Twitter Strategy: 4 Tweets You Should Consider Beside Article Links

April 1, 2014 by Daniel Sharkov|

The point of my previous post about improving your Twitter strategywas to help you curate content from your favorite blogs easier and automate the process of sharing your own material.

As I see it, curated content and links to your own articles should be the ground layer of your Twitter strategy. While the previous post hopefully helped you simplify the whole process, it didn’t really give you new content ideas.

And today I would like to this a step further, by sharing
some of the ways to diversify your tweets.

On top of those two basic types of content
it might be worth coming up with other tweets to keep your audience engaged.

So what you will read in the next paragraphs are five examples of tweets you should consider adopting in order to make it a little more interesting for your followers to actually follow you.

Let’s get started!

1. The “Did You Know” Tweet

You might say that every tweet that provides interesting and useful information answers the “did you know?” question.

Then again to get those helpful bits and pieces you have to click a link and take a few minutes to read a lengthy article.

As opposed to doing that, the tweet I’m referring to provides the information
without your followers having to take any further action.

For those of you who haven’t come across one of my DID YOU KNOW tweets here is an example:

As the above image demonstrates, most of my “did you know” content revolves around useful WordPress plugins or different tools that help my productivity in terms of blogging and social media.

The same approach could be applied for pretty much every niche you can think of.

If you can’t come up with anything, you can use your articles as a starting point and simply make a list of the most useful resources, tips, tricks and insights you have provided. What’s left is to sift out the best and turn it into tweets (also don’t forget to create a list so that you can use those tweets multiple times over time) .

NOTE:
As you might now Twitter imagesare a great way to bring more interaction to your Twitter content, so consider attaching one to your tweets when suitable (like I have done in the above example) .

2. Motivational Content Creates a Lot of Buzz

Motivational content mainly takes the form of quotes or inspirational sentences.

While I’ve heard some criticism towards those types of tweets, my analysis concludes one thing -
inspirational material receives above-average interaction in terms of both comments, favorites and retweets.

By simply tweeting out the quote as a text tweet (here is a Top 100 Inspirational Quoteslist to get you started)

And…

By uploading an image for the quote and using the 140 characters left to add your own thoughts:

The best place to start your motivational quotes image search is Pinterest. Simply do a search with keywords like “motivational”, “inspirational”, “quotes” and everything related. Then you can head to Google Plus and again use the search box with the same terms.

Ten minutes into it you are sure to come across a lot of good material!

And what about frequency?

As I said earlier quotes can help you get exposure, but
they are effective as long as you don’t overuse them. My current Twitter strategy includes one quote per day (excluding Sundays) and I certainly wouldn’t encourage you to go higher than that.

Remember the point we started with
– your own posts and curated articles are the focal point. All else is a topping that aims to make your profile more interesting.

3. Links to Content Shared on Google Plus

Heard of the term cross-promotion?

As you probably guessed we are talking about sharing content from one social network to another.

The idea?

To bring people who follow us on one social network to another and also to generate more exposure for the post we are cross-promoting.

What this tip implies however is that you are active on Google Plus. If you are not, get started right away, as Google Plus is an awesome platformfor bloggers and marketers and a great place to build relationships.

So what are the steps to follow?

Share a post on Google Plus Click on the date of the post to open it separately Use the bit.ly extensionto shorten the URL automatically Open up Twitter and create a new tweet with the shortened URL and the headline of the post Possibly use the image from the original Google Plus post if bigger than
506×253 pixels (any smaller and you won’t get an image preview) Consider adding a prefix to the tweet to let visitors know they will be forwarded to Google Plus. I use “From G+: “Insert Headline” bit.ly link” format.

NOTE:
You can do the same cross-promotion for Facebook posts.
I highly recommend Google Plus over the former though , unless you are willing to spend a lot of money on Facebook ads due to the declining reach of stories shared.

4. Don’t Forget About Funny and Interesting

Came across a really funny comic, related to your niche… but you believe your brand is a little too serious for that?

Well I personally believe breaking the ice every now and then and looking from the funny side of things is a good strategy.

For one it shows you are not an evil tweeting robot, but a normal human being, exactly like your followers.
All of this makes you more approachable , which unless you already have an audience of millions, isn’t a bad thing.

…Also did I mention those tweets almost always beat your ordinary headline-and-a-link kind of shares?

As an example, here is one of my latest tweets that can be labeled as “funny”:

An “interesting tweet” on the other hand is a bit more serious. It can be pretty much
anything graphical that is related to your niche and provides interesting data or information in a concise way.

A good example is the content marketing periodic table, which I shared sometime ago:

NOTE:
Don’t ever forget to save such images in a folder on your hard disk for future re-sharing, as most stay relevant years after they’ve been released.

Final Words

It should really go without saying that actual interaction should be the final element to your Twitter strategy. And when connecting, don’t simply thank people for tweeting your content.

Instead try to create a discussion. Ask a relevant question or simply how they are doing!

It doesn’t have to be hard.

Now I would like to hear your thoughts!

What are your ways to diversify your Twitter stream? Have you tried any of the tactics described in the post?

As always all comments are much appreciated. Also please consider sharing the post if you found it helpful!
Daniel

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