Feathering Your Twitter Nest – How to Write Tweets People Will Read
Despite outward appearances, Twitter is not a frivolous social media site. The media enjoys painting Twitter as a shallow place, full of vapid folk who have checked out of real life. Perhaps they think that life’s most important moments cannot be distilled into a 140 character tweet. If so, they are spectacularly wrong.
Crafting a good tweet takes practice, especially if you’re tweeting to advertise something or attract new followers. There are two kinds of tweets, business and personal – and you should always endeavor to keep the ratio about 75% personal and 25% business. Business tweets are about gain, you want people to buy your stuff or add their number to your numbers to make your numbers bigger. Personal tweets are all about communicating, just talking without expectation of tangible gain. The reason for my above ratio is based on the fact that people are much more likely to read a tweet with one or less blue parts.
Blue parts are generally hashtags. Those are clickable conversations that give the casual readers an idea of your tweet topic, such as #Dogs, #Shutdown or #Chocolate. One of the biggest misconceptions about Twitter is that each tweet needs a hashtag. The truth is that people are much more likely to read a tweet with no hashtags at all. It’s because our timelines are filled with hashtag laden tweets, most of them wanting to sell something, so when we see a plain tweet, we know it’s just a person talking.
As I’ve said before, Twitter isn’t a place to sell your book, CD, Etsy shop or whatever, it’s the place to sell you. Selling yourself, your brand, via tweets can go a long way towards increasing sales. It’s just that you shouldn’t appear to be selling anything at all. Whether you’re new to Twitter or an old hand who isn’t getting the response you desire from your followers, here are a few tips for writing tweets people will read.
Avoid stuffing tweets with “impressive” facts and figures. Eyes bounce off that stuff faster than Miley Cyrus can find a new way to take her clothes off.
Keep hashtags to a minimum. I, personally, don’t read many that have more than one. If there is more than one hashtag channel you want to tweet in, compose several different tweets, each with one or two hashtags. The more you try to cram in to one little tweet, the less likely anyone is to read.
Keep #FF (follow Friday) and other follower-gaining memes personal. Don’t bare your soul, just say something interesting, funny or insightful about yourself. You want to attract people to you, so be a person with strengths and foibles just like everyone else.
Avoid putting links to your blog, Amazon page, Facebook page – whatever – in all of your tweets. If you do it too often, people will think you only care about advertising to them.
Tweet real things about yourself, your pets, your adventures in your own real voice without expectation. By doing this, you are allowing people to like you on your own merits. Once they like you for who you are, they are much more likely to pay attention to subsequent advertisements from you. Heck, if they really like you, they will advertise for you – and that is golden in any medium. Word of mouth is the best sales tool ever invented.
A final thought about hashtags is that they’re not evil. They are, in fact, very useful when used appropriately and judiciously. Don’t discount the viability of making up your own silly hashtag just for fun because it might catch on and take on its own life. But hashtags will not take the place of actual conversation, so don’t use them as such.
As always, I encourage people using Twitter just to talk to other people. Let them discover you, discover that they like your voice and let them decide when or if they’re going to buy what you’re selling.
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