The Complete Guide to Mastering Twitter Marketing in 140 Characters or Less: 140 Tips to Make You a Pro!

Looking for 140 Twitter Marketing tips?

For years I didn’t know if Twitter worked. It wasn’t until I started really following blogs that talked about Twitter marketing tips for my clients, that I started to understand how powerful a social media marketing tool it could really be.

Building a following

Twitter marketing is all about building a following (people who follow for an account and read your Tweets), but don’t get tricked into thinking more followers are better. Here are some tricks to improve both the numbers and quality of your followers.

1. Don’t be shy about following people, or adding them to lists. If you like what they share, retweet it to your followers.
2. Avoid begging for retweets, or offering prizes in exchange for promotions. You’ll encourage bots to engage, but that’s about all.
3. If you want to get somebody’s attention, consider tagging them (@thisismyurl) in a tweet.
4. Be kind on Twitter. It’s easy to be offended, or to offend, instead be kind and you’ll see it returned.
5. Be responsive on Twitter, share and like content that you value. Reply to interesting posts.
6. When you’re building your streams, follow a dozen people a day, or add them to lists. It’s a manageable number to engage with.
7. Ask questions on popular (but related) hashtags, and contribute to others to help solve problems.
8. If you see something you like, start a conversation about it! It’s called social media for a reason.
9. Quote, or reference, an industry leader to piggyback on their popularity.
10. Keep your personal chats in Direct Messages, or better yet off Twitter!
11. If you start a tweet with a username (@thisismyurl), it sends it straight to them, add a period (.) first to force it to go public.
12. Use Tweetdeck to track popular hashtags and join in conversations quickly.
13. The perfect follower/ following ratio is a myth, instead, focus on delivering great content and following great accounts.
14. Remember, building followers on Twitter isn’t an end game, it’s the beginning. Understand why you’re trying to grow.
15. Try not to get caught in the numbers game, it’s better to have 100 engaged followers than 10,000 spam bots following you.
16. Building a following takes time. Building an engaged following takes even longer. Don’t give up too soon.
17. Give credit where credit is due, even if it’s a thank you for helping influence your approach, a public tweet is a great way to connect.
18. Ask questions, especially on relevant hashtags to get listed in the search results!
19. Build lists of your local, regional, industry, and trade show contacts.
20. Connect with influencers to maximize your marketing on Twitter. Look for influencers in your market, your geographical region and more.
21. Understand Twitter terminology so you can take advantage of hashtags, and links.
22. Be sure to answer people on Twitter, it’s a conversation tool, not a broadcast medium.
23. Automated Direct Messages are tricky. Plenty of people hate them, so if you’re going to use them, be warned.

Creating a Twitter image

Marketing yourself (or your business) online is about creating a well-branded image. These Twitter marketing tips are all about crafting your brand image on Twitter.

1. Customize your Twitter profile header image to brand your profile page and turn it into a marketing endeavor.
2. Use your Twitter username to sell yourself! I use the same domain name (thisismyurl.com) as my Twitter to build my brand.
3. Define who you are. Take the time to understand who you want people to see when you tweet and create that brand.
4. Use that bio box and page! Take the time to write a short, powerful pitch about yourself for the world.
5. Take the time to write an easy to read bio in your Twitter profile.
6. Include an interesting fact that people can learn about you in your profile.
7. Don’t be shy to show your personality in your profile or posts, people want to know the real you.
8. It’s okay to have multiple Twitter accounts for different aspects of your online image.
9. Make yourself easy to recognize with a memorable, closeup social media profile photo.
10. Include a URL to your website in your Twitter settings to increase your exposure.

Plan your tweet strategy

No amount of Twitter marketing tips would be complete without a section dedicated to helping you plan your tweet strategy, from live tweeting to monthly website planning. Here are the tips to help your strategy take shape.

