Twitter Hacks - Advanced

by Abigail Pike

2015

Advanced Users

• This presentation is for those of you that are advanced users of twitter. These are some helpful tips and hints that you might not be aware of.

• A bit about me- I am social media consultant and I am very passionate about what I do. I am constantly learning and love showing others what I have learnt.

• Please follow me on https://instagram.com/abipike101/ and https://twitter.com/Abi20047

Contents

• Twitter keyboards

• Scheduling tweets

• Sensitive Content

• Location enabled

• Attaching Social Media Accounts

• Hashtag searching

• Hashtag services

• General tweeting

• Searches

• Public replies

• Image and Video

• Twitter Mobile

• Apps

• Twitter SEO

• Guides available

• Last Minute Tips

Tips& Tricks you never heard of!

• With many of us spending large amounts of time on Twitter every day, there has to be a quicker way to use the desktop interface and that comes in the form of keyboard shortcuts.

• As you can see from the list, there is a shortcut for pretty much every one of the actions you carry out on a daily basis.

Scheduling Tweets• 3. Schedule Tweets• Sometimes you can come up with a good tweet, but feel that it’s not ready to be posted for the

world to see. If that’s the case, there’s a vast number of apps and tools that will allow you to schedule tweets for later. Tweetdeck is one example and if you’re looking for something a little more advanced, then Buffer is a great tool to use.

• Tweet deck is free and enables you to schedule your tweets, see what your competitors are up to and for any up and coming trends.

• Klout is another that enable a user to do this with was of increasing your social media score. www.tweetdeck.com www.klout.com check these out!

•

Sensitive Content

• If, for whatever reason, you’re tweeting content that isn’t suitable for general consumption, activating this option in settings will either display sensitive content (those that users have marked as such) or mark yours. The latter will mean that users will be warned about your content before they proceed. Settings>content>

Mark media I tweet as containing material that may be sensitivePlease check this box if your Twets contain sensitive media so that users can be informed prior to viewing.

Location enabled/disabled

• If you don’t want people knowing your location of your tweet. There is a simple way of disabling this.

• While you can turn geotagging on, sometimes you might not want people to know where you’re are or have tweeted from. If this is the case, head to settings and you will find the option under ‘Tweet location.’

• Settings>security &privacy> tweet location (tick box turn on/off)

Attaching Social Media Accounts

• 8. Linking to Facebook account

• The majority of social media sites allow cross-posting and Twitter is no exception. In your profile settings, you will find this option at the bottom of the page underneath your bio.

• Click edit profile and copy the link into your bio.

Hashtag searching

• http://hashtagify.me/

• Hashtagify helps you accelerate your business growth, brand awareness and marketing effectiveness through intelligent Hashtag Marketing. –

• See more at: http://hashtagify.me/explorer/about#sthash.aoibrene.dpuf

• If you’re looking for particular topics or searching for updates to an event, using a hashtag to search can bring you more accurate results. Provided you know what the main hashtag is (eg: #London2012), you can find out more real-time info.

Hash tag services

• https://tagboard.com

• https://www.hashatit.com/

• https://www.hashtags.org

• hashtagify.me

• iconosquare.com/instagram-search-tool

General Tweeting

• Less is More• You may post interesting content or say witty things, but when you’re doing so, you want to give

people the opportunity to retweet your stuff. As a rule, you should leave leave 20 characters worth of spare to allow this. If it’s possible leave 40 since that way, the person retweeting should be able to fit in a quick comment.

• Modified Tweet• For those cases where you’re retweeting something that’s too big, modified tweets come into

play. Marked as MT, this lets people know that this tweet has been edited so you can cut down the least essential parts or reword it so you can tweet it.

• Shorten URL• Yes, Twitter and every other third-party app automatically shortens apps, but using a URL

shortener has its benefits. For one, all URL shorteners include analytics so you can see how effective and popular your links are. Handy if you’re a business or blog and want to see how many clicks a link got.

• Twitter lists• Chances are you’re following far more people then you can keep up with. Lists are a handy way

of counteracting this. By creating different lists for different categories, you can easily follow the same number of people without being overwhelmed.

