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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i still dont use twitter efficiently , the reason i dont understand those mentions and hashtags properly , and not many sites tell the use of it ….
This post helps …
I think the Twitter background is not important anymore, Twitter has made a big revamp in its interface and they has removed the background feature today.
Other tips are very useful.
You have really explained the anatomy of the twitter account.I think the most important factor is profile and design.Good profile attracts more people and number of followers increases.
I am just getting started with twitter. I didn’t realize how important a good twitter background is. I was just going to use the default one. Now I can get to work designing a new one.
“@Mentions and #Hashtags – the more the better.”
I am sorry but I beg to differ. Replying to loads of tweets of the people you follow get very old very soon, it’s like jumping in a forum and starting replying to every single thread. It’s better to segment a bit and be a bit more picky, otherwise it’ll be clear that your intentions are just related to numbers and it will have the opposite effects.
And hashtags, I suggest to limit them. They should be used on important tweets to help people search for relevant information, and 1-2 max at the same time. I see tweets with 3-4 hashtags at once and I feel like it really poisons the realtime search with information sometimes not even pertinent.
I think, “Amount of Status Updates” and “Twitter Feeds” are the most important of all six points noted. The more you tweet, the more you get fan following. And as you’ll be tweeting a lot, the quality of your tweets should be good. Even if you tweet 20-30 tweets a day with quality content and get it re-tweeted by someone else, your followers increases by the quality.
A profile picture can really be anything, but there should be something there in place of the default image. The profile picture (or avatar) can a candid picture of you to a favorite cartoon character to a corporate logo. Tread gently when using copyrighted images, but express yourself. Tastefully, of course.
Before you set up an account understand what you’re getting yourself into. Just because everyone is tweeting and chirping, it doesn’t mean that Twitter is for you, so its best to read the what, why and how to get a better feel for what you’re signing up for. Be sure to watch the Twitter video.
So have we to limit the amount of status updates since we may sync each blog post to twitter? thabnks for your info
For me Twitter has always been a mystery. I am sure your tips will help me unravel this mystery. I hardly use twitter cos I can barely handle it. I agree with you on your points specially the ratio thing. I am sure the even me when I am looking at someone’s account to follow or not I decide by looking on the Twitter followers and following ratio. And probably providing the right information and a profile picture is also quite important