9 Top Tips for Happy Tweeting

Twitter has emerged as an established integral marketing tool in the social media toolbox that can extend both the reach of your brand’s message and authenticity of your reputation.

1. Schedule Your Tweets

Programs such as Hootesuite, Tweet Deck and Revinate’s Twitter integration allow you to schedule your tweets in advance which not only allows you to strategically plan your content but also saves you time and hassle.

2. Utilise #hashtag Searches

These programs (as well as Twitter itself) also allow you to search and save hashtags from both your computer and mobile. As a hospitality professional, you may want to do a hashtag search when attending conference or event (so your tweets are tracked as part of a conversation) or include them in your hotel’s tweets when speaking about a particular topic, location or interest.

3. Try Out Advanced Search

Twitter’s search function can further assist you with identifying users and content that may be relevant to your venue to engage with. The search feature allows you to filter results by specific words, accounts or locations, which may prove useful if you are looking to engage with similar users that follow, for example, your local destination management company (DMC) or convention visitor’s bureau.

4. Limit Your Tweet’s Length

To ensure that you’re content is more shareable, limit your tweet’s length to 100-120 characters. Tweets are not easily re-tweetable when they have been maxed out in length. By limiting the number of characters you use, you allow your followers to share the content easily, add a comment to your message and ultimately give it the best chance at maximising its reach.

5. Love the URL Shortener

It’s imperative that you utilise a URL shortener when creating your tweets to ensure you maximise the limited Twitter message real estate. Bitly.com provides some handy click data information on each of your tweets, which can help you identify what content draws the most engagement.

6. Maintain a Balance

While it’s important to engage in real-time on Twitter, inundating your followers with an endless brigade of consecutive tweets is a sure-fire way to diminish your influence. By scheduling some tweets in advance and incorporating some public replies into the mix, you will maintain a conversation balance that is compelling without annoying your network.

7. Mix Up Your Content

The importance of balance applies not only to the frequency of your posts but the content of them. While there’s no finite formula that will yield you optimal engagement levels, visual posts – whether that means sharing photos or video – typically receive higher levels of shares.

8. Use appropriate Punctuation and Formatting

One of the biggest misperceptions about tweeting is that audiences do not care about style or formatting. Social media researcher, Dan Zarella, reports that retweets concistently contain correct punctuation. It has been found that the most retweeted posts most often comply with proper formatting. That is, each tweet should begin with a capital letter, utilise proper grammar and avoid any semblance of text-like abbreviations.

9. Optimise Your Tweets

Reports show that real-time engagement will have a maximum reach during the following times and days:

• Tweets sent on Saturdays and Sundays see a 17% higher engagement level compared to weekdays.

• Wednesdays and Thursdays are the days with the lowest rate of engagement.

• Tweets that are published between 8am and 7pm in your time zone see a 30% increase in engagement throughout the week.

#SocialMedia #Twitter