Twitter is indeed a noisy place. There’s lots of people talking in 140 characters, sharing news, articles they’ve found, selling their products, talking about celebrities and the odd cat picture.
So how do you as a small business owner get heard above all the noise and get your content seen and shared by your ideal customers and the press?
1 – make yourself attractive on twitter
Make sure your bio, profile picture and links work – that’s a given!
2 – use hashtags
Hashtags will help your tweets be seen by more people, rather than just those people who are following you. Hashtags can make your tweet be shared by people you haven’t even communicated with yet – I’m not promising viral (you have to create killer content for that kind of shenanigans, but at least a good retweet ratio!).
What are hashtags?
Hashtags can be used in several ways. But basically, hashtags are used for topics. So, once you’ve used a hashtag in your tweet, people searching for that hashtag (or topic) will also find you and your tweet.
So as an example, if you use the hashtag #womeninbusiness – other people looking for interesting content around women in business and people to follow, will search that hashtag and find you and your tweet.
It’s worth doing some research on what hashtags are popular for your business sector. For example, #socent is used by the social enterprise community, #sciencematters by the science community and #technews by people working in tech.
If you have something to say and want to reach more people – use hashtags.
They are also used around news topics. One of the hashtags trending right now (which means popular, judged by the amount of people using that hashtag) is #snow – todays lots of people are tweeting about whether it will snow or not. Another news item is #TrumpSpeechEP – because lots of people are tweeting about Trump.
There are also hashtags used for different days of the week, with lots of people sharing content around particular subjects. So there’s #mondaymotivation, #humpday (how are we all going to get over the hump of Wednesday to the weekend?) and #ff or #followfriday (where you can share twitter accounts you think your audience would be interested in).
For a full list of the popular hashtags used weekly log onto your twitter account on the desktop version, go to your analytics, events then choose recurring trends.
3 - use lists on twitter
You’ll find once you’ve followed a fair few people, your home column can be pretty fast and full with everyone’s tweets. There will be people that you want to build relationships with and engage with their content. You can create lists and add those people to them and rather than read the tweets of everyone that you are following you can just check out your lists.
You can make lists public (so the person added are given a notification that you’ve added them to a list) or private (so no-one knows). You can also add people to your list that you’re not following at all.
For example maybe you want to keep in contact with businesses in your local area. You could create a public Nottingham list, and use this to see what businesses in your area are getting up to. Or you could create a private list of your competitors, so you can keep an eye on what your competition is tweeting about. Or you could create a news list and add accounts that publish news, so you’re always in touch with what’s happening in the news.
Then when you log onto twitter you can check your lists first to make sure you’re engaging with the people you want to engage with, by liking, retweeting or commenting on their posts.
These are just 3 things you can start to implement today to get yourself seen on twitter and start engaging and developing relationships with the right people!
Interested in learning more about Twitter? Check out these other posts:
12 ways to get more followers on twitter
http://debbiedooodah.co.uk/blog/2017/5/9/12-ways-to-get-more-followers-on-twitter
8 ways to shine on Twitter
http://debbiedooodah.co.uk/blog/2016/12/12/8-ways-to-shine-on-twitter
Why being consistent with your twitter and Instagram name matters
