Friday 4-Step: Quick Twitter Exercise for Brands

It’s Friday. How much time will you spend scrolling through Twitter today? Be honest!

Are you scanning and tweeting for business or pleasure? If you’re in the mindset to give your company Twitter profile a little TLC, let’s run through a 4-step exercise to optimize your bio, spruce up your look and get a little (inter)action.

1. Set Your Clear Intention

Super basic, but the importance of focusing your efforts with a clear strategy can’t be overstated. Not every tool is a megaphone, and you shouldn’t use all tools as such. Carve out the tasks you’ll use the channel for based on the way users use the service.

Tweets are the amuse-bouche of marketing. A tweet needs to amuse and delight in one bite. Just what content will do the trick depends on the kind of person you’re writing to, but businesses can bet on success if the tweet shares clearly useful or helpful info. A subset of that is announcements of ways to save money.

If your experience supports this claim, a solid strategy to set for your company Twitter profile might be: Focus on broadcasting deals and discounts and tips for [X issue related to your product/service] that are highly likely to be retweeted.

With your intention for the channel defined, you can tackle the next objectives.

2. Ban the Bio Hazards

The bio section of Twitter should be crafted with 3 things in mind: brand messaging, consistency, and value impact. Read your current company Twitter bio and ask yourself:

• Is the messaging in-line with the brand?
• Does it emphasize the brand’s unique value proposition?
• Does the link point to the right page on the site?

The objective is to optimize the profile info from both a branding perspective (unique value and consistent message) as well as a keyword perspective (including keywords that signal relevance to the target audience). The link should be the most tantalizing to the amuse-bouche audience type, and that may not be the home page but could be a product finder or the blog or…

3. Run a Few Tools to Improve Engagement

• Follower to following ratio signals authority. The ratio of followers to those you are following should be equal, or you should have more followers than those you are following. Friend or Follow is a free application that sorts through your followers and those you follow to give you an idea of mutual follow and one-way follow relationships you want to keep or prune. 
• Follow and un-follow users with purpose. Use the free Twitter analysis tools in Follwerwonk to find influencers in your niche and understand what activity is received best. 
• Set alerts for phrases where you can start or join conversations. Phrases you set alerts for may include the most popular product names and questions you can answer. One service you can set up to do this is Tweet Alarm.

Also run your eyes over the profile to make sure you’re taking advantage of the full visual opportunity to tell a story and show personality. Include a header image and background image to the profile page to optimize the profile’s visual representation of the brand.

4. Follow a Shareable Tweet Checklist

Practice the art of the alluring tweet. Run through a (mental) checklist before you hit the tweet button to make sure those 140 characters pack a punch.

• Give it up, up front. A tweet is more seductive and likely to be retweeted if the useful info is present right in the tweet rather than a page linked to. You may decide to draw traffic to a blog post or article with a teaser or question, but followers will be more impressed, and thus more likely to interact, if you give them the fascinating info in question right in the tweet.
• Think past text. If the info comes out to more than 140 characters or would be better displayed in a visual way, put it in an image. Get good at the quick and dirty graphic. I make drawings on Google Drive all the time to slap some text over a stock photo. A little multi-media in your tweet may be worth a longer look. If you tweet an image, be sure to include a link in the text area.
• Count characters. Don’t forget to leave some characters free for those who choose to retweet manually.

Virginia Nussey is the director of content marketing at MobileMonkey. Prior to joining this startup in 2018, Virginia was the operations and content manager at Bruce Clay Inc., having joined the company in 2008 as a writer and blogger.

See Virginia's author page for links to connect on social media.