Did you know that across the Twittersphere, there are more than 7,000 tweets per second? Let that sink in for a minute — that number adds up to more than 600 million tweets per day and 220 billion per year.
Twitter is a powerful platform for publishers to build a conversation around their content and keep their names relevant in today’s flurry of information. In fact, 86 percent of Twitter users say they use the platform for news consumption and 64 percent say they both consume and share news on the social network.
There are some steps that you can take right now to positively impact your Twitter account’s performance. Let’s take a look at these four tips you can start implementing today.
1. Curate Meaningful Content
Twitter users love a constant stream of content. Ideally, you’d like to be the sole provider of information, but chances are that you’re struggling to come up with multiple tweets a day to keep your followers engaged at any given point. That’s why you need to curate content to constantly power your Twitter feed.
The World Wide Web presents you with millions of articles. Your job is to find fun and interesting topics, and share them on your Twitter account to present a fresh stream of content to your followers.
Start by checking Twitter trends, Google Trends, and Facebook trends to see what’s trending. And then tweet about content that is most relevant to your industry. Another thing you can do is retweet your readers’ posts if you’re seeing great content to share, like O’Reilly Media does.
You can even automate the research part of content curation by using tools like Quuu, which allows you to pick an interest category to receive content suggestions that matter to your company and its audience. Choose from ready-made ideas and tweet away. How cool is that!
2. Stream Live Video
Curiosity, instantaneousness, and FOMO (fear of missing out) — these are some of the key factors that are driving the trend of live video. As your audience becomes increasingly aware of what’s happening around them — they don’t want to feel left out. They want instant gratification. Live video ensures that they stay in the present moment.
Twitter is the only digital media platform that offers 24/7 live video streaming. Launching a broadcast is as easy as clicking a button, and audiences can view and share the stream within the platform. Entertainment, sports and news publishers occupy the crux of this space. For example, The BBC recently teamed up with Twitter to live stream 5 UK election specials.
With the rising interest in real-time videos, the opportunity is ripe for publishers to improve their Twitter engagement. Use Twitter live to host Q&A sessions, stream events, broadcast interviews, and share breaking news stories. Because live videos feature unedited raw footage, you’ll build trust with your readers, which is one of the keys to improve social sharing.
3. Use the Right Hashtags
The proliferation and use of hashtags are truly remarkable. What started on Twitter is now an integral part of social media culture and a popular means of categorizing content. Today, almost all social media channels including Facebook, Pinterest, LinkedIn, and Instagram allow the use of hashtags.
Publishers can incorporate hashtags in their tweets to improve engagement. Tweets with hashtags get 2 times more engagement than tweets without. Also, anyone who follows your hashtag trail can check out your content, even if they’re not following your Twitter account. As a result, hashtags can extend your influence outside the boundary of your own followers.
Get started by creating a custom hashtag to use in your tweets. It can include your company name, your location, or a unique catch phrase – anything that is exclusive to you. You can also add a trending hashtag or two to increase the visibility of your tweets.
However, go easy on the quantity. Research shows that one or two hashtags appear to generate the maximum engagement. When your tweets include more than 2 hashtags, engagement could drop by 17 percent on average. That being the case, limit yourself to using a couple of hashtags for optimal performance.
4. Use a Twitter Share Button
Blogger Joshua Benton conducted a detailed study on the value of Twitter share buttons for news publishers. The findings revealed that several news outlets receive 20 percent of their Twitter traffic from Twitter buttons placed on their website. For instance, 20.2 percent of the tweets to the Wall Street Journal came from a Twitter share button on the publisher’s site.
Obviously, not everyone on Twitter is familiar with your publication. Including a Twitter share button on your site increases the probability of attracting new eyeballs to your content. When someone shares your post on Twitter, it gets seen by his or her followers, who then may share it with their Twitter followers, and so on. The possibility is endless, which makes it a great way to improve your Twitter performance as well as visibility across the internet.
ShareThis provides a handy Twitter share button to help your readers share the post or article they’re viewing with their followers.
With our social sharing buttons, you can customize its look across all landing pages. Choose Twitter as your social channel, select an alignment, pick a size for the button, and include a call-to-action.
Note: You can also request a mobile preview to see exactly how the button will appear on smartphones.
With these tips, the visibility of your Twitter account will increase over time. And as you make it easy for readers to share your content on the platform, you’ll certainly reap the rewards off-Twitter, too, as people in the readers’ network start visiting your website.
