Techniques to make your twitter messages (tweets) more punchy, credible and viral.
Some initial findings have been produced by Jakob Nielsen who ran a simple test to investigate ways to increase the effectiveness of a tweet. Based on testing clickthrough rates, tweets have a very short lifespan. Visitors only follow the click for a short period of time, compared with clickthroughs on emailed links.
Email links can be clicked on for days after the initial mailing as people work their way through a stack of newsletters in their inbox. Tweets have to work hard to meet your objectives.
I read through the advice he gave when testing 5 versions of a message about some of his usability conferences and have summarized it into some general tips, and added a few more of my own to the end of the list.
- Consider capitalizing 1-3 keywords
Capitalization is a good way of making words stand out, and as long as it is used sensibly, it avoids the drawback of looking like you’re SHOUTING. Nielsen found capitalizing place names was a good way to draw attention to the location of his conferences he was marketing.
- Make people aware of your message but don’t bombard them with repeats
Nielsen notes: “Because many companies molest their poor followers with repeat postings about the same event, users have become somewhat hardened against event promotions.”
Constantly repeating your message to people who have already read it damages your credibility, so repeat your tweets with care. Don’t hog the conversation—you’re not that interesting. No one is.
If you decide you do want to repeat your messages, tweet the message at different times of the day if you have a global audience, to make sure you get the best coverage without overstaying your welcome with one group of your followers.
- Front load the message with keywords
Human eyes are programmed to scan along the left hand edge of text to get a sense of the information presented. Put your keywords at the start of the message so that your target audience is more likely to gaze at them.
- Be specific
As with all sales and marketing messages, specificity is good for conversions. Vague and random details never sell products and services effectively.Nielsen explicitly mentioned the locations and dates for his conferences to increase specificity and suggest to the reader that these were real, concrete, planned events – that were happing soon, not a sketchy plan.
- Make it easy to retweet
Keep the message length under 140, and use the following formula to make it easy for followers to retweet
Optimal Tweet Length = 140 - (your twittername length) - (3 characters for “RT@”)
If I was going to optimize one of my messages, for “ThinkLikeaUser” it would be:
140 – 14 -3 = 123 characters
Twitter is changing it’s policy so that the retweet source is not part of the 140 characters – but not yet, so until that happens, leave some space for your followers.
- Tailor your shortened link to indicate where it goes
Bit.ly links tend to look like this: http://bit.ly/XvY7m, which doesn’t make sense to a person. Nielsen tailored his for his audience to become http://bit.ly/UsabilityWeek to encourage clickthrough because users can confidently predict where they are going before they click.
- Don’t pre-schedule your tweets for “exactly on the hour”
If your customers are awake when you’re asleep, it makes sense to automate posting your tweets, using a product like tweetspinner. Just make sure you change your time to be just after the hour, so it ends up at the top of the column, not off the page.
- Be clear and concise
Make sure you have not included any redundant words in your copy. Remove any words that might be irrelevant to what you are trying to convey.
- Always use the shortest simplest words
Think up the gist of your message, then look for synonyms for the words in that message and select the shortest, simplest words you find, for example ”plan” is much better than “envisage”.
- Contribute to the twitter community, don’t just promote yourself
Make sure you are building a name for yourself by being helpful and friendly. Retweet and comment on other users’ good work. Share free, helpful advice.If all your messages are based on selling your latest and greatest product and building your business, people are going to tire of you quickly.
- Prefix keywords with hashtags (i.e. #keyword)
Twitter users prefix keywords with hashtags to help people search for particular tweets, for example, for people interested in BBC Television stories, you can add the story, then #BBC at the end of your message.
You can see some examples of tweets #BBC when you visit http://hashtags.org. Just type in a keyword you think is relevant to your tweet and see if there is a relevant #Hashtag.Here’s a BBC example:Can anyone get me tix to a recording of #BBC show #mocktheweek please?
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Hi Colette, Instead of using capitalization, maybe the use of hashtags is a better way to draw attention to certain keywords. Especially since more and more applications use it to link to some kind of Twittersearch with that term, which makes the word in question also stand out because it’s being transformed into a link.
Good point, they do make words stand out as well. I’ll update the article to reflect your tip – thanks for the suggestion.
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