Five ways to get Twitter users to retweet your content

Since Twitter introduced the favourite button, businesses have been plagued by an ever-increasing problem: dead-end content marketing. While the favourite button is intended for users to flag a tweet they like, or to bookmark a link so they can refer back to it later, many are now using it in lieu of the retweet function. And this means your content isn’t being shared.

While favouriting (or liking) something is an excellent way to endorse posts on closed social networks like Facebook, favouriting has the opposite effect on Twitter. Instead of spreading the word, promoting participation and improving exposure (and followers), the favourite button gives users the option to simply flag a post instead of retweeting it. This means content they might have otherwise shared is disappearing into a social media abyss… and that’s not good for business.

The task for businesses is now tougher than ever before. If people aren’t sharing, it doesn’t matter how great your content is. While you can’t force Twitter users to avoid that favourite button, here are five ways you can encourage them to go for a good old-fashioned retweet instead (or – if you’re lucky – as well).

1. Keep your tweets brief

People like to add comments to tweets that they share, so don’t use all 140 characters when you’re tweeting as this will put them off. Shorter tweets catch the eye and give your followers space to add their own remarks. This in turn endorses your content and will hopefully encourage their followers to share it too.

2. Retweet other people

Practice what you preach. If you want people to share your content, then share theirs – particularly content from key influencers within your industry or area of business. Of course, you should only retweet things that your audience will find relevant, but once you start retweeting others, they will start to notice you. And if you start catching their eye, this means they will be more likely to spread your content in return.

3. Have compelling material

Get to know your followers and their interests – not just in terms of business, but their hobbies too. If you tweak or angle your content so that it’s more relevant to your followers, this will make it more far more retweetable. Providing top tips, promoting giveaways, contextualising content with current affairs or even just making users smile are all sure-fire ways to grab their attention. And once that happens, chances are they’ll be more willing to retweet you.

4. Time your tweets

This one might sound obvious, but time your updates carefully. There’s no use tweeting when it’s too quiet (such as in the morning or late at night) because fewer people will see your content. Equally, tweeting at peak times often means your post will be lost amid a sea of other content. Tools such as Tweriod are excellent for helping find out when your followers are online so that you can increase exposure and your chances of that coveted retweet.

5. Ask for a retweet

As the old saying goes: ‘If you don’t ask, you don’t get’. If you have compelling content that’s relevant to your followers, asking them for a retweet can really pay off – interestingly, studies have also shown that spelling out ‘retweet’ rather than writing ‘RT’ improves the chances of sharing by about 23 times. Asking for a retweet can be an excellent way to promote discussion while increasing coverage and showing your followers that you’re interested in what they have to say.

Finally, engage with people, and don’t take yourself too seriously. Whether you’re a business or an individual, the best way to promote yourself on Twitter is to be real – after all, it’s called social media for a reason.

Did you find this post useful? Then start as you mean to go on: don’t just favourite it – share it!

Will Hillier

Top 5 Twitter Tips On How Businesses Can Build Their Twitter Page and Get More Followers

With close to over 500 million users, Twitter is a great platform for connecting with friends, families, celebrities, and businesses. With having so many people part of one giant community, Twitter is the perfect place for any business to connect with current and potential customers. By putting the time and effort (or paying a marketing firm to do it), you can leverage the full power of Twitter to help increase your followers and to help make sure your current followers stay as followers!

Implementing these tips on your Twitter page will help you get your company's Twitter account off to a great start:

Claim Your Twitter Name and Page

Just as you did with your website, you will want to find a Twitter name that is relevant to your company or industry. The longer you put this off means less of a chance of claiming the name you actually want, especially if it's in a very popular industry or field. There are 500 million Twitter users out there, so claim your name while you can!

Fill Out Your Profile and Bio - COMPLETELY

This is one of the biggest mistakes we see many users and companies come into. They setup their Twitter account but don't bother filling out the profile part. You are a real person and your company is real, so you need to make sure your customers see that, and the best way to start is by providing as much information as you can about you and your company. Change the profile picture to something relevant! We typically suggest your logo, a picture of the store front, a picture of your product, etc.

Create a Custom Background

Another feature about Twitter that many newcomers don't take advantage of right off the bat is making use of a custom background. If you really want to stand out from the crowd, creating a custom background which reflects your company is the perfect thing to do. You can use the Twitter background to promote products, services, or just give some information.

Follow People and Companies With The Same Interest

Twitter is all about following. And aside from following your friends, family, employees, and co-workers, the next best people to follow are those in your industry or have the same interest. Doing so will show your follower's that you're active in your industry and that you're not just there to promote your business, but to also network with others and get the latest industry news and information

Post Relevant Content

Sure, it's easy to post that you're standing in line at Starbucks to get a coffee or that you found some new shoes on clearance at Target, but you have to remember that your followers are following you for a reason, and you want to continue to give them reasons for following you! Posting random thoughts and actions is fine in small doses, but the amount of relevant information about your market, industry, or business, needs to far outweigh your tweets about what's on TV or what you had for lunch (unless of course, that is what you are focusing on). You definitely don't want every tweet to be strictly about business, as throwing in random tweets about what you're doing does give your Twitter page some personality, but don't over do it!

