How to turn your Tweets into value.

Now that there are over 300 million users of Twitter, it’s appropriate to recognize this very established social media channel for what it has become.

For there’s little doubt that this tool can deliver benefits to just about any organization or brand including:

• | Driving traffic to your site or blog
• | Fostering relationships with prospects + customers
• | Enhancing thought leadership in your domain of expertise
• | Improving the perception of your brand

Time to turn tweets into value?

If it’s not obvious, great content and good ideas get spread. And if you can get your followers to participate in sharing, it only amplifies your reach and influence. What’s more, if you’re not spreading the valuable content to your target customers, how are they ever going to find you or consider you for your product or service?

Structure your approach.

So, let’s take a look at how you should be using this have-to-have tool for maximum efficiency at distributing content to build brand value.

With help from Brett Virmalo of TippingPoint Labs, the strategy of using the 4-1-1 method of tweeting is a great place to start. It’s simple and easy to remember. And it uses this structured approach:

1. | Share 4 posts from other influencers that are important to your target audience
2. | Share 1 original content post about your business that helps tell your story
3. | Share 1 “sales” post asking for something with a link back to your site

The chart below illustrates by example.

Invest for the long term.

As with all great strategies, there’s a cost. And to realize the most value from this approach, you need to implement this strategy every day.

That’s right. No one ever succeeded by avoiding the mundane or foregoing the heavy-lifting to achieve their goals. Discounting the process or neglecting the investment in daily activity will ensure mediocre results.

So embrace the requirement to spend at least 30-45 mins a day for your Twitter participation. You can also gain some efficiencies by scheduling your tweets for timely broadcast with great tools like Hootsuite, TweetDeck and many more.

Attract. Don’t repel.

Beyond the nuts and bolts of tool management, having both thoughtful content to distribute and distributing content thoughtfully are essential considerations.

Therefore, it’s important to always remember, that you don’t want your content to drive people away. Avoid a continual stream of chest-pounding and trying too hard to promote yourself. The goal is to attract an audience. So mix up your tweets and feed your audience related content that helps them address their challenge or need.

When you integrate a hashtag | # into every tweet, it makes it easier for people to find your content or topic when they do a search on Twitter. Mix up the position of your hashtagged words to test if they’re more effective at the end of embedded right in the middle of your tweet.

Timing is everything.

Hubspot social media scientist Dan Zarrella has conducted studies about tweet timing and determined that tweets later in the day and later in the week are the most re-tweetable. So consider sharing your best content around these times for maximum reach.

Sysomos recently analyzed 20 million tweets and uncovered that a vast majority of people don’t tweet every day and that tweeting activity is busier during the week than it is on weekends. So it makes sense to space your tweets with less concentration. That way, more people see them and you can have more influence and achieve more clicks.

Flooding your followers with a bunch of tweets at once runs the risk of alienating many. Always remember that a steady tweet stream is a good thing. But don’t feel like you must schedule every tweet you send in a concentrated batch.

Focus on the bottom line.

Using Twitter effectively and efficiently is now a requirement for just about any business to attract new customers and sustain relationships with existing ones. So why not experiment with some of these tips to see if you can turn your effort into more rewarding results.

How are you using Twitter effectively?

Are you finding success with Twitter to build relationships and your brand? What’s working? Or not?
Shout out and let’s hear from you.