Want to Start with Twitter? Here are 36 Top Tips
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I like Twitter. I know some people hate it and think it is a waste of time. Others are always foretelling the death of the site. But for me there are plenty of reasons to start with Twitter if you haven’t already or to overhaul your profile if you’ve never given it serious attention.
So if you fancy a challenge and want to try and master the tweet, here are some top tips from around the internet to help you do just that.
Table of Contents
Understanding Twitter
Twitter may not have the heavy hitter numbers of Facebook or the ‘cool with the kids’ badge of Instagram or Snapchat. It may not be the place to pour out your heart or to have in-depth conversations with people. But it is a very easy to use social media site compared with the others and there’s always something going on.
Figures from the 2021 192 million active daily users. That’s an increase of 27% on the previous year. The most followed accounts include former US President Barack Obama (110.2M) and Katy Perry (108.3M).
Some 28.6% of the platforms’ users are in the US. Approximately six of every 10 (63 percent) Twitter users worldwide are between 35 and 65 years old. 66 percent of Twitter users worldwide are male compared to just 34 percent females, which puts the ratio of males to females at two to one.
The average time spent on Twitter clocks in at 3.39 minutes per session which makes sense because Twitter is about short and to the point content. There are no long-form reads here.
Learning Twitter basics
So there are a few reasons why it is worth adding Twitter to your social media promotion circle for your blog or business. Next up, let’s take a look at some of the basic terms used on the site so when you start with Twitter, you instantly feel at home.
Tweet
Even my mum knows what a tweet is though she’s a bit uncertain what all this hashtag business is about. The tweet is the core elements of Twitter, a message that contains up to 140 characters of text and can contain graphics, photos, videos and other media. All tweets are public unless you set your profile to private (and there’s not really much point to that if you want anyone to see your stuff).
Retweet
On Facebook, you ‘share’ but on Twitter you ‘retweet’ and often people will put the initials RT before it to show that this isn’t their original content. You can also comment onto the tweet if you want to add your own viewpoint or endorsement to what is being said, even tag someone else in the tweet – this is known as a quote tweet. The original user will be notified you have retweeted their content (useful to catch an influencer’s eye).
Feed
Just like the feed on Facebook, Twitter has a main screen where you see all the tweets of the people that you follow. This can be a constantly changing place depending on how many people you follow – the average user tweets 22 times a day so if you follow 500 people, that’s 11,000 tweets on your smart feed each day. Busy.
Handle or username
Your handle or your username is the thing you give yourself when you sign up for Twitter (more on that later) and is shown with an ‘@’ at the beginning. When you use this @username, the person will be notified and can respond to you. If you are replying to someone, use their username at the beginning to make it into a reply.
Mention
Mention is when you tag someone by their handle or account name and they get a notification that you have done this. Normally this is done during or at the end of the tweet rather than at the beginning where it is seen as a reply.
Direct message (DM)
The direct message is Twitter’s version of an instant message on Facebook and is directly between you and the sender. You can only receive them from people who you follow. Sadly, there’s a big trend to sending automated messages via DM to anyone who follows you so personally, I barely skim the content and rarely use it.
Hashtag
Twitter is the place that hashtags became famous and are still the core element to a tweet. Current recommendations say that 1-2 hashtags per tweet are the ideal number, aiming to signpost what your content is about or associate it with a particular topic.
Setting up an account
To actually start getting involved with all of this, you need to start with Twitter by creating an account. The basics of it are very simple:
- Pop over to Twitter.com on phone, tablet or computer and hit the ‘sign up’ button if you have never used the site before
- You will need to put in your first and last name, phone or email address and choose a password that you can remember
- At this stage, you can start tailoring your interests with their Tailored Suggestions page so if you are using it for your business or blog, then you might want to start looking for topics relating to what you do
- There’s an option at this point to hide your email or phone number to stop people searching for it – that’s up to you
- Hit that sign up button
Once you have done this, a verification text will be sent if you used a phone number as a sign-up method. You need to finish the verification process to complete your account set up. There’s no verification for email addresses. If you do use your phone for the log on info, the site will ask for an email address later or a phone number if you used an email address.
Last job is to choose a username up to 15 characters long. Try to go for something that matches up with your other social media profiles. For me, I couldn’t get @bloggingblog so I went with @bloggingangela instead. You can change this so if you alter your blog or business name, your username can go with you.
You now have a Twitter account!
