How do you get your tweets read and acted upon? There is so much content on Twitter, our brains will skim over tweets which include elements we don’t like.
It may be that the words or phrases have an association with sales pitching, or that they register with you as boring or annoying.
These tweets are probably the result of someone’s laziness or lack of thoughtfulness when posting them. So what eight actions do YOU need to avoid?
#Word #WordyWord #ILikeWords
Don’t hashtag every word in your tweet – it’s distracting and, because of that, your message loses its value. And don’t use a list of more than three hashtags at the end of your tweet because it looks like you’re trying too hard.
‘Click here’
It just looks spammy. You need to tell your audience exactly why they want to click on the link. People underestimate the effort it takes to click on a link that takes you away from where you wanted to be – having a leisurely scroll through Twitter.
‘C U L8R’
That’s what your followers will be saying as they click the ‘unfollow’ button after seeing countless tweets written in text-speak. Granted, a 280-character limit makes it easy to resort to shortened words, but don’t be tempted. It won’t take you long to think of a way to rephrase it and there’s no harm in replacing words such as ‘and’ with ‘&’ now and then.
‘Fancy’
When we see a question starting with ‘fancy’ we immediately think, ‘marketing term; they’re trying to sell me something’
“Fancy a job in marketing?”
“Fancy doing a course in cookery?”
We can’t scroll down our timelines for long before we see this phrase. Don’t do it! It’s a cop out! If you’ve ever used this phrase in a tweet, you’ve got to admit you were being lazy, weren’t you? You didn’t really think about how you could have phrased it better.
Instead, think about why your audience might ‘fancy’ whatever it is you’re suggesting. If you think your followers might like a job in marketing, tell them why they would! If you’re advertising a job in marketing then tweet about the aspects of it that you think would appeal to your audience.
‘The best’
Who says your product is the best? We’ve seen ten other businesses telling us their product is the best too. We’d like to see some evidence, please. And we mean evidence from your customers.
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Is it necessary to shout that at your audience? Writing in all caps won’t get their attention. If you want to get people’s attention, be clever about it. You might want to think about your audience and words they might use to show passion and excitement.
Misspelled words
You’ve only got a maximum of 280 characters to check! Ok, typos happen (as unforgivable as they are), but there are a few things you can do that will make sure typos are only a ‘once in a blue moon’ occurrence.
A lot of social media management tools have now introduced a ‘confirmation’ feature. For example, on TweetDeck you can add a step before the tweet is sent which prompts you to check your tweet again. On Buffer you can set permissions so your posts are checked and approved by someone else before they are posted. And of course there is our favourite, Grammarly.
‘Don’t miss out’
Your audience will respond differently to this type of tweet. It will have the desired effect on some and they will feel a sense of urgency to purchase the product or service. However, others will decide the value of the offer for themselves.
The key element of all social media is understanding your audience. If you consider them before yourself you are much more likely to get success. And that probably means avoiding the 8 things above!
If you’d like your tweets to not only sing, but to achieve your objectives, then find out more about our Twitter training.