recipient)
These are called mentions and are immediately visible to the intended recipient but also to your followers as well.
Direct Messages
You direct message others by writing – DM username
You can only direct message people who follow you, and only you and the recipient can read the message.
Retweets
If you read something interesting from one of the people that you follow then you can simply retweet the message. A retweeted message has – RT @username – at the beginning of the message that you are retweeting and then followed by the message. e.g.
‘RT @peterpiper Obama made me pay for health insurance. Bummer dude.’
So now your retweet of peterpiper’s message will show up in his account, but then all of your followers will see the retweeted message too.
Twitter Hash Tags
Hash tags are great to keep track of a topic. Let’s say that you were interested in any tweet that mentioned the word “jackson” because you were following the Michael Jackson buzz. So all you would do is search for #jackson at http://search.twitter.com/ . Up would come a bunch of posts that contained the hashtag #jackson.
In order to make your twitter posts searchable for the same term all you would do is put the word #jackson into your post. e.g.
‘I was really sad that Michael #jackson died the other day. His songs were amazing.’
Interestly, you can use hashtags to keyword optimize your posts to give your post a better chance of turning in google search results. Hence, #why #some #people #like #to #post #like #this #which #is #really #annoying. So the point here is to use it sparingly.
Conclusion
So nothing earth shattering here. I’m really just covering the basics in this post, and then I will get more strategies of how to use Twitter to build your business, increase brand awareness, generate backs links for SEO, build communities, and other good stuff in some later posts.
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