How to Stand Out on Twitter
Every day on Twitter, more than 500 million tweets are sent. That translates to about 5,700 tweets every second, according to the social media site. That’s a lot of 140-character tweets floating around. Furthermore, that’s also a lot of competition to grab the attention of other users. To make your tweets stand out from the crowd you’re going to need to do more than just include trending hashtags in your character count.
In fact, hashtags aren’t necessarily going to be the driving force behind making your Twitter accounts unique. That’s because, while hashtags are one way to attract new followers, that’s what so many people already do. Meaning it’s still easy to get lost in the shuffle.
Additionally, while one of your end goals for your Twitter marketing may be to grow your number of followers, that’s not what you should be focusing on. Rather, focus on goo — meaning, interactive — content, and the social media site will start to work for you more than ever before.
Inject Your Personality into Every Tweet
The number one thing to do on Twitter is to be yourself: utterly and completely. Show your uniqueness, and the uniqueness of the company you’re marketing, with every 140 characters you send out into the world. Specifically, don’t just fill your profile with headlines and links to industry-related news, whether it be about restaurants or travel.
Rather, be your interesting self so that when people view your page as a whole, or catch a glimpse of just one of your tweets, they get a sense of you and your company. While this doesn’t necessarily mean to outrageously over-enthusiastic, it does mean being opinionated and showing your knowledge about the topic you’re discussing and tweeting about.
Don’t Rely on Pre-Populated Text
As an offshoot of rule number one, don’t just hit the retweet button. Although that’s the easy thing to do, at the end of the day, it’s just pre-populated content that’s already been tweeted (sometimes thousands of times).
You can still retweet content, but you should also add something of yourself in the retweet. Such as commentary on what you’re reposting or a question about the retweeted link. Questions work particularly well, because that way you’re encouraging engagement with your followers. For example, if you’re retweeting a review about the new movie Sharknado 2, you can also ask your followers what they thought of the sequel.
Test Out Different Tweets
Even if you’re an influencer in the tweeting world with thousands of followers, your tweets can still get lost in the shuffle. As such, send out the same links but with different headlines to get the most exposure. Then you can monitor which ones get the best engagement with retweets, favorites and replies. Those analytics can drive how you write your tweets in the future.
Think Outside the Text
Since Twitter says you’re limited to 140 characters, people usually think of Twitter as a text-based social media site. But it doesn’t have to be that way. Get creative with your tweets and add photos or images too. These could be a company’s product, or an inspirational quote in meme-version. Not only are photos worth a thousand words, but they also make your tweets more prominent in the Twitter feed.
Other ways to get creative with Twitter include sharing a story across multiple tweets, or even creating an interactive game built around bit.ly links that lead to other tweets.
Listen, and Then Engage, Engage, Engage
Engagement is key on Twitter, but so too is listening. Pay attention first to what other people are talking about before responding. For example, if you notice drug addiction is trending, as seen in the Twitter sidebar, see why that phrase is trending first – was there a new study done? Did someone die from a drug overdose? Before you add your two cents to the topic, or send out a link related to the trending topic, be aware of the trending context.
Additionally, rather than just sending out your opinion as a tweet, respond to other people talking about that topic in order to start conversations.
Welcome New Followers
There’s #FF, or Follow Friday, but that isn’t really engaging with your followers. It’s just telling people who else they should be following. While that has some value, to be a bit different from others in your industry, welcome your new followers publicly (rather than sending out direct messages – especially if those DMs are non-specific to who you’re sending them to). This not only gives your new followers public recognition, but chances are they’ll either retweet or favorite this tweet.
To make these “welcoming” tweets even more unique, offer something to your new followers, whether it be a recipe, or a free eBook download. Think of it as a thank you gift!
Twitter may continuously update with lots of new content, but that doesn’t mean you can’t grow your influence on the social media site. By focusing on creating a personal identity for yourself online, being unique, monitoring what works and what doesn’t, and interacting with other tweeters, you’ll, soon enough, become someone others look up to on Twitter. And, yes, the number of Twitter followers you have will most definitely grow, even if that’s not what you’re focusing on.
Images: Flazingo | Robert S Donovan
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