Bridget Willard | SaaS Marketing Agency

Category: Twitter

  • Tweeting with Links – Best Practices

    Do you ever find yourself scrolling through the home feed or one of your lists, looking for a little bit of conversation, only to find link after link after link? Sometimes, I just want to be able to reply to a tweet without having to read a blog post first. That got me thinking.

    If I, a member of the Twitter audience, don’t always have (or want to take) the time to click on a link and read the article before responding or retweeting, then why should I expect my audience would have a different sentiment?  I came to the conclusion that only tweeting links asks a lot of your audience.

    I’m guilty! This post is as much as a confession as an admonition. Including work, I have three Twitter accounts and four blogs. Though I’m not on a regular blogging schedule, I’m producing content and, of course, I want people to read it.

    It’s so easy for us news junkies to read an article and tweet it out. The blogger junkies write blogs and tweet it out. And after a while, if you look at your own feed, you may realize that you are, indeed, a linker. Maybe it’s a good time to mix up your content. Carol Stephen discuses it in her blog post, “Tweeting for Engagement: Links Versus Text?” In the comments she brings up a good point:

    “I like the idea of having tweets that are complete thoughts, that require very little of your audience as far as clicking and reading~that idea seems considerate.” Carol Stephen 

    I know many people don’t think they have anything valuable to say, but I would disagree. You have opinions, opine. This is what Twitter is about. Whether you want to talk about who had the worst dress at the AMA show or who should be the next Ambassador to the U.N., you will have an audience of like-minded people – they may even overlap.

    But if you do tweet with links, here are some of the best practices.

    1. Check the Link

    The fact of the matter is that links get broken. Un-shortened links when copy/pasted into an Old School RT can sometimes lose some of the characters. Remember, in a link, one character missing can make it break. Other times, the web page is taken down or was redesigned. You never know.

    Always, always check your links before tweeting. This is especially important for those of us who keep tweets to recycle, either in a text or Excel file or from our liking/favoriting. You could stop reading at this point and still dramatically improve your tweeting.

    2. Shorten the link.

    For the reason above, shortened links are easier to copy and paste, etc. Also, sites like bitly.com give you statistics for your links if that’s what gets your engine running. There’s some debate about this so I won’t push it too heavily. That said, unless it’s a photo on Twitter, I shorten the link.

    Bitly’s analytics show how many times a link was clicked on. For those un-clicked links, I sometimes tweet it again, maybe with a different headline.

    3. Rewrite it.

    Let’s face it. Not all of us are the best copywriters. If you want to write better headlines, Copyblogger is your go-to source. Check out “How to Write Headlines That Work.” More often than not, I find a sentence in the article that appeals to me and I tweet that as a quote instead. Here’s an example from yesterday:

    Tweeting quotes from an article, even if they’re your own, is a good strategy if you want to repeatedly tweet out an article but don’t want your Twitter timeline to look spammy. You’re welcome.

    4. Give credit.

    If you read it on Facebook from your friend who you know is on Twitter, give them a hat tip at least (h/t @username at the end of the tweet). If you read it from Mashable do the same (via @Mashable). We don’t always find things on our own, giving credit shows you are humble and generous at the same time.

    In the spirit of giving credit, this blog post was inspired from discussions and brainstorming with my good friend Carol Stephen. Follow her on Twitter at @Carol_Stephen.

    5. The Two-Step or Hop, Skip, and a Jump Link.

    Have you ever clicked on a link that takes to you a site with only a teaser paragraph? Then it says “read the story here” with another link, so you have to click again and wait for the page to load, click away pop-ups — all just to read the story. That doesn’t even mention the hoops you have to jump through on your mobile device. It drives me crazy.

    After I play link hopscotch a few times, I start ignoring their tweets entirely. I realize there are financial reasons why people do this, but as a user it’s beyond annoying. Are you really making enough money off of the affiliate link to justify the inconvenience and frustration to your audience?

    The same goes for paywall sites. I don’t subscribe to Financial Times, yet I see their links tweeted often.  Either check the link to make sure all of the articles can be read by your audience before you tweet or tweet it with #Paywall at the end as a warning. Our local paper went to the paywall model a while back. Not only do I never read it now, but I refuse to retweet any links from them. (I often wonder how many clicks they’ve lost because of the paywall.)

    6. [Your Idea Here]

    Have you had trouble with links? Do you delete tweets with broken links? Leave your Tip #6 in the comments below.

  • Twitter is About Trust. Is Your Social Ledger Blank?

    Ledger-6 Print fit-to-page or on 12 inch or legal paper
    by Mel McCarthy Creative Commons License

    A blank slate. Many social psychologists believe that the human starts off with a blank slate. Regardless of your ideology, every relationship does begin with a blank ledger. Let me explain.

