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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This is really useful info.I totally agree with your views and insight especially about maintaining following n followers ratio and status updates.I was not aware about TTF ratio tool, Thanx for sharing.
Filling the bio field and adding your own photo are the two undoubtedly most important things when it comes to good Twitter profiles. I have a rule to not follow anyone who is using Twitter’s stock avatar. It is just unprofessional and I wouldn’t find such person’s words serious enough. Just my two cents.
I found the last tip is extremely helpful. It keeps you away from installing additional plug-in like WordTwit anymore. Great tips 🙂
great tips, i really need a hell lot Twitter traffic these days….
a timely post for me
Design and Bio matters a lot. Because first impression is the last impress and the design will show that you are a professional and your bio will tell that about your passion and professionalism.
Hi Adam
I reckon you covered it all really well and thanks. When I was setting up my twitter account I had an experienced marketer help me and he made sure to cover the things you have mentioned here.
Then as I got to know some of the blogging community I’ve learnt more of the Twitter etiquette. I haven’t chased big number of followers; rather built my numbers slowly so I could interact with my followers and it’s working well.
Patricia Perth Australia
extremely helpful !!!! thank you , i’m not that good with twitter , so reading that made me consider lot of stuff and be aware of new things !!!! thank You
I seem to forget about the hash tags. Do they really help that much? I never really had very good luck with twitter for some reason. I’ll have to check my account and check for some of these tips and suggestions. I think I have most of them except for the hash tag thing, but it never hurts to double check. Thanks for reminding me not to forget about twitter.
Great points here. These are all important points to consider. In my twitter accounts, I make it a point to regularly share information that my followers can learn from as well as I try to interact with them, I also retweet posts worthy of retweeting.
Hey! Well, I just don’t get tip #4… why would you want to be following more people than follow you back, and why is that a good thing? The most successful twitter accounts all follow far less than are following them. I think if you want to succeed on twitter focus on keeping MORE followers than you follow.