1. Know what you’re posting about, and create a plan to produce great content regularly.
2. If your tweets aren’t being retweeted or liked, you need to improve what you’re posting to Twitter.
3. It’s okay to share the same content throughout different times, but always remember to gear the tweet for the right city and audience.
4. Take advantage of Google Trends to know what’s popular quickly.
5. Look at your competitors, or another business to learn what they’re doing to build engagement.
6. Are you on Twitter to sell? To make friends? or to promote yourself? Know your purpose.
7. Keep a notebook of Twitter ideas, online or in your pocket to remind you of great promotions and ideas to share.
8. Focus on something you really care about and be passionate about putting a schedule in place.
9. Don’t fall into the automation trap, Twitter (like Facebook) isn’t about collecting more followers than others, it’s about being genuine!
10. Review your strategy regularly! Twitter is always changing and you need to adapt to its new style.
11. If you’re going to be a traveling or unavailable on Twitter, plan some scheduled posts to keep your account fresh.
12. Use the Google Keyword Planner to find out what keywords are the most popular.
13. Explore Twitter regularly and watch what other businesses are doing right.
14. Plan to engage, that’s what Twitter is all about so focus on it in your strategy too!
15. Use Twitter Analytics to understand why other tweets are popular and mimic those patterns for your own benefit!

Schedule your tweets

Don’t get bogged down in writing every day! Scheduling your Twitter is half the batter of being successful on Twitter. Here are some tips for helping you make better use of your Twitter schedule.

1. It’s a great idea to write most of your tweets once a week, but remember to schedule them throughout the day (or week) for maximum exposure.
2. You can tweet the same thing more than once, but mix it up a little to ensure that people don’t feel you’re repeating yourself.
3. Twitter is local, but it’s also global. Don’t be shy about posting in the middle of the night if you’re business is global.
4. A tool like Tweriod can help you know when the best time to tweet is.
5. Find out when the best times to tweet are! Each city and timezone could be different, so use your Twitter Analytics to find the best time.
6. Change your schedule up from time to time, until you find the best time slots to market yourself in!
7. Know when to tweet! You’re more likely to get retweets in the early afternoon than mid-morning.
8. Share the same story 4 to 6 times a day, several hours apart to make sure your story reaches a global market.
9. Use a tool (I use Buffer) to schedule your tweets, that way you can focus on writing great content.
10. Twitter is surprisingly active on the weekend, be sure to share your posts on weekends to get the most return.

Automating your Twitter account

There is, by itself, nothing wrong with automating your Twitter account but remember that unless you’ve marketed your account as an automated robot account, you should take the time to understand and make choices instead of allowing the robot to do it all for you.

1. Use a service such as Buffer to schedule posts automatically for you, it’ll help find the best times to post.
2. Automatically using feeds with twitterfeed.com on your favorite subject or author and retweeting is a great way to have content.
3. A website like IFTTT (If This Then That) can monitor and retweet plenty of sources for you, even piping them into a schedule!
4. You can live tweet an event you’re at by pre-scheduling your presentation on Twitter and having those tweets appear while you’re speaking!
5. Plug your WordPress blog into Twitter to retweet older posts, or update your feed when new content is posted.

Writing a great tweet

Now that you know how to plan and schedule a tweet, here are some fantastic Twitter marketing tips to help you write a great tweet.

1. Keep slang, acronyms, and abbreviations to a minimum. You may know what an Extended BD7 is, but most of us don’t.
2. Keep tweets short. You have 140 characters to work with, but 110 gives people room to retweet.
3. Look at which if your tweets get the most retweets and likes, use that information in influence your next posts.

4. 

   NSFW (Not Safe for Work) content shouldn’t be posted to Twitter unless that’s specifically what you’re known for.