Getting involved in the world of Twitter can give any business a great advantage. From branding your company and its products to keeping in touch with customers, Twitter can be a powerful marketing tool if used correctly. Following our 5 tips mentioned above will help get your company's Twitter page started on the right foot!

Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/6911736

A well known dictator struggling with his Twitter followers!!

Twitter’s New Follow Button

Currently, most websites include social media icons that link to their social media profiles; typically you will see icons for Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube. Twitter has just launched a Follow button, that when placed on your website, allows visitors to follow your Twitter account with a single click. No longer do you need to worry about your visitors being taken offsite to Twitter.com and then not making their way back to your webpage.



The current Twitter icon is second from the left, amongst typical social media icons:



The new Follow button is pretty straight forward. It keeps the two-tone Twitter blues and bird and will automatically have your account follow the account connected to the button if you are logged in to Twitter.



You can access the code for the Follow button to add to your website here: https://twitter.com/about/resources/followbutton

Vanity Fair’s main page is an example of the new Follow button in action:




The new process of following through the use of the Twitter Follow button:



The process of following through the use of the Twitter icon:



Don’t confuse the Follow button with the Tweet button. The Tweet button allows visitors to your website to share content from your website to their Twitter followers with a click of a button your website.

Examples of Tweet buttons:



http://twitter.com/goodies/tweetbutton

There are many benefits to using easily identifiable Twitter icons, the new one click Twitter Follow button and the Tweet button. Twitter continues to release new ways to enhance your website and increase engagement with your audience. We look forward to seeing how these onsite buttons will progress in the future.

How to grow over 10 000 your followers on Twitter

It’s never too late to build a large, loyal Twitter following—if you think outside the box. In this guest post, Matthew Magain from SitePoint shares some tips on how you can grow your Twitter following to more than 10,000 in less than a week.

I admit it: we were a bit slow to recognize the potential of Twitter at SitePoint.

Sure, a few of us had dabbled with personal Twitter accounts, but we never really acknowledged Twitter as a viable medium for communicating with customers until, well, everyone else was doing it! By the time we decided to jump on board, our preferred username had already been snapped up by an enterprising squatter (we had to settle for @sitepointdotcom). Not the ideal beginnings for building a successful Twitter presence—and more than just a little ironic considering we pride ourselves with being at the cutting edge of the Web!

Despite beginning on the back foot, we were able to attract 13,000 followers in less than a week—an impressive following that surpasses CNN and the New York Times.

Here’s how we did it.

Dangling The Carrot

Everyone loves free stuff. At SitePoint we publish around 10 books in a year (yep, of the dead-tree variety). We decided to make one of our best-selling titles available as a free PDF to anyone who followed us on Twitter within a 14-day period.

It was a somewhat risky proposition for us—it’s both expensive and time-consuming to produce a high-quality book. We were therefore faced with the very real possibility that we might be giving away something of considerable value to thousands of people, only to have them un-follow us immediately afterwards (luckily, this hasn’t happened!).

However, the fact that we offered a free book is only one reason our campaign has succeeded. If you’re thinking of running a similar promotion, here are six tips, based on our own experience:

1. Give It A Name.

Any successful marketing campaign needs to have a catchy name. Before this venture, our marketing manager had jokingly used the phrase “Twitaway” a couple of times around the office, to mean a “Twitter giveaway”. We realized that this was in fact quite a catchy compound, and decided to run with it. We quickly registered the twitaway.com domain, and referred to the Twitaway promotion in all marketing material that went out.

2. Do Your Homework.

We hit a couple of hurdles on the first day we set our campaign live—primarily due to the fact that we weren’t aware of Twitter’s throttling of the number of Direct Messages you can send in a day (as you can guess, we hit our limit pretty quickly).

It is possible to get around this limitation (it requires that you submit a request to Twitter for your account to be whitelisted). If we had done our homework better, we’d have realized this before embarking on such a project. Perhaps you’ll learn from our lesson, so you’re not scrambling desperately to get hold of Twitter support at odd hours, requesting that your request be accelerated in the queue. Not that we would ever dream of doing such a thing…

3. Have a Plan B.

We knew from the beginning that there would be visitors for whom signing up to Twitter would be a friction point. We gave these folks the option of submitting their email address instead of forcing them to sign up to Twitter—as a result, we’ve ended up with 60,000 email addresses as well as our 13,000 Twitter followers (and counting!)

