When it comes to Twitter, I use it as a place to absorb news of all kinds, more or less curated from the accounts I follow, as well as a place for people, companies, and brands to communicate all alike.
What stands out particularly for Twitter, when comparing it to the other major social media channels, is the importance of the hashtag. The hashtag is something that originated on Twitter back in 2007 and ever since, every other social media platform has adopted it; or at least their users have.
I remember the days where a hashtag was simply used as a P.S. to end your tweets, almost ironically. But now, they are used to essentially join in on a local, national, or sometimes even an international conversation. There is a whole page dedicated to hashtags that are trending on twitter, located just a swipe away. On all the other platforms hashtags aren’t a focus in the least.
Hashtags are something we love to use at DNA. It gives people who may be unaware of our services an easy way to discover us through people tapping into the conversation. I do think where we can do better is overall engagement. The fun part of Twitter and tweeting at other profiles is to get feedback.
As far as conversations go, Twitter is a great place for communication between product/service and consumer. It’s set up in a way that the conversation is both personal, but also public. This allows for people to see interactions and again possibly join in. There are companies, like Taco Bell that are successful with or without a Twitter but are known to have a popular social media presence for engaging with the community.
7 Quick Tips to use to gain followers:
Tweet frequently - This works just like any relationship. If you don’t maintain connection, followers could lose interest and unfollow you.
Target Your Audience - Popular Twitter accounts share qualities such as having an established unique characteristic. But, in order to do so, you have to understand your target audience first.
Incorporate a personality - If you are a company or brand, you may gain followers because of their interest in your brand. However, creating a social persona will allow you to gain more traction with the community.
Engage - You may want to poach followers from competitors or just people you may be interested in communicating with, and tweet, follow, or any type of engagement. This will create an awareness for people who don’t follow you. Even engage with the current following you have, to make the connection stronger.
Create content that varies - It may be smart to post a video one day, and image the next day, and a blog the day after that.
Create Captivating / Actionable Content - With the tricky limited word counts, the Tweets that went viral on the platform were usually short and intriguing.
Share other people’s content - This will allow your followers to see what you are interested in and can maybe even open the door for the other account to share your posts. The best thing you can do is for your post to hit an entirely different audience than your own.
A way to add some of your brand personality on twitter is by using the Twitter Creative Canvas. There are tools on here like live video, creating promoted videos to post, and even creating your own branded emojis. The branded emojis are something we see often when there is any type of major event going on like a sporting event, a major movie release, or just with brands in general.
A tool Twitter allows you to use, is the pinned tweet. Your twitter feed is available to you in reverse chronological order, which will allow anyone who visits your profile to see your tweets that are most recent. You have the ability to pin a single tweet at the very top of your page, no matter how old it is. This allows you to post a static call-to-action at the top of your timeline.
Twitter limits you to 280 words per tweet, however they do allow ways to compose longer forms of writing through twitter threads and twitter moments. The two are strong tools but are handled very differently. Threads essentially allow you to add to a tweet, with another tweet. This is often used to tell a story in segments, and sometimes can be very effective. I’ve seen these used to tell stories of all different kinds. If you ever came across the Dear David twitter threads, you may have been scared to the point of losing sleep. They became so popular that the writer of this thread actually sold his story to New Line Cinema, to adapt it into a movie.
Moments on the other hand are essentially a hub for a number of tweets, pictures, and possibly even clips. Creating a moment is almost like creating a little web page for a load of information. A lot of news stories are told through Twitter moments.
We even posted this moment not long ago. Hope you like it.