5. Include keywords, as well as hashtags in your tweets for best results.
6. Add value to your reader’s life. Nobody wants to be advertised to, so instead send tweets that improve people’s lives.
7. Sometimes a great tweet needs time, don’t feel the need to tweet everything you think of right away.
8. Replace longer words with shorter symbols (and becomes &), abbreviations, or acronyms when commonly known in your marketplace.
9. Shorter tweets are often the best tweets.
10. Curating, or retweeting other people in your competitive space is a great way to build content on Twitter.
11. Focus on improving content over tricks and getting more followers, good posts will gain real followers.
12. Instead of bolding a word or phrase on Twitter, use a #hashtag to draw significance to it.
13. People love lists, write a list that starts with the top 6 and fill in the rest!
14. Share facts and figures on Twitter in super short, constructive tweets.
15. Never underestimate the value of giving away knowledge on Twitter.
16. Emphasis can’t be used on Twitter, but you can wrap a phrase in asterisk symbols *to let people know it’s the important part*.
17. Tweets without links get more social engagement! So don’t feel you always need to include a link.
18. When your link is too long for Twitter, it’ll get shortened automatically. Instead, consider using a short link generator for your website.
19. Keep a high signal to noise ratio, meaning .. ensure most of what you post is worth reading.
20. Who is your audience? Write every tweet to a specific person, that way you’ll always know your audience.
21. Remember to focus your tweets on a specific group of people. Don’t think of them as a market, think of them as people looking to learn.
22. If you’re live-tweeting an event, a game, or a tv show, remember to include a spoiler warning.
23. Focus on quality tweets, and curating others. Posting your own links too often is just spam.
24. Stay on the subject. If you’re a technology blogger, don’t tweet about the Sunday football game unless you want to lose your audience.
25. Don’t feel you need to use all 140 280 characters in a tweet.
26. Write a tweet that answers a specific person’s question, instead of simply broadcasting to everybody.
27. Be sure to mean what you type! It’s easy to give people the wrong impression on Twitter, avoid being a source of conflict.
28. If you can’t write a great tweet, curate (and credit) somebody else’s great tweet!
29. Focus on your message and share things that interest your community of followers.
30. Twitter isn’t the right medium for public fighting, especially if you’re a brand.

Posting photos to Twitter

Marketing on Twitter with photos is fantastic, these tips should help you make the most of your Twitter photos!

1. Use landscape, or square images when posting to Twitter. A 16:9 perspective is great for photos, and remember to link to larger versions.
2. You don’t need to include a photo in every tweet, but remember to include them sometimes, especially at events, and interesting places.
3. Add a watermark such as a logo or branding to images to ensure people know where it originated!
4. If you don’t have a good photo for your tweet, try some of the free stock images, or ask photographers to use pics on 500px!
5. Include an (appropriate) image in your tweet to maximize engagement! Remember to credit the photographer is needed.
6. Be sure your photo is accessible! Some Twitter photo services won’t post an actual photo, but just a link to it.
7. If you’re posting an image of another person, remember to ask them first, and tag them in the image to gain extra exposure.

Twitter marketing tips: Use the # tag

You can create a hashtag on Twitter by adding the # symbol to any keyword or phrase (without spaces) to boost the potential for a tweet to be found. Hashtags can be located anywhere in a tweet, and are often used to boost the popularity of a tweet.

1. After you draft a tweet, review it for keywords and add a hashtag to popular words or phrases.
2. Remember hashtags become clickable links in tweets and before visibly different to readers, it’s like bolding a word!
3. #dont #over #use #hashtags #in #your #posts. If you’re posting more has tags than content, people will get tired of you.
4. Avoid overusing #hashtags! Pick a two or three per post, and remember to keep them relevant to your tweet.
5. You can use #hashtags to find or join conversations that are relevant to your topic.
6. Include #hashtags about the subject you’re talking about, for instance, #twitter or #twittertips to increase your following.
7. Hashtag research tools such as tagdef.com can help you to define a tweeting strategy by finding popular, and related subjects.
8. Any more than two hashtags per tweet just makes a person (or company) look desperate, don’t be that person.
9. Use the right #hashtags to promote your tweet, and keep it on topic. Nobody wants to feel your post is spam.
10. Remember to include an event #hashtag or tag the event’s username to be curated into the conversation.
11. Structure your tweets, [message] [link] [hashtags] to increase readability.

