Chapter 16

Ten Ways to Tweet Strategically

In This Chapter

Designing a program to accomplish your goals

Contributing material that’s valuable to others

Tweeting for jobs, reputation, and more

Twitter, the social media mini-blog site that relays 140-character messages among its users, is a serious medium of communication despite all the dull ‘chatter’ that characterizes much of it. Last I checked the community had nearly 200 million monthly active users sending out an average of 58 million tweets daily. You may want to be part of this platform for any number of reasons, ranging from job-hunting to establishing expertise.

Making a Twitter account influential and professionally useful requires a real commitment on several levels. For your tweets to make an impact, the social media gurus say you need to send out five to 20 of them per day. You need to spend some time identifying who and what is out there, and choose people you want to follow. And you need to look at Twitter strategically, integrating it with all your other outreach, both online and offline.

The following ten essentials come from a writer’s perspective. You can up your tweet savvy with Twitter For Dummies by Laura Fitton, Michael Gruen and Leslie Poston.

Plan Your Twitter Program

Random tweeting produces random results. Consciously build a Twitter program that aligns with and complements your website, blog, video, other social media investments, and traditional media too (your print materials and presentations, for example).

Plan an overall strategic framework based on what you want to accomplish. Do you want to establish yourself as an authority in your field? Build a following? Draw people to your website or blog? Find a job? Connect with like-minded people – or influential ones? Defining your goals for any communication initiative – and especially Twitter – helps you decide who you want to reach and guides you to the best content for your purpose (see Chapter 11 for more on goal setting and writing guidelines for social media).

Decide Who You Want to Be

Unlike formal media such as résumés or even websites, Twitter gives you the opportunity to show off your personality and individuality. But don’t go freewheeling. Try for carefully spontaneous. Make an active decision about how to represent yourself.

Humor is great if you’re good at it, and occasional sharing of personal information makes you real to your followers. But determine in advance how you want others to perceive you and what is appropriate to your goals. If you’re aiming for a job in banking, don’t share your romantic adventures or tell everyone that you made a fool of yourself at a party last night. If you want a copywriting job, you may want to show off your creativity. Set your own guidelines and stick to them. You’re branding yourself.

There’s never an advantage to demonstrating bad temper, a mean spirit, or sarcastic turn of mind – no matter how terrific it feels for 10 seconds. Negative or nasty comments don’t play well online, and are apt to be widely circulated. And never forget that once ‘published,’ your short-sighted remarks (or images) may live forever to embarrass or even undermine you. I can think of many public officials in a position to reinforce this advice.

If you recognize yourself as someone who’s regularly tempted to send out angry or ill-considered tweets, use Twitter’s scheduled/delayed posting feature, or an app that delays posting until your better angel has a chance to take back the helm.

Take Pains with Your Bio and Photo

Twitter gives you 160 characters to tell everyone who you are. Use the space well. Try for a lively description that crystallizes your uniqueness, framed by your goals. I tell you how to identify and express your own core value, or that of your business, in Chapter 9. Use Twitter’s own Bio Generator to describe yourself in an effective way for this medium. And, do whatever it takes to provide a good photo of yourself as you want to be seen, particularly if you’re on the hunt for a job or clients. The bio and photo should reinforce your persona, which I talk about in the preceding tip.

Listen to Your Target Audiences

Just as you hesitate to plunge into a party conversation before listening to what’s already going on, take time to acquaint yourself with what people of interest to you are saying to each other on Twitter.

Notice the tone of the conversation as well as the content. Look for niches with which you’re comfortable – questions you can answer, for example, or a subject you can productively comment upon. When you become part of a good exchange, keep it going. If you can build relationships tweet by tweet, you’re successful.

Aim to Be Useful

Never waste those 140 characters on trivialities that only your mother, perhaps, finds interesting. Share substance: news, ideas, tips based on your expertise, insights into events, a snippet from a good lecture you heard, links to something of interest, re-tweets of other people’s messages you find worthwhile and believe others will appreciate. Some experienced Twitter users send such re-Tweets out once every three or so tweets, but invent your own guidelines. Whether to use Twitter’s re-tweet feature to send your own messages out multiple times is more complicated. The premise is that you capture a different audience each time, but you also risk annoying your audience.

