Seven Steps to the perfect Tweet

As we are all aware by now I'm sure, Twitter is one of the easiest, cheapest and most effective ways to market yourself or get your chosen message across to what is potentially the entire world. The beauty of it being that you can craft your tweets to exactly what you want, with complete authenticity. It's your own voice at the end of the day, expressing what you want to your own way. So you need to get them right!

A strong example of the importance of this is the fairly recent hashtag phenomenon of #YorkshireHour and #BrandYorkshire. Both offer the opportunity for your tweets to reach a much wider audience than usual in the short space of an hour. Even more important then to ensure that you're tweets are crafted perfectly! 

Twitter is a major part of a recently new career direction for me, I am a Social Media Developer now and I also use the platform for my own personal Alexia Claire brand. So here are some tips I would like to share with you, most of which I have either learnt the hard way or just through trial and error.

Spelling!

First things first, the most obvious blunder: incorrect grammar, punctuation and spelling! There's nothing worse than sending a tweet out and noticing a few hours later that you spelt 'your' instead of 'you're'. Always do a last check before hitting the tweet button and if you're not very confident with these things then perhaps compose your tweets in Word first to take advantage of its spell check. 

An eye-grabbing headline

Your tweet will only be in the spotlight of your follower's twitter feed for a fraction of time. If your aim is to be retweeted or for your link to be clicked through, you need a headline-esque tweet which will catch their eye. The more attention grabbing tweets you send, the more likely your followers will start to associate seeing your avatar in their twitter feed with good quality content

Include photos

If you are talking about a product, or something with the potential for a visual accompaniment, then add a photo! I have always found myself automatically clicking the 'View Photo' button underneath a tweet, even if I haven't read the tweet yet. This is because it stands out from the previous 20 tweets on my news feed which didn't have an image. This isn't always necessary of course, don't over do it! But spice 

up your profile's tweets now and then with something nice and visual. 

Include links

If you are talking about your products, news story or any other topic, add in a link to it. Always use Bit.ly for this (they've just had a re-design actually) as you can then track how many clicks your link receives over time. It's also useful just to see how many people are paying attention to your tweets. Therefore is a good indicator for how successful your tweet writing skills are becoming.

Use hashtags

I will assume you know the purpose of hashtags by now. If not they are used in front of a word or phrase of which you would like to be included in a search for. So for example any tweet with the hashtag #YorkshireHour included in it, will show up in the results when this phrase is searched for in the Twitter search.

There are other uses for hasthags though. Twitterers have adopted it to add a slight bit of humour into their tweets. For example 'Had a nice long walk in the beautiful English weather today..  #CompletelySoaked'

So why not try this approach to inject a bit of humour into your tweets!

Think like your readers

Whether you are tweeting to followers you already have, or to attract further followers, always be aware of who your target reader is. Tailor your tweets to what your target customer/reader would want to hear but don't lose your personality. After all they are following you because they wanted to.

Do not over-promote

It's bad form to only tweet promotion type tweets. People want to be able to see that you are human, not a bot. Ensure you include just as many non-promotion tweets. Engage your followers from time to time, ask them their opinion on something, or discuss a piece of news which has interested you. Talk about other tweeters' work. I remember reading a quote once that said 'promote others more than you promote yourself'. Definitely one worth remembering. 

I hope this has been of help! A lot of it is fairly obvious but I think it help to have it all in one place. If you have any thoughts on this post please do comment.