Retweeting as a Twitter marketing strategy

Retweeting is, as you may have guessed by the name, all about reposting another tweet on your timeline. It’s one of my favorite Twitter marketing tips. Everybody loves having their tweet retweeted, and your audience gets to see fresh new content! It’s a win-win.

1. It’s okay to cut people out of a retweet to make space, especially if they’re not involved in the conversation.
2. If people mention you, retweet it, and thank them for helping to promote you (but ignore bots, they’re a waste of time)
3. Combine retweeting with scheduling to maximize the impact of sharing somebody else’s post.
4. Learn to do more than just curate (retweet) other people’s tweets, add your own comments so people know why you valued it.
5. Take advantage of people’s Twitter Lists to find great content to curate, and retweet with your own unique spin.
6. Retweet others as quoted tweets and add your own social commentary to help your audience know why it matters.

Using Twitter Lists

Twitter lists allow you to sort accounts into streams, it’s a great way to improve Twitter’s usability, promote others, and find great new content! These Twitter marketing tips are all about using lists.

1. Adding people to Lists is one of the best ways to curate their content, without cluttering your followers.
2. People can see the name of your Lists, so be sure you’re adding them to the right ones!
3. When people add you to lists or follow you, take the time to see who they are and follow them back if you’ll benefit too!
4. Use Lists to sort people into the industry, subject, or locations to help make Twitter more manageable for you.
5. Only you can see your private lists, but everybody can see your public lists. Use them to help curate great content!

Tweeting as a company

There are unique challenges to posting to Twitter as a company, but here are some awesome Twitter marketing tips to help you make the most of having your business on Twitter.

1. Nobody wants to be marketed to all the time, use Twitter to interact with your stakeholders;
2. Reply! If somebody makes the effort to mention you in a Tweet, take the time to reply promptly.
3. Have a reliable tweet schedule, and post if you’re closed for any sudden reason.
4. Learn to listen. A lot can be learned about your competitors without saying a word on Twitter, so pay close attention to them!
5. Before you tweet, ask yourself why your business is tweeting it remember, business accounts should be kind.
6. Encourage engagement! Sometimes simply asking people to retweet or share is enough to encourage them.
7. Don’t overthink your Tweet, just focus on making it friendly, social, respectful, and off the cuff.
8. Run contests, or ask people to share your content in return for a prize or discount. Why not tie it to a discount on your online store?
9. Promote yourself! If people are following you as a brand, or a company, they want to know about your business.
10. Adding a location to your posts will help people gain an idea of where you are. If you’re at a business, tag that business!
11. Remember that Twitter remembers if you wouldn’t say it to somebody at a conference, don’t say it on Twitter.

Twitter marketing tips for a person

Social brand and companies aren’t the only people using Twitter! If you’re marketing yourself online, here are some great Twitter marketing tips to help yourself get noticed too.

1. Be sure to share your personality on Twitter, be funny, creative, interesting.
2. Avoid sounding arrogant, instead focus on sounding positive. Help people with their problems, and respond to their questions!
3. Never automate your personal account, there’s a place for Twitter robots but your personal account isn’t one of them.
4. Join in conversations, and share your views but remember Twitter is like a family dinner, you won’t all agree on everything.
5. Be honest and be yourself, if people are following you on Twitter there’s a good chance they already like the real you.
6. Tweet about your audience, not yourself. People aren’t on Twitter to learn about you, they’re there to learn how you can help them.
7. If you interact with every Tweet a person makes, it gets creepy fast. Respect that people get a notification when you love a tweet.

Twitter Marketing Tips Next Steps

There are literally thousands of ways to improve your Twitter performance, these Twitter marketing tips are a sure fire way to get there fast! Do you have any suggestions? Tweet me and let me know!