By Kevin M
Last week in What Twitter Can Do For You we discussed how Twitter can be used to generate activity, connections and traffic, as well as enable you to get your ideas out into the world.
Obviously, the more followers you have, the larger the potential market for your messages, or tweets. But equally important is the quality of your tweets. After all once you have a few followers, or a few thousand, the next critical step is generating a stream of tweets that will engage them enough to take the next step, either by responding to your message on the social media itself, or by clicking through to your site.
Despite the thousands of claims of expert status that populate Twitter, the fact that the network is just a few years old and in a constant state of evolution means that there are far more practitioners than experts. With that in mind, I humbly lay claim to the status of practitioner and disclose that I can’t make any guarantees as to your success.
The type of tweets to send out
There’s considerable debate over what type of tweets work best on Twitter. Some say to keep self promotional tweets (messages with direct links to your site) to a minimum, but if you look on your Twitter home feed on any given day it’s clear that the vast majority of networking participants are mostly self promoting. Too many self promotional tweets, say several per hour, 24 hours a day, and you risk being considered a spammer which will turn off and turn away many followers. Too few, and you may defeat the purpose of being on the site at all.
Purely personal messages are the most basic tweets. They’re the type you might send out if you were texting a friend on your cellphone, and may include what you’re doing right now, such as “I’m waiting in line at the grocery store and I’m bored”, or “Having a great meal at Bahama Breeze” or just “I’m tired, I think I’ll go to bed early”.
Personally I shy away from these. I could be wrong, but unless you’re someone famous with a large cast of groupies in tow on your Follower list, it’s unlikely that the typical user you’re trying to attract is going to have much interest in the kind of messages that are usually aimed at an intimate circle of friends.
Tweets that promote other users are a must. This is where the all important practice of reciprocity comes into play. One of the very best ways to make friends on any social media is to promote others. When you do, most will promote you back, and no form of promotion is quite as impressive as a third party endorsement. Here is where the more you give, the more you get.
Content and quotes is another category to emphasize. Here you can send out snippets of news stories, your personal interests (sports, faith, business) or engage messages by others in a more conversational way as opposed to promoting yourself.
Always remember that what you tweet on Twitter stays on Twitter, at least somewhere, and be careful not to send any messages that might compromise you or someone else in the future.
Of course, what type of tweets you send out will depend on what your purpose in using Twitter actually is. But my personal opinion is that you look to work some sort of balance between self promotion, promotion of others, content and quotes and purely personal messages. Since Twitter is still evolving, the best approach may be one of continuous experimentation.
A tool to help you compose your tweets
To help you create compelling tweets, there is a free tool on a site from Advanced Marketing Institute called the Emotional Marketing Value Headline Analyzer, or EMV. It isn’t a Twitter tool per say, but it’s to help you create headlines, which is really what your self promotional tweets are. It grades a headline of up to 20 words—which is about what you get from the 140 character Twitter limitation—based on a range from zero to 100%. The greater the emotional appeal, the higher the score.
The site describes the importance of using emotional words, or EMV’s as follows:
“…reaching your customers in a deep and emotional way is a key to successful copywriting, and your headline is unquestionably the most important piece of copy you use to reach prospects.”
Think of your tweet as your “headline” in this case; in order to get a reader to click through to your website or blog you first have to create compelling content for that message, which usually means some sort of emotional hook.
As an example, I used the EMV tool to create the headline for this post, and received the following result:
“This score indicates that your headline has a total of 71.43% Emotional Marketing Value (EMV) Words. To put that in perspective, the English language contains approximately 20% EMV words. And for comparison, most professional copywriters’ headlines will have 30%-40% EMV Words in their headlines, while the most gifted copywriters will have 50%-75% EMV words in headlines.”
This tool won’t guarantee that a headline, or in our case a tweet, will bring hundreds of visitors to your website or blog, but it will provide a metric for you to measure the potential reach of your messages which hopefully will make you a more skilled tweet writer and contribute toward getting you where you want to go.
You truly are what you tweet on Twitter, and learning how to create messages is a critical skill. Developing that skill is one of the most important aspects of using this social media to it’s fullest. I’d like to help you do that more fully in my short e-book, Do You Need 5,000 REAL Twitter Followers?. Not only will it help you build a list of thousands of followers in just a few months, but it will also provide detailed suggestions on what kind messages to send, and when to send them.
