This is a guest post by Adam Smith from SocialPuma about important things you need to look at while creating your twitter account for getting maximum exposure and success with twitter marketing.
Twitter is a great medium for directing traffic to your site, as you’ll have undoubtedly heard, but (yes, there is a but) people generally want to follow great tweeple, and if you are not the best you can be; they won’t consider following you at all.
Everyone needs a great twitter account, even tweepers like @mashable, in fact that’s what makes them so popular. Even if your Twitter account isn’t half bad, these tips will help you get from good to great.
So what are the makings of a great twitter account?
- Profile – your name and your bio basically.
- Design – text color, background image etc.
- Amount of Status Updates – If you are following 1000 tweeples and you only have 5 status updates they aren’t going to follow back.
- Follower to Following Ratio – this should be around the 100% – 90% marks (Following up to 10% more than are following back.)
- @Mentions and #Hashtags – the more the better.
- Twitter Feeds – everyone needs a good twitter feed.
So that’s your 6 steps to a great Twitter! Let’s get started…
Profile
In the profile tab of the settings page there are 3 key areas that will either make or break your twitter’s success.
Name: Is this your company account or your personal account? Either way you really should use your real name.
Location: You need to make reference to where you actually live, but if you want to make your twitter less formal, I suggest putting something like ‘at my desk, reading some great tweets (UK)‘ in the new twitter you have more space to display your location.
Bio: 160 chars to tell us what you do. Don’t put ‘Graphics Design, IT Specialist, Dog Walker, Occasional Smoker, Basketball Playing American‘ like quite a lot of people have started to do, tell the tweeples viewing your profile what you do. You have to tell them what you can do for them. Eg. ‘I am a forward-thinking web designer who can make you great websites for a low price!‘ is much better.
Design
To put it simply: people like to see something pretty. So that’s what we’ll give them. remember to get something related to what you do.
Here’s a list of great Twitter Designs and Photographs/Graphics…
- TwitterBackgrounds.com – Free twitter automatic design.
- TwitterGallery.com – Another Twitter design site.
- SXC.hu – Photography site mainly, but the photographs are great for adding to your twitter background.
Amount of Status Updates
Take about 20% of the amount of people who follow you and if you have more status updates than that, then your fine. If you don’t I’d suggest replying to tweeples tweets and trying to build some twitter friends (not just followers.) But whatever you do, Do Not try to tweet meaningless and rubbish tweets to try and get a higher amount of status updates.
Follower to Following Ratio
The best you can be is anywhere between 90% followers -100% followers that you are following, but in fact anywhere between 75% – 125% is fine. So as a ratio that’s: 0.75 : 1.25 . You can use this tool: TTF Ratio to find out if your own (or another users) ratio.
@Mentions and #Hashtags
@Mentions especially are a very good medium of building followers, friends and contacts on Twitter, when someone posts a tweet try to reply to them with a witty comment, advice etc. This will help a lot if the person your replying to is not yet following you. #Hashtags are good too to attract people to follow you using the twitter search feature or the area trends.
Twitter Feeds
Using a feed may seem like automation to some people, but even if it is, it’s a very twitter-friendly type of automation. Head over to TwitterFeed.com and set up an account, then you can grab blog feeds and post them through twitter feed into your twitter account. If you want to be clever about it and put a Google Alerts RSS into a Feed Burner setup which twitter feed can use to post to your twitter account.
Hope you found these tips helpful! Do let me know if you think something you find more useful to think of while setting up the twitter account for success. The comment form is below 🙂
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Do not become a Twitter spammer and send out nothing but links to your website and or business. Although you may have some short term results from this type of Twitter strategy, eventually people will know you as a spammer and stop listening to you or even worse tweeting out that YOU and your company are spammers. Make sure that 90% of your tweets are valuable and 10% are selling something or have links to your website
Thanks for this. I have been avoiding twitter like the black plague. But it seems like I can no longer not jump on the band wagon.
Good post, a good step in setting up your Twitter account for a successful marketing campaign is filling in the biographical information box. This description lets everyone know what you’ll potentially be tweeting about and it makes it easy for people with the same interests as you to search and find your profile.
Very informative information. Profile and design are the two basic entities that are very helpful to increase your fans on twitter.
I agree the best way to get the most out of your twitter account is to fill out all details and provide as much information as possible. This will give others as much about you as possible to see if they want to follow you.
Info and feedback is the greatest way to hook up with your followers. Your tips are brilliant.
Thanks.