For the last few weeks I’ve been experimenting with Twitter.
I’ve been looking for a way to improve the way I use the social network and have always been testing little things, but it was time to make a bigger change.
I had seen a few tweet formats that inspired me and finally started using the social sharing software, Buffer, more and the results have been positive.
In this post I want to share with you a few of the tweet formats that I’ve used the last few weeks to get more followers for my Twitter account and more traffic to the GBW Blog.
I hope you can use these tweets to do the same or get some inspiration to tweak the formats and find your own way to accomplish those two things.
Here they are.
#1. List Enticements
I stole this format from PGA Tour. They were doing these really cool lists and rankings with their tweets including live leaderboard tweets. They would show the top five in a tournament and then include the link to the full leaderboard by a “Rest:” mention in the tweet. I thought it was really enticing so I’ve tried it.
And it’s worked really well.
https://twitter.com/DayneShuda/status/430385328525168640
I’m not sure on the percentage – maybe 25% to 40% – of our posts are list posts and this type of tweet format has been doing really well to increase clicks to those posts.
We use Buffer to set it up and that includes using all the old posts from the archives.
#2. Posts Featuring People And Brands
We’ve been writing more posts that feature individuals and brands. Some of these are list posts. Some are the type of posts where we write about specific blogs or website designs.
When we share these posts on Twitter we’ll mention the individuals and brands.
https://twitter.com/DayneShuda/status/430400480733573122
We’ll use the “feat.” strategy and we’ll also use a few different formats. We might use the list enticement mentioned above by mentioning a couple brands in list format and then linking to the post.
We try not to overdue this format. We don’t want to spam brands on Twitter, but we do it a few times a week and it usually leads to brands and individuals following and retweeting. It’s enticing to do more, but again, we don’t want to spam people.
#3. A Couple Hashtags
Earlier I mentioned I was surprised by how effective hashtags are. I didn’t really think it would do that much for our tweet formats, but it’s been working really well and now I’m making it a regular part of our tweets.
https://twitter.com/DayneShuda/status/430128569982136320
I usually add about 1 to 3 hashtags on some of the tweets. I combine these three formats sometimes, but for hashtags I’ll kind of do it on posts that don’t fit into the first two formats on this post.
I also did some research on hashtags for marketing companies and found the top 10 hashtags to use. There were a few surprises including #mobile and #sales and even #startup, but those have been working really well.
Conclusion
These tweets have been really successful. They’re getting more clicks than the formats I would usually share, which were often just the blog post title and link. By mentioning brands a little more often in the posts and in the tweets it’s also leading to more followers and more traffic. Those brands retweet the tweets sending their followers to our blog.
And finally, those hashtags are working better than I had ever thought. It’s really exposing the content to a group of people interested in specific topics.
So try these formats for your Twitter account. I believe you should get the same results.