Twitter is a platform that offers great value to both businesses and individuals... but how exactly should you get started?
While Twitter has been around since 2006, its usership continues to grow year on year. In 2021, the site hit 396.5 million users displaying a growth rate of 12.3% since 2020.
Many people still haven’t joined the platform, however, because they are unsure of how best to use it. Twitter is a place where news is shared and conversations started, but it can also be overwhelming when trying to get heard on Twitter as a beginner.
In this article, we run through everything you need to know about getting started on Twitter so that you can get the most out of it- whether in business or personal use. Read through the full article or select a section from the list if you’re pushed for time.
Set up your profile
Curate your interests
Develop a content calendar
Research hashtags
Jump on trends
Whilst setting up your Twitter profile is relatively self explanatory, there are a couple of things that you need to do in order to optimise your account and make a good first impression to prospective followers.
The first is to write an engaging bio. In this you should summarise what you do and try to show some personality. You don’t need to incorporate hashtags into this, but it’s important to include keywords. For example, if you work in engineering, you might include the word “construction” or “buildings” so that you’ll come up on searches for these terms.
It’s also important to include a high resolution photo of yourself or your brand for the profile picture. You have room to illustrate more about what you offer or your brand personality in your cover photo so focus on keeping your profile picture clear and simple. Look to @generalelectric as a great example of a profile picture and cover photo.
When you first start a Twitter profile, you’ll be asked which categories you are interested in following. Make the most of this by scrolling through and finding accounts that are relevant to the type of content you want to put out. Engaging in conversations is a key part of Twitter, so it helps to find people who are likely to interact with your profile.
You can also create lists in order to streamline your feed so that different subjects come up in different sections. This enables you to direct your engagement by building mini communities who share the same interests.
Recent research suggests that users should aim to post at least 5 times a day, but ideally 20 times a day. While you can just go ahead and start tweeting, you’ll find that the demands of a platform that requires this quantity of output can be overwhelming without a plan.
Queueing content through a tweet scheduler allows you to harness moments of inspiration and engage with your audience when they are most active. Once you have started to build a following, you can easily research the times that they are the most active through Social Opinion. This will allow you to set up your tweets to build a global audience and encourage engagement- which will also indicate to Twitter that your content should be pushed out further.
While you start to build up your Twitter presence, remember that it’s completely fine to reuse your content. Most of your followers won’t see ( or remember seeing) the same content several times and reinforcing messaging is key to marketing campaigns of all types- from sales to branding. Social Opinion’s auto-retweet feature even allows you to set up auto retweets of your own content to ensure that your account stays front of mind for your audience.
Including one or two hashtags in a tweet has been shown to increase engagement on Twitter by 100% for individuals and 50% for brands.
Through a social listening tool, like that incorporated into Social Opinion, you can find out which hashtags are popular and trending with your audience. Since hashtags come and go in popularity, this is an important feature. You can even search for a specific hashtag to assess the impact it would have with your followers.
By combining Processed Tweets (all tweets that were processed by the campaign searching for a particular hashtag) and Audience Intelligence (all people that sent tweets picked up by your campaign), Social Opinion allows for extended insights into this.
As well as putting time into interacting with your Twitter connections, one of the best ways to harness growth is to engage with trending content.
Though you can simply look at the top trends across all of Twitter or country-wide on the homepage, this isn’t the optimal way to find engaging content. These are most often very over-saturated. Our social listening feature, on the other hand, offers insights into the exact topics and brands that your audience are talking about. This gives you personalised trends to jump on in order to connect with your audience and can even play a pivotal role in competitor research as a brand.
As you start to build up your Twitter presence, it’s important to try to create a balance between trending content and content that is always going to spark interest in your audience. This type of content is referred to as “evergreen” content; our evergreen tweet feature allows you to write content that is relevant at any time and can be queued to be sent out whenever you’re missing content at a key time for your audience.
To accelerate your progress on Twitter as a beginner, click this link to find out more about Social Opinion.
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