Your profile
One of the important things to do when you have set up your account is to complete your bio. Again space is limited so it’s important to get the most essential elements in it to draw the right people to your account. According to Neil Patel, there are seven essential elements of a Twitter bio:
- Accuracy – be realistic otherwise you might seem like a fake account
- Exciting – generate a bit of interest or curiosity
- Targeted – you attract people who share your interests and will want to read your tweets
- Self-promotion – there’s nothing wrong with a little self-promotion without boasting, just add a little snippet to show who you are and why you know your stuff – blogger, entrepreneur, marketer, even mum or dad will do
- Realistic – make sure you read like a real person (there are 20 million fake profiles on Twitter)
- Intriguing – make people want to click follow or look at your tweets
- Hashtags – use hashtags on important words to help associate you with your business or interest o #blogger or #contentwriter would be for me
Finding people to follow
One big difference between Twitter and Facebook is that there’s no need for people to return the favour when you follow them, although many do. This means you can follow random people, celebrities, companies and anyone you find interesting – that’s actually the point of the site.
Once you have set up your account, you will get some help from Twitter to start finding people to follow. You can import contacts from Gmail or Outlook to find anyone on your contact list on the site or you can follow the recommendations that Twitter offers you based on the interests you said. But you don’t have to if you don’t want to.
Twitter will also keep offering you suggestions for people to follow. There’s a little box in the top right hand side that will have three suggestions in it and you can tap ‘see all’ to see a much bigger list. There is a limit to how many people you can follow in one day but it is quite a big figure and I’ve never reached it.
But how do you pick people to follow? Here are a few suggestions:
- Search for people you know
- Search for people you like such as celebrities or influencers in your industry
- Search for brands you like or want to work with
- Search for hashtags relating to your industry – so for me, this could be things like #blogging or #blogger or #contentwriter for my day job
- Search for words without the hashtag to see if you get any different results
- Go into the accounts of people you have followed and see who follows them – if any of them look like the right kind of people for your account then follow them too
The more people you follow, the more content will appear on your feed. But also, the smarter the suggestions that you will get from Twitter about who to follow. Plus people will begin to find you and follow you – if you want, you can follow them back.
Tweeting when you start with Twitter
The whole point of being on Twitter is to tweet but what can go into a tweet? There is a lot of different variations and much discussion on what makes the perfect tweet. But let’s just look at the basics for now. Here are a few tips for organising your tweeting efforts:
- Each tweet is 140 characters long
- If you include a photo, video or a GIF, the character count will decades by 24 characters – you can add up to four pictures per tweet
- If you include a link to a website of any type, this will decrease the character count by 23
- Use one or two hashtags in each tweet to connect it with other tweets on the same topic
Using Twitter
The fast-paced nature of Twitter can make it hard to keep track of everything and this is sometimes why people don’t like the site. But there are various tactics to help with this and make sure you don’t miss anything important.
Don’t try and read everything
Don’t spend hours trying to read every tweet on your feed – you will never manage. Instead, skin through the interesting stuff and if you want to know what someone in particular has to say, go to their profile and look at their feed or click ‘tweets’ under their username to see their latest tweets.
Use Twitter lists
You can add people to Twitter lists to see a selection of tweets from only those people. On your menu, go to ‘lists’ and down the left side you can create a list. Then search for people and when you see the follow button, click the three dots to the side. In the drop-down menu, you see the option to add them to lists – then when you click on your list, you will see what person’s tweets.
You can also use IFTTT to automatically add people to a list based around a specific hashtag.
Use your notification to manage reactions
Your notifications section is where anyone who mentions you, replies to you, retweets your tweets or other reactions are stored and it is an easy place to respond to these. Maybe someone has mentioned you in a new post you might like or has liked one of your posts and retweeted it – you can easily thank them by seeing it in the notifications section.
Use a scheduling tool to help spread your tweets
One of the reasons I like Twitter is that you don’t have to be as conscious about posting too much in the way you do with other sites. But this also means you might want to send a lot of content – that’s where social media scheduling tools come in. In the past, I use CoSchedule as my main scheduler and also Buffer for curated content plus I’ve also used SmarterQueue. There are others too that allow you to fill up your tweet queue and then send them at specific times throughout the day.
Create optimised graphics
Tweets can include graphics, photos and even GIFS and often get better responses when you use these. Canva has a whole page filled with resources for making Twitter graphics to help and you can also use their resizing feature to change the dimensions from things you make for other platforms. So an Instagram quote could easily become a Twitter one too!
Getting the most from Twitter
One of the best tips when you start with Twitter is to think about it as a way to get in touch with people and to make friends. But as Chris Brogan said:
Don’t tweet all about you. Tweet all about them
Chris Brogan
As much as 80% of our content can be about ourselves and while you want to personalise your content, you also want to engage your followers and create conversation. Asking questions or opinions are great ways of doing this and letting people know how content might help them or be interesting can shift the focus from yourself to your followers.
Do you have a Twitter profile? If so do you like using the platform? Any more top tips would be welcome!
