Twitter: The Blackmarket for Content

By April 11, 2018July 14th, 2019
Twitter

Twitter.. What is it good for? 

I bet that you, like us, have become disenchanted with Twitter. The lack of updates, the user interface, the user experience could all use an update in our opinion. But maybe we shouldn’t tell Twitter to be more like it’s kindergarten friend Instagram and we should instead use Twitter for what it is great at, creating content. Twitter is like the blackmarket for content. Fast, cheap and you should probably verify it before you use it.

There are some really fantastic ways to use Twitter to mine content fast.

Twitter is a great listening tool. People come to Twitter to find out what’s happening right now. Conducting specific searches daily in Twitter is a great way to find new content. Looking to find influencers, media groups, or anyone publishing content? They’re all on Twitter promoting their content or their brand.

Searching

The ability to mine Twitter based on a keyword, key phrase or hashtag and then populate a database with this content, allows us to generate content banks in about half the time it used to take. Once you have mined the keyword you are looking for, you can then sort based on engagement and look at what content is performing across Twitter. The next job is up to a human. Rewriting or tweaking the content so that it is relative to the business it is coming from and targeted at their ideal client, then scheduling and posting.

18 minutes

The average lifespan of a Tweet is 18 minutes. I’ll let that sink in. 18 minutes. 18 minutes to engage with your audience, to promote yourself and your brand, to capture attention. All of that time and effort for a tweet that lasts about 18 minutes before it won’t be seen again. And then you have to repeat the process, several times a day. With businesses telling us that social media marketing is a time consuming business, wouldn’t it be better to streamline the process by recycling content?
Engagement rates on Twitter are around 10-15%. If a tweet is seen 100 times, there will be around 10-15 “actions”, whether a like, retweet or click on a link. Therefore increasing impressions of content is key when looking for engagements. 
Because twitter is such a fast flowing social media platform, recycling content isn’t spam, (100 tweets on a loop means same tweet reappears once every 10 days, for about 20 mins) as the likelihood of a follower seeing the same tweet is low. It’s an effective way to drive impression and engagement rates, and we review the content every month.
Tweeting 10 times a day or more
Capture all the content you have produced in the past month on Twitter for your business in a spreadsheet. Plump up that content so you have a database of 60-100 tweets. Then using your favourite scheduling tool, we like Hootsuite for this purpose, schedule those tweets to run on a loop for the next month. Hootsuite only allows you to upload 300 messages at a time, so this will only last for number of tweets per day x number of tweets. 

More tweets and posts means more reach, and more reach certainly means an increase in followers.

 

twitter
Hashtags

Twitter didn’t invent the hashtag (#), but it certainly popularised it with the masses. Once more commonly referred to as the pound sign, online use of the hashtag began on IRC (Internet Relay Chat) in the late 1990s, where it was used to categorise items into groups. In August 2007, designer Chris Messina asked his followers how they felt about using the pound sign to group conversations on the micro-blogging platform, and thus became the first person to use the hashtag on Twitter. The hashtag was eventually adopted by Instagram, Facebook, Google+, Pinterest and seemingly every other major digital platform. Today, hashtags are everywhere and an important part of every modern marketing strategy.

After looking at the mining data, it’s important to have one or two hashtags in a post, but anymore than two and your post begins to look spammy. The likelihood that someone will engage with or click on your post decreases with more than two hashtags.

Twitter Cards
Twitter Cards

About Twitter Cards. With Twitter Cards, you can attach rich photos, videos and media experiences to Tweets, helping to drive traffic to your website. Simply add a few lines of markup to your webpage, and users who Tweet links to your content will have a “Card” added to the Tweet that’s visible to their followers. To set up Twitter cards you have to link a Visa to your Twitter advertising account. However, creating Twitter cards is free and they look awesome. Warfare plugins created this great image.

Twitter Chat

Twitter Chat
Businesses looking to grow their following in a specific industry should get involved in Twitter chats. A Twitter chat is where a group of Twitter users meet at a pre-determined time to discuss a certain topic, using a designated hashtag (#) for each tweet contributed. A host or moderator will pose questions (designated with Q1, Q2…) to prompt responses from participants (using A1, A2…) and encourage interaction among the group. Chats typically last an hour.

Imagine a business networking event—but without a dress code and with a keyboard instead of a bar. The same social customs apply—courtesy and respect—and it’s a great way to meet new people with similar interests. Twitter chats are great ways to make online friends, learn something new, and learn some important tactics for responding to people in real time using Twitter. 

The Twitter chat friends we made three years ago are still our biggest online content supporters (in Twitter). 

Tag Hunter

Twitter
Tag Hunter is the coolest open and free feature we have found in a long time. Created by the web scientist, Phil Waddell for anyone to use. Type a #Tag into the search box and hit submit, you’ll get the top 10 #Tags most commonly used. This is still being developed, but for now, it works and it’s awesome. Thanks Phil, we love TagHunter. 

If content is King, Twitter will make you look like a hero. 

Carmella

Author Carmella

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