    Social Media is about many things, one of which is building relationships. How to start that building is often debated.

    “Relationships take time. If you try to shortcut social media, you’re shortcutting relationship building.”

    ~ Scott Stratten from “Mannequin Networking: Why Twitter Automation Is Bad.“

    Scott is right. Relationships are built over time. Being the logical person that I am, I came to the conclusion that Twitter is about trust and tweeted it on September 25, 2012.

    In our digital age it’s easy to either be naive (an oversharer) or paranoid (incomplete profile). It’s true that occasionally you do run into people like Terry Rantula, as Carol Stephen describes in her post, “Social Media: Do You Really Know Your Friends?” But should that be the determining factor in our social media strategy?

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  • Retweet Styles – It’s like Jeans; there’s a fit for everyone.

    Social media experts are known for their opining.  Like it or not, extreme positioning tends to garner both positive and negative attention.

    As a dispensary of unsolicited advice I’ve made the enemy or two in my day. My thought, however, is this: why not experiment around?

    One thing we can count on in social media is that trends, platforms, and accepted notions change over time.

    By now, most people know what I think of Twitter’s Retweet Button.

    But there is an element of style in the retweet. Style in tweeting is like jeans – there’s a fit for everyone. Quote Tweets or Quote posts are still fine. They have limitations. And to each their own.

    1.  Old School RT

    Why would someone post on X with the prefix “RT?”

    When Twitter originally started, there was no button to retweet. Users came up with the syntax — et voilà. We’re used to it — us old schoolers.

    This is traditionally done by clicking reply on a tweet, copying the text of the original tweet, and pasting after the user’s name.  Then you put “RT” in the front of the tweet and click send.

    Copy/paste FTW!

    Hootsuite and Tweetdeck (as well as their rival third party apps) have buttons that make this much easier.  In Hootsuite, however, you have to change the settings for this retweet style to be activated. Well, maybe not anymore. I haven’t used Hootsuite since 2023.

    On X (Twitter) this is called “Quote Tweet.”  I still don’t get why they don’t have that option on the web version, but I digress.

    Example:

    Original Tweet:

    RT:

    2. Modified Tweet (MT)

    You may have seen “MT” at the beginning of a post on X. What is it? It means “Modified Tweet.”

    If the original tweet is very much longer than 120 characters, you may have to edit the tweet to get under the character limit. If you do this, then put MT instead of RT and use an ellipsis (…) where the text is cut off.

    Another good use case for “MT” as a prefix is to thank the original poster but include the context.

    3. Comment Tweet

    This retweet has a comment in front to continue the conversation. This is my preferred style.

    Note: Some people put the comment at the end of the tweet with “//” or “<<” before their addition, but I find this style confusing

    Example:

    4. Rewrite Tweet

    This is a hybrid between the comment and the hat tip. Especially if the tweet has a link, I may use a quote or something in an article that I like better than the original tweet’s text but still want to give credit. When I do this, I usually add the website or author’s Twitter handle, if known. I may even add an appropriate hashtag.

    Example:

    5. Hat Tip (h/t) Tweet

    You saw the link somewhere else (Facebook, G+, Instagram, et al) but still want to give this user source credit. Use the hat tip by adding “h/t @username” at the end.

    Example:

  • Six Tips to Gain Followers Through Engagement

    Ducks

    How do you gain followers?

    This is the question I am often asked.

    “Do I buy followers?” No. In fact, most of the time people can tell when you have bought followers, as my colleague Carol Stephen describes in her post here. This strategy sort of backfired for former Speaker of the House and Presidential Candidate, Newt Gingrich, too.

    Twitter is one of the major spokes in the social media wheel. Social media, people seem to forget, is about being social.

    During the question and answer period of the Digital Influence panel at ACEC California’s April Conference, I was asked what the best practice for Twitter is.

    My answer:  “The most important thing for you is to be a human being.”

    In fact, my social media strategy revolves around being a polite, helpful person.

    That seems to do the trick.

    How does this work.

    1. I avoid Twitter’s Retweet button.

    This is controversial and everyone has their own opinions. Read my blog post here.

    2. When I do retweet, I add a comment first.

    This continues the conversation the original tweeter intended, presumably, when they sent the tweet in the first place. Awkward sentence? Sure. But the point is that Twitter is a conversation. By that logic, every tweet is potentially a conversation starter.

    See: Retweet Styles

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  • Extend a Tweet’s Life

    One of the takeaways from “Can you fall in love with a brand?” is how to extend the life of a tweet.

    Tweets, essentially, are public text messages with a link. If it has a link, it can be embeded into a post like this.

    And so, people from the blog post, can favorite the tweet, retweet it, follow you, etc. (more…)