Twitter is a powerful social media tool for businesses. Tweets are essentially written sound bites for projecting your brand voice. Building your brand awareness on Twitter is easy; if you know how to write engaging content.
Why Use Twitter?
Twitter is designed to offer rapid-fire updates and live streaming of news and videos. It is catered to mobile users (an estimated 80% of Twitter’s users are mobile), and there are about 500 million tweets sent each day.
Twitter has made some changes in recent years that include multiple accounts with easy switching, and an increased character limit.
Changes to the 140 Character Limit
The character limited increase was divisive when it was first changed in 2017, from 140 to 280 characters. Some users felt that the 140 character limit helped to encourage creativity and wordplay, while others enjoyed having double the characters to communicate more information.
Under the Twitter limit increases, things like the @name used to reply to a tweet, all media attachments, and the retweet button on Tweets no longer count towards the character limit. What’s more, users will no longer have to implement the @name to reach specific followers. Now, all Tweets that begin with the @name convention reaches all followers.
7 Rules for Writing Content for Twitter
Writing content for Twitter requires elements that are not used in other forms of writing, advertising and social media.
By being engaging, speaking directly with your audience, and making use of the viral nature of Twitter, it’s easy to create a presence that promotes your brand and helps your company develop an image online.
Crafting content for your daily interactions can be challenging. It is important that you develop a strategy to engage your audience with value-adding content that tells a story over time. While all these tips are based on well-established content marketing strategy, applying them to Twitter is a skill that is evolving and is likely to continue to challenge our creativity.
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Create mini-campaigns from long-form content
Your company whitepapers, e-books, and original research provide the material needed to create targeted mini-campaigns. A short campaign sharing multiple data points, infographics, industry insights, inspiring quotes, and analytic soundbites from a presentation can provide the material you need to grab attention. Include a link to the long-form asset. This will add value to your audiences’ experience and drive traffic to your website.
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Use Twitter polls and ask questions
Encourage your audience to share their opinions, thoughts, and views, which will help to increase engagement. Twitter polls and an open-ended question invite your audience to engage with you by asking insightful and timely questions. These insights from people connected to your business and industry can also drive your contention creation and direction. Retweet the most interesting answers to show that you are willing to really engage.
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Go cross-channel by mining your other content
Your Twitter feed can be used to showcase your brand narrative over time. Share current and evergreen blog posts, positive brand news, industry events and research, and highlight customer case studies. The content you’re producing for other channels can be strategically repurposed with your Twitter audience in mind. Fresh happenings and revisiting evergreen topics creates an interesting mix for audiences following your brand.
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Include visual assets in your Tweets
People are three times more likely to engage with Tweets that include visual content, including video, photos, and GIFs. Visual content captures people’s attention when they’re scrolling through the feed and encourages deeper engagement.
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Develop a themed content series
A content series can guide your new content creation overtime, linking multiple tweets around a common theme. Some examples include:
- Profiling leaders in your space
- Providing quick how-to tips in your space
- Showcasing moments in the history in your industry or related to your products or services
- Highlighting your customers
- Sharing surprising facts about your industry
- Introducing employees
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Make it easy to track content with hashtags
A hashtag can make it easier for your audience to follow the conversation. Creating a campaign hashtag links together all your related content, and can help increase curiosity for the rest of the story. Hashtags that capture peoples imagination are a powerful tool for content sharing and awareness. However, reading your hashtag and asking people what they read is an important part of the writing of a hashtag – overly long or complicated tags are boring and show a lack of creativity.
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Curate compelling content
Curated content can help you find fresh stories. Follow publications and thought leaders to understand the dialogue in the industry. Read the content that your peers, employees, or customers create and look for opportunities to share content from your audience. Sharing other people’s content builds relationships and introduces another point of view.
Most importantly, creating a great content strategy that showcases your brand requires planning. Search for inspiration from different sources and look for a variety of opportunities to create content in advance and react to what’s happening in real-time. By pulling inspiration from multiple sources, you’ll keep your content fresh and audiences engaged.
