Twitter can be a daunting social media platform to get started on as a brand or business. With around 240 million active users, people are on Twitter for different reasons and looking at different things, it may be confusing for businesses to use these Twitter tips to their advantage.
There are posts all over the internet with Twitter tips, but who better to get advice from than the co-creator of Twitter, Dom Sagolla?
At the AFA National Conference, he explained the secrets to Twitter’s success and how you can get started with Twitter and use it well.
1) As co-creator, Sagolla knows exactly what numbers say. According to him, 10% of the people that follow you are online at any one time, just by chance.
Then, only 10% of the people that read your tweet will click on your link, so inactivity is pretty common on Twitter. “For every action you require of someone, you lose 90% of people, because people don’t really act.”
Don’t feel too bad if your Twitter interactions aren’t going so well, but always strive to engage that remaining 90%.
2) Every social media platform has its own purpose and it is up to you to differentiate between them and determine who your audience is.
Sagolla emphasized that it is more important to get the right kind of followers rather than simply amassing a huge number of them.
That 90% of your inactive followers could very well be people that are not in your target audience at all! It is important to get the right information out to the right people so that your tweets are retweeted or replied to more often.
3) It’s okay to start small, Sagolla says. Start off by following people or businesses that do similar work to get a feel for their best practices.
“To get started, don’t write, just read.” Follow people who you admire on the off chance that they might follow you back!
The growth of your Twitter account does not need to be overnight, and with some vigilance and dedication, it will grow slowly but steadily.
4) Keeping it simple can be the hardest thing to do when you’re partially trying to sell your business and partially trying to interact with other Twitter users in a personable way.
“The best way to tweet is to fit your speaking voice into your writing voice,” Sagolla says, and those 140 characters need to be used cleverly and in good taste. Keeping your tweets short, but simple can really pay off in the end.
5) “If you have to ask me whether you should or not, the answer is no. If you ever have a doubt, the answer is no,” says Sagolla.
Because Twitter is such a public forum, you need to be very cautious with what you are posting and how you interact with your users.
This means that you should keep separate personal and professional Twitter accounts, and if you ever have doubts about posting something, just don’t post it!
