I still remember my first reaction after seeing Twitter.
“How can someone express in 140 characters?”
You can blame it to my inclination to talk more (actually a lot, being a woman!) that I found it quite absurd that there was a limitation of 140 characters. I do not know how I would have managed if there was a restriction on me to use 140 words throughout the day! However, I was enlightened that ‘Less is actually more’. The impact you can create through 140 characters in your tweet can be better than writing a paragraph. But you should better know that how one make an impact on the audience through Twitter profile. Believe it or not, Twitter drives a chunk of your audience to your website more efficiently than other social platforms.
So what are the ways to drive the traffic from Twitter???
Tweet content- It is important to know how to tweet and make it visible, searchable and interesting. Hashtag seems like a magic wand to increase your visibility manifold. Adding (#)hashtags in your tweet makes you come up in the search results when a viewer is searching for those words which you have marked with hashtags in your tweet. Adding your signature branding hashtags to your business card will make more impact on people.
Catchy Tweets: Remember how many times you have retweeted someone’s tweet just because you fell in love with the one liner statement of the tweet. It is very important to grab the audience’s attention through interesting tweets-quotes, statistics etc.
Tiny URL- Always remember than you have a character limit. So you better be aware to shorten your links to your blog/ website. Bit.Ly or TinyURL can help you to do the same for your links.
Tweet directly: It is a good way to directly tweet the person or company whom you are mentioning in your tweet. Chances are high that they will retweet or click on the link you mentioned in your tweet or follow you on Twitter
Automatic tweets:
Scheduling your tweets- It might be possible that you forget to tweet your updates. After all promoting your blog/website through all the social networking websites is a Herculean task. It will be a better practice to sync your posts from other social media as well as your blog/website to automatically appear as tweet. You can use Tweetdeck to schedule your tweets.
Tweet timing: When the followers are most active? Thanks to analytic services like Followerwonk/ Tweroid, you can actually make it out that in what time during the day, your followers are the most active and can read your tweets. The more you are closer to the analytics estimation, higher are your chances to get traffic from your Twitter profile.
Retweet: When I had started with Twitter, I used to be pretty frustrated with the way my tweet went down the feed even immediately after posting it. I still get frustrated at this fact. But you need to accept it that if no activity is being seen in your tweet for a time period of two hours, you have to assume that no one has actually seen your tweet. And so you need to retweet to again and make it visible to your audience.
Following people: It is wise to follow those people who, you think, will follow you back. A twitter profile with more than 15,000 followers might follow you if you are having a fan following of 25,000 (which is unlikely until and unless you are a famous pop star or movie star!). So, try to follow people whom you expect, will follow you back. But I do not mean to say that stop following people having more followers than you.
Interacting with followers: Just like the way you handle your followers on other social networking websites, you need to engage with your audience on Twitter as well. Retweet the posts of your followers, mark their tweets as favorites, reply/ comment on the tweets, embed the tweets are some of the ways to increase interaction with your followers.
#FF Hashtag: Shortened version of #FollowFriday, this can be quite an interesting way to connect to your followers while suggesting them to follow the Twitter handle of the person you have tagged with #FF.
Geo targeted tweets: Adding your location to your tweet will be relevant to your business as people will easily find you or know about your business while searching your location.
Culturally aware tweets: I was sad to see that how Twitter was misused by some to vent out their expressions (to be specific-racist expressions) against the latest winner of an American beauty pageant. It is very important to be culturally aware about the jargons/ colloquial speech in Twitter because to save your characters; you are bound to use them.
Twitter button: Put Twitter buttons in your blog/ website to let the viewers share your link on Twitter.
Tweet chats: They are a good way to increase your number of contacts. Be specific while joining tweet chats. Join chats which are relevant to your business.
Twitter party: Do you want to promote an event through Twitter? Let’s throw a Twitter party, sending out invitations to your followers with the date, time and venue and most importantly, a very relevant hashtag so that people can immediately relate to your event after looking at the hashtag.