4. Roll Your Own.

We opted to auto-follow every one of our followers, and sent them their download link immediately after following us. Initially we made use of the third party service Tweet Later, but it became obvious early on that auto-follows and Direct Messages were getting dropped.

Luckily, we have some smart developers on the team, and they were able to throw together a custom tool based on the Twitter API that duplicated the auto-follow and Direct Message functionality in about a day. We also added the ability to send mass Direct Messages (so we could send the download link to our existing followers, as well as new ones).

We’re currently running both tools—Tweet Later does the majority of the grunt work, and our custom tool steps in and picks up the crumbs whenever Tweet Later drops the ball, which gives us the added benefit of a crude form of failover.

5. Plaster It Everywhere.

Once our giveaway had launched, we did everything we could to get the word out—we emailed customers who had purchased the print book or who had downloaded sample chapters from sitepoint.com; we blogged about it, posted in our forum, modified our email signatures … everything short of screaming from the rooftops (although I’m pretty sure I saw our marketing manager doing that, too!). Most importantly, our download link encouraged the recipient to help spread the word, so retweets formed a huge part of the viral momentum that gathered.

6. Give It Some Iron.

There’s no point inviting tens of thousands of people to visit your site if your servers aren’t up to the challenge. We’d run similar giveaways in the past, and had our fair share of being slashdotted or dugg. We knew in advance to host our landing page on a scalable, fast infrastructure (read: a cloud computing service such as Amazon) so that this would be a non-issue. And it was.

Conclusion

Regardless of your initial follower count, it’s possible to grow a large Twitter following by giving people real incentive to begin following you—such as an exclusive offer for Twitter followers. The SitePoint Twitaway reinforces the notion that Twitter is more than just a tool for attention-seeking individuals looking to forge personal relationships and discuss breaking news—it’s a legitimate channel that companies can leverage to strengthen their brand, expand their customer base, and increase traffic to their web site.

Of course, once you’ve attracted these followers, it’s up to you to keep them by delivering timely, relevant content to the Twitter feed. That part is up to you.

(Note: The Twitaway offer has been extended by one week—follow SitePoint on @sitepointdotcom to receive your free PDF of The Art & Science Of CSS.

25 hours and 17 minutes to get 1 million Twitter followers!

It's a known fact that the Guinness World Records logs milestones for every esoteric achievement known to man. So with Charlie Sheen "high" on the drug he calls "Charlie Sheen," it was not inconceivable that he would "score" the coveted honor for the "Fastest Time to Reach 1 Million Followers" on Twitter ever. (take that, Ashton Kutcher!)

Clocking in at 25 hours and 17 minutes, everyone's favorite bi-polar ranter was able to reach this goal. As of this posting, the Two And A Half Men star, is closing in on 1.2 million, with a bio that reads, "Born Small…Now Huge…Winning…Bring it… (unemployed winner)."



Then, as if winning 'Best Actor' at the Emmy's or some other industry award function, #TeamSheen tweeted the following thank you to his ever-loving fans, when he tipped the scales at 1 million, just 11 hours before this post.



Remarkedly after joining Twitter on March 1, in less than an hour, Sheen amassed more than 60,000 followers and a Klout score of 57 - without tweeting one word. According to an Advertising Age report, Sheen was able to get his account verified quickly as the result of the Internet startup Ad.ly brokering his account with Twitter. Ad.ly apparently represents a long list of A& B-List celebrities who are known to attract the media, such as Kim Kardashian, Snoop Dogg and Paris Hilton.

"It was Ad.ly that got Charlie Sheen up on Twitter," says Ad.ly spokesperson Krista Thomas. "Based on trusted relationships with our executives, Charlie's management team reached out to us. Right off the bat, we realized that Charlie's voice has no contemporary. We knew he had one speed: go."

"So we helped Charlie get ownership of @CharlieSheen on Twitter and verify his account to ensure that friends and fans would have no doubt as to his identity and the authenticity of his tweets. As we have with many celebrities, our stellar talent team then helped get Charlie and his team started with Bit.ly, Twitpic and the other Twitterverse tools he might need - something we do quite often for athletes and artists."

So as Sheen continues to "defeat the earthworm" with his tweets, and threaten his ex-wives with his "fire-breathing fists," has he redeemed himself within social media circles by reaching this milestone on Twitter? Or is this just a desperate attempt by a man slowly losing his grip on reality to attach himself to yet another media outlet? In either event, I'm sure his tweets over the course of the next several news cycle will be "breaking news" and sopping up all the air in the room.

It's an odd commentary on life, when the Twitterverse can reach such heights as providing a forum for oppressed people to help achieve democracy in the Middle East, and then in a blink of an eye sink to such depths as to provide a run-away freight train like Sheen with a soap box to broadcast more of his bi-polar (er, excuse me, bi-winning) rants.