Remember that valued tweets are not necessarily about you. Mine your knowledge base, observe the conversations underway, stay up-to-date with your field, or with the world. Alltop.com is a good resource to keep current with what's happening.

Avoid Blatant Self-Promotion

Don’t sound like you’re selling something. It’s fine to call attention to a new blog post, event, workshop, article, book, product, or service improvement. But resist the temptation to promote yourself or your organization every time you tweet. You’ll quickly be discounted as a self-seeker, contrary to the best spirit of the web and of Twitter.

Some savvy tweeters follow a rule of thumb: self-promote one out of four times, max.

That said, you cannot always predict what information may be welcomed. When you travel, for example, tweeting your location can draw useful advice and suggestions. And people may appreciate knowing where you are. I know more than one case in which a traveller tweeted from a remote location where the unexpected took place, and he was recruited as an on-site reporter and photographer for major media.

Use Twitter for Surveys and Questions

Big companies are looking to Twitter to accomplish research that would otherwise be very expensive, and you can do that too.

Never before has soliciting opinions and knowledge been so quick, easy and cheap. Surveys and crowdsourcing are great ways to use the medium. Want to test-run your new website copy? Or a contest idea? Invite your network to visit your site and comment. Need an idea for employee recognition? Or advice on which logo to adopt? Put out the word. You can also ask your followers for resources and information when you want input. But don’t ask questions you can easily answer yourself with Google’s help, or request advice so often that you bore people.

Write Tweets as the Ultimate Self-Edit Test

Writing well in 140 characters isn’t easy, but authors are starting to write stories one tweet at a time, chefs are writing recipes to that character count, and employers are writing job descriptions on Twitter.

A good tweet usually requires good editing. Drill down to your message’s core and then express that in the most economical way you can. But don’t edit out the life and color – work to focus your meaning and limit its scope.

Experienced tweeters limit themselves to 120 characters to allow for easy re-tweeting. Use bitly.com to reduce the space needed to communicate links and URLs. As for abbreviations, what can I say? They're inevitable. But aim to be easily understood.

Tweet at Optimal Times

Would you believe, studies have already been done on how to tweet in tune with your personal biological clock and likely reaction from recipients?

Tweeting early in the day, like 8 or 9 a.m., is most likely to produce upbeat enthusiastic messages, according to a two-year study conducted by Twitter itself and published in the magazine Science. That’s on weekdays – on weekends, cheeriness peaks a bit later. So you’re likely to tweet in an upbeat manner in the morning, and also, to read positive tweets from other people then.

Tweets are most likely to be re-tweeted when posted between 3 and 6 p.m. because people are tired then and prefer relying on other people’s tweets. That comes from a HubSpot study. And at 10 and 11 p.m., people tend to send more emotional tweets, according to the Twitter study authors, so you may want to avoid tweeting when you’re tired.

Of course, you can write all your tweets when you’re in a good mood, according to your personal biological clock, and use a social media distribution service to feed them out over the day.

Treat Twitter as a Serious Job-Hunting Tool

A growing number of employers use Twitter as a recruitment tool. They find it cheaper, quicker, and more selective than traditional methods. Some regularly follow Twitter conversations that relate to their industries, watching for people with good judgment, expertise, and best of all, a following that indicates they are respected. Others place employment ads on Twitter (to find out how to uncover these posts, and many additional in-depth insights, get hold of Job Searching with Social Media For Dummies by Joshua Waldman).

If you’re in job-search mode, take special care to create good, useful, steady tweets that show off your best persona. Actively use Twitter along with other social media to showcase how conversant you are with these tools, because this know-how is a plus for many jobs these days. You may need to hone your tweet-skills to supply your résumé in this mini-format.

And check out Vine, Twitter's six-second video app program (vine.co or vine.twitter.com). Anecdotes about brilliant use of this format to score great jobs are tantalizing.