7 Ways to Set Your Twitter Feed on Fire

 

Twitter has become an essential tool for entrepreneurs. A 2010 study done by Chadwick Martin Bailey and iModerate Research Technologies showed that 67 percent of some 1,000 adults surveyed were more likely to buy from a company whose brand they followed on Twitter. Plus 79 percent of the respondents were more likely to recommend a brand whose handle they followed on Twitter.

Most entrepreneurs aren’t experts on Twitter, but all entrepreneurs can improve their engagement with a few minor adjustments. The following are seven ways to set your Twitter feed on fire:

Related: How Marketers Should Approach the New Twitter
1. Grow your following.

Increasing your follower count is the most effective way to boost your influence on Twitter. Look at the followers of your competitors. If their followers are ideal clients for you, begin by following these handles. Many of these users will follow you back.

To keep track of the Twitter accounts you follow and figure out which ones don't follow you back, use free tool like Manageflitter to identify those who don’t follow you back. Manageflitter gives you the ability to unfollow the Twitter users who have not followed you back right.

Using a strategy of following a few hundred targeted followers a week will result in your adding scores of new and ideal followers within a month. Continuing this strategy consistently could result your gain of thousands of new followers in a relatively short time period.
2. Be clear about your message.

The main question potential Twitter followers want answered is "How do I benefit from following this person?” To have ideal clients follow you, answer this question immediately.

The first place customers look is your descriptive bio. They don’t care if you're a father of two and a husband. Your favorite quote won't prompt them to follow you. Telling them what’s in it for them is all they care about.

Author Brendon Burchard offers the best way to communicate this concisely. At his live Experts Academy event, he suggested saying, "I help [blank] do [blank] so they can [blank]." 

Related: Twitter Courts Businesses With Option to Promote Their Most Popular Tweets
3. Ask for retweets.

The ability to have your followers share your tweets is imperative to the growth of your social-media presence. Salesforce.com found that when followers are specifically asked to “retweet” with the shortcut reference “RT,” they are 10 times as likely to retweet a message.

The research also showed that asking followers to “retweet” (using the whole word spelled out), boosted the retweet rate 23 times more than average.
4. Share during the best times.

You can have the best and most engaging content in the world, but if it's not tweeted at the correct time, then it likely won't be seen. According to Bitly, the best time to reach people on Twitter is Monday to Thursday from 1 p.m. to 3 p.m. The worst times are after 3 p.m. on Fridays and any evening after 8 p.m.
5. Schedule tweets.

Set uptweets ahead of time. Free sites like Buffer and HootSuite grant you the ability to schedule tweets. This helps you be present on Twitter when your followers are more likely to be online. One hour of scheduling work might deliver a month’s worth of prescheduled Twitter content for your feed.
6. Use hashtags to boost retweets.

According to a study by Buddy Media/Salesforce at the end of 2011 and early 2012, tweets with hashtags receive twice the engagement as those without. The same study found that tweets incorporating more than two hashtags experienced a 17 percent decline in engagement. So be careful not to overuse hashtags.

Using hashtag websites like Hashtagifyme or Ritetag can assist you in identifying the most engaging hashtags for posts.
7. Use the @ properly.

Never start a tweet with @whoever. When you do, the only people who will see the tweet are your followers and @whoever.

Start the tweet with words and then insert @whoever later in the phrase like this: "Thanks @whoever for your great review about our service at ABC Company." This will ensure that all your followers will see this tweet in their feeds. And @whoever will be notified as well.

Article curated from Entrepreneur

5 Tools for Downloading and Analyzing Twitter Data

 

If you are running a social campaign, you have to be analyzing your account's data. To do that, you have to do some data mining. Unfortunately, it is a time consuming process that brands often hire whole teams to manage, rather than entrusting it to a single person.

The good news is that there are tools that make it infinitely easier, and that you can take advantage of to archive your own Twitter data.

1. Twitter's official archive download.

The easiest route to go is always going to be Twitter itself. They allow you to access your own archive of posts, and save them in an easily exported format. This option has been available since 2012, and it is a consistent way to build up a good archive of your tweets in a CSV file that includes all information.

Of course, there are a couple of downsides. There is no way to set what dates you want, and so it will go back as far as it can to create your file. Any time you re-download a new version, you will be overwriting the old one, or else saving it as a separate file with the same old info.

While this is annoying, it is preferable to how it was, when you could only get a short period of tweets before they were lost forever. Progress!

2. BirdSong Analytics.

BirdSong Analytics is an absolutely unique tool that lets you download all the followers of any Twitter accounts. It's a paid tool but I don't think such feature has any alternatives.

The export comes in an Excel format and contains each username, number of followers/following, real name, Twitter URL, bio, number of tweets, date when the account was created, location, Verified status and how many lists the account is included into.

Now, think about all Excel sorting, filtering, searching options: You can now find most followed accounts, search bios by a keyword, sort accounts by location, etc. For example, you can download all people your competitor follows and investigate their habits, sites, etc. Or you can download all accounts that @nytimes is following and get the list of high-profile journalists, their personal sites, their hobbies, etc This is a great database to plan your outreach campaign out.

3. Cyfe.

For a more customizable option, it has to be Cyfe. This is an all-in-one business management tool that allows you to create custom made widgets that work with any number of services, including most social networks. There are pre-made widgets already available for Twitter (among dozens of others), but you can craft your own to catch the data that you need. Getting started is free, but you will want to use their premium service for real analytics gathering.

4. NodeXL.

To go more simple, but very thorough, you could try NodeXL. It is an open source template for Microsoft Excel that works by integrating data pulled from a CSV file into a ridiculously informative network graph. So you could get your archived data from Twitter, input it into NodeXL, and create a breathtaking visual representation of your tweets from any period you like. For a graph junkie like me, this is a very exciting tool.

5. TWChat.

Better known as a Twitter chat room for tweet chats, TWChat also provides you with the option of creating a permanent archive for various hashtags of your choice. Every day, a new archive will be created that shows you how that tag is being used. This is an amazing tool if you are looking to monitor your reputation, or even a specific social campaign.

Using Twitter archives.

Now, there may be numerous ways to use the data; here are just a few ideas:

• Gary Dek of StartABlog123.com uses Twitter for content inspiration.
• Anna Fox of HireBloggers uses Twitter favorites as a bookmarking tool, so her archive is her ultimate reading list (she can also share)
• You can use BirdSong exports to identify niche influencers for outreach campaign or customer research.
• You can also use hashtag archives for keyword research to investigate which words tend to go in close proximity with the chosen hashtag.

Article curated from Entrepreneur