The Art of the Tweet

Introducing tweeting etiquette, step 4, how to tweet. With tweet ideas and concepts, we reach into the gentle art of twittering…

But first, did you read the last lesson? Would you like to read it again, first? You can here: Raving Twitter Accounts

Are your tweets retweetable?

This is the holy grail and it has to be your key objective when you tweet. To make your tweets so irresistable that others just want to forward your messages automatically on reading…

Tweet forgiveness

Most first time tweets read something like “no idea if this is going to work – here goes, lets see what happens” as a first tweet you will be forgiven – probably mainly because no one will read it! A tweet like this will probably not attract many followers. But Twitter knows this and by simply doing nothing, you will find that there are some who will follow you anyway and they will be your first followers most probably.

How to make your tweets retweetable

The idea is to make your tweet so interesting that someone else would like to forward it to their followers. When this happens, your tweets go viral and more people would hear about you (another excellent reason to have multiple accounts – see step 3!). In essence, yo must make sure your tweets are useful, interesting or entertaining. Others will forward your tweets and some more people will start to follow you.

Re Tweet others!

It is hugely complimentary to re-tweet (RT) someone elses Tweet. It is also very simple and this is one the keys to success in Twitterland. All you need to do is cut and paste the entire tweet that you have seen that you want to forward to your followers and enter the letters RT followed by a space and the @ sign followed by the rest of the message, including the name of the twitter account that posted the message.

So if you were following Weboptimiser and you see a tweet that you think is cool you just cut the Tweet and type in RT @, so it reads:
RT @weboptimiser … tweet content …
Simple stuff!

Tweets that last the hour!

You will find as you increase your followers that you will not have time to read all of the messages that others send, they are not addressed to you per se, they will not miss you if you do not reply. You can reply if you make the time. When you realise these facts you will start to realise that the tweets that you make are likely to have a useful life of just a few hours, if that!

I think that realising that your tweets are likely to last only an hour or two means that you can test messages pretty easily – as either they will work for you and give you the results you are looking for – within the hour – or not and if not, that is great, you can send another tweet until you get the results that you are looking for.

Some tweets last more than an hour, and some have lasted days and they continue to be retweeted. I recently found an article on the ROE (return on engagement) and promoted it. People are still retweeting that tweet, so if your tweet is useful, it can last a lot more than hour. However, in my opinion, most hang around for about an hour and then they disappear off with all the others to Twitter heaven…

Smart ways to Twitter…

But first lets consider what you would do with other peoples tweets as this will provide you with the insight into how your tweets maybe ‘processed’. You can do two things with other peoples tweets you can hit the reply icon to the right of the tweet on the results page or you can delete them, there is third option – the most common option – do nothing. I would suggest where ever possible if you have the time, or even just a few minutes a day, hit reply to other peoples tweets that you can comment on. That is all it takes!

Hitting reply is almost a no brainer. It is fast all you have to do is reply to the comment, it can save the trouble of thinking up something new or trying to say something interesting – who knows there may be times when you just plain run out of interesting things to say. So the alternative is to feed off the prompts that jump out to you right off the page. This ‘lazy way’ to Tweet is not necessarily a bad idea, as others will see that you are engaging and there is a website that values Twitter accounts and if you are seen to engage with others, your account would be worth more – so there you are real business reasons to pass comments on other tweets!

There are other messages that you can respond too – those that are sent directly to you. Select ‘Direct Messages’, to the right of your Twitter page and there you will see direct messages addressed to you. Direct Messaging will only work if you are following each other. You can reply to these as you wish in a similar manner. Many of these are likely to contain messages of thanks suggesting you might like to follow their link. Follow a few and send them an appraisal of what you found – they may be grateful for the feedback and this may get interesting – people love talking about themselves!

Favourites are smart too

Favourites are one of (modern) mans favourite friends. When you are on your account and looking down your tweets you can mark the best posts as favourites, just by clicking on the star shaped icon that shows on the right of each tweet. You can do this real fast. That’s it, it is a real time saver, the first thing you do everytime you look at your account is speed read a bunch of messages, quickly favourite the ones that are interesting. Then click the favourites button in the menu to the right and all those you just tagged are now in view. You can now focus just on the ones that you have preselected and have some fun replying to just the ones you have some interest in, and you will see just how fast you can work twitter.

