How I Cheated Twitter
and won
This is how it all began:
“…Also, we are starting some Twitter chats — log onto Twitter today and post an inspirational startup quote using #WVAcademy. Then, ReTweet anything anyone writes that really hits home for you. The person with the most RT’s wins!”
Game on.
If you are in charge of growing your business, your brand, or your personal image, you probably already understand why Twitter is a go-to platform for developing a community of advocates. As your Twitter audience grows your opportunity to engage people increases. If they are excited by what you have to share, they share it and their network shares it — and suddenly you have fans that care about what you stand for and will advocate for you.
Much the same as in ‘real life’, you get what you give on Twitter. Reciprocation is vital. What can you give your audience that is relevant to them and still relevant to what you stand for?
Twitter is demanding.
Best to try and have some fun with it. Once you get started the data-driven side of you awakens — in laymans terms this is called “being competitive” in business terms it’s called getting a return on investment for your time.
You will sign up for services such as Klout to see how influential you are, which means you will care about the ratio of tweets you have to the number of followers and how many you follow back. You will find that some followers will automatically unfollow you if you don't participate on Twitter within a certain timeframe, or if you didn't follow them back, or haven’t addressed them in a tweet, etc. You may find reasons this is not important. Regardless, Twitter has become a demand on your time, it’s become something measurable that warrants integration into your marketing, sales and customer service and even leadership initiatives.
Suddenly you are driving value using Twitter and you can't afford to be careless with the content you publish — you need to put real thought into everything you tweet.
How I Won by Cheating.
I have 100 demands on my time so I had a budget of 1 minute to get this tweet out there. It took 30 seconds to think of a strategy, 10 seconds to post, 20 seconds to converse with other Twitters and within 24 hours it was retweeted 54 times, favorited 37 times and generated about 22 conversations. I have posted 1,000+ tweets and that is not a typical response rate for anyone who isn't a celebrity.
What made this tweet stand out? Did it combine best practices. Sure. But I went a bit farther than that, and I'm here to confess.
Here’s what makes this the “typical good tweet”
- Popular and relevant hashtags are used: People follow hashtags which means they may not follow you personally but if you have a hashtag in there, you and your tweet, are now on their radar.
- Hashtags are used in moderation: Tweets with more than two hashtags get 32% LESS engagement. I used 3 but the third hardly counts because…
- Uses a Hashtag that is part of a chat: I'm participating in a live twitter chat with this 3rd hashtag, meaning other people are actively watching for updates and there is an expectation that they will be actively responding or “chatting”.
- It’s timely: There happened to be an large entrepreneur event in my state going on that day… even though I'm not physically present, my hashtags allow me to crash the party.
- It has a picture: Tweets with images average 2X the engagement of Tweets without images.
- Bonus — it uses Hashtags & Links together: Because I have included a picture, Twitter links that with my post which is great. Tweets with hashtags AND links outperform Tweets with just one or another.
- Clear Call To Action: I shamelessly plant the idea of Retweeting… without actually telling people to RT it. Remember, everyone prefers to do something when it’s their idea not when they are directed to do it.
- Addresses another twitterer: Twitter is all about conversations! So go ahead, call someone out and have one!
Here’s what makes this a “cheat tweet”
You must promise not to overuse this one. Repeat after me: “I will not overuse this type of tweet. I understand that if I do I may break the entire Twitter Universe. I will use the Twitter Rule of Thirds to put myself in check. I will work to balance my posts between: self-promotion, sharing, and genuine conversation. I accept that by upsetting this balance I will tempt Twitter’s wrath.”
Okay.. This is what I did. I went on my favorite search engine and looked up “most popular twitter accounts startup quotes”… opened up the first three links… decided to look through the account with the most followers… looked for quotes by people who are still alive… who have a twitter account (It’s Twitter we want to have a real conversation!)… picked a quote that has been retweeted and favorite’d over 100 times… for extra measure something a bit shocking… made my own image to go with the quote and included the twitter photo of the person who made the quote (people like talking to other people, especially ones that they can relate to)… and tada!
A couple dozen followers later… That’s how I won.
Author:
Stacie Andrews, CMTO and President of ProvadoMarketing.com
I work with Founders and CEOs to design state-of-the-art go to market solutions. My unique blend of business innovation methodologies, marketing and technology expertise is highly valued by companies to accelerate their growth.
* This article was inspired by my work with the Wasabi Ventures Academy whose focus is on Early Stage Startups. The opinions here are my own and do not necessarily reflect those of Wasabi Ventures.