Do’s and Don’ts

There are none really, but we have tried to compile a guide for best practice. The bottom line is to have fun, enjoy yourself, be transparent, be honest & respectful of others and to Tweet interesting things – ideally tweets that others might want to retweet(!).

Do

• Tweet often – at least a few times per day
• Retweet other people’s messages if you found them useful
• Thank others that have retweeted your messages
• Reply to others in public if you feel others would be interested
• Tweet interesting things:
  • Offer advice, knowledge, information, and add value
  • Share pictures, links, and resources
• Engage with your followers, invite questions, and take polls
• Tweet your blog posts – but make sure that this is not all you tweet.
• Answer anyone that messages you
• Try and follow targeted people
• Make sure you use a good photo, a great background, an interesting Bio that includes your website details (use bit.ly to measure results).

Don’t

• Brag about how many followers you have. I have done this, no one has complained, but it has a so what factor (6000 today!)
• Swear or use foul language @$!!
• Sell on Twitter £@$
• Have updates that are just RSS feeds or affiliate links – oops!
• Try and pretend you are someone else – just be honest and open with people

Often we see people posting quotes, jokes and there is no shortage of really good web pages out there.

Instant feedback in action!

What not to do and how to recover

Just to prove how instant twitter can be I instigated a copy change (I am always changing and testing things) that kinda backfired! I was looking at how many visitors were coming through to home page of how to tweet from twitter about a 100 a day on average and I see a sign up rate of around 10% pretty good you might think. I was looking at the page and I was looking for ways of more quickly getting the message across and I thought I know, I will write a paragraph on ‘the lazy way to twitter’ (there is a famous and very much a best seller book called ‘the lazy mans way to riches’).

Instant feedback! but now that I think of it I am not surprised… This is what I had sent:

Here is something new: The 'lazy' way to Tweet http://bit.ly/mPVvr

As a result I changed the copy from Lazy to Smart and I replied:

Click throughs dropped that day too, so Derek was not the only person who had this view. I changed the link text and I changed the copy on the page from Lazy to Smart, although I still keep a reference to lazy on the page. The next day, convertion rates went back up again. How is that for instant feedback! Also, because I sent the ‘lazy’ text 100 times that day, there would have been a lot more than Derek taking offence, something that I obviously did not intend.

It is interesting to reconsider the text that I sent in the context of it solitary status. When I look at it again, although no harm was meant and it was best intentioned, you can see how some may find it offensive! Another lesson learned – no doubt I will make a mistake like this again at some time in the future- please don’t burn me, I just need a gentle nudge and I will change it!

On this occassion I know I did not upset everybody, as some people even retweeted the message, but I had no intention of offending anyone. I am not sure that I necessarily did offend Mr Showerman, afterall, he simply pointed out the error of my ways and helped m correct what I was saying. Thanks Derek!

Thank new followers

When people follow you the best thing you can do after following them back is to send them a thank you. After all, that is polite, however, it is time consuming! Thank fully there is a system for doing this, but here is a warning – some think this is bad etiquette. You need to make the choice.

Thankfully there is a site you can use to automatically send a thank you message for free – visit Tweetlater. You can register for a free account. The first thing you will want to do when you have logged in is to add you twitter account. (You can register multiple accounts too).

When you add a new Twitter account, within Tweetlater you can send a message to new followers and you should say “thanks for following me”. You also want to click on auto follow and auto unfollow buttons.

Tweet, tweet, that’s it for now

On this page we have started to go a little bit deeper into the gentle art of Twittering… We hope you found it useful. Imagine if you could see who clicks on your links… Imagine if you could monetise your tweets… It is not only possible, we do it all the time. It can be achieved in a subtle way so much so that it can actually help increase your followers too.

We hope you have found this edition interesting, the next part will be in your in-box shortly, thanks for reading. The best thing you can do now is to take action – go ahead – and follow us… @weboptimiser

Next up: Everyone needs a Tweetpan