Discovery- Searches

• Twitter recently redesigned its search feature so it’s a good place to start when discussing features. Behaving more like Google and Facebook by suggesting users, searching terms can be filtered by top, all or best yet, ‘People You Know.’ The latter allows you to see what those users you follow are saying so you can jump into the conversation or add your own comment

• Advanced Search

• However, if that isn’t enough for you, you can take things a step further and increase your search capabilities. When you’ve viewing a search result, clicking the cog icon up in the top right-hand corner to bring advanced search. Here, you can filter by words, accounts, location and even moods to find what you want. Alternatively, you can access advanced search here.

• Save Search

• Similar to how you find advanced search. On the search results page, this is the second option offered in settings alongside advanced search.

Public Replies

• Public replies

• Sometimes when you’re having a discussion, you want everyone to see it instead of just the person. It might be to strengthen a point you made with a previous tweet or to help followers keep up to speed with a discussion. To do this, simply place a full stop (really you could place any symbol, but this is tidier) and it will appear as a public tweet.This rule also applies to any tweet that begins with a username.

Images& Video

•  Images & Video

• If you want better engagement or responses, sometimes an image or video is the way to go. It’s good to mix up your tweets with a mixture of the two.

• If you’re not used to taking photos or need an excuse to take some snaps, then things like the ‘photo a day challenge‘ on Instagram is a great way of getting practice. Just be sure to choose only the best photos to tweet if you don’t want to overwhelm your followers with abstract photos.

Twitter Mobile

• Just because smartphones have grown in popularity doesn’t mean that feature phones aren’t still being used. A section for traditional SMS still exists in settings, allowing you to receive text notifications, how many notifications you want to receive is really up to you, but bear in mind that you have to enable certain followers for mobile notifications first before you can start using it.

• SMS Sleep settings

• Because you don’t want to be woken up at 3am by a Twitter user on the other side of the world, you can choose to switch off updates during certain times. Simply turn on the settings and choose the times you don’t want to receive notifications.

• Tweet alerts

• One of the new features for Twitter’s new app update is the ability to receive notifications every time someone tweets. To activate this, go to the account you want to keep up to date with and hit the options button (person symbol). Select “Turn on notifications” and now you will now be alerted to any updates from that account

Apps

• Nurph is smart in that it correlates hashtags to create an ongoing conversation between Twitter users, making it easier for them to respond to one another and chat through tweeting and creating hashtag chatrooms. You can also create Twitterbots to guide users to a chatroom and funnel all your replies into the one space. Nurph is the ultimate in Twitter community curation

• dlvr.it (‘deliver it’ ) schedules blog posts to be delivered onto Twitter and across other social media platforms, allowing you to keep up with all social media and projecting your content to as many people and in as many ways as possible at one time or many. It’s fairly by-the-numbers and simple to use, so as to be effective as possible.

Apps

• TweetBoard pulls your Twitter stream into real-time and reformats them into threaded conversations. So instead of clicking ‘view conversation’ a viewing a feed between you and few users, TweetBoard will enable you to view the conversation, other similar conversations and any tangential tweets as well, forming one giant conversation among you and your friends and followers.

• Who Retweeted Me enables you to congregate all your Retweeters on one page and thank them one by one, if you so please. It will tell you how many retweets a certain tweet has had as well as the average amount of followers the Retweet-ers have and the potential reach the tweet had with their help. To top it all off, it puts the chronology of retweeting in a simple graph for you to analyse at your pleasure.

More Apps

• TwitSweeper

• Twitter is as closed to organised chaos as humanity will ever get; TwitSweeper has undertaken the rather audacious task of cleaning it up a bit. Use TwitSweeper, either as a trial version or a paid subscriber, to rid your feed of spam. Whether it manifests itself in tweets, messages or spambots followers, TS will be on hand to shoo them away.

• The Archivist

• The Archivist is one of the premier Twitter analytic apps, allowing you to archive tweets and analyse the biggest trends. Whether you’re searching for stats on keywords, hashtags or certain users, the Archivist will provide an extensive and aesthetically crisp analysis of whatever you want.

• MentionMap

• MentionMap displays all your mentions and replies in a spider diagram, which, though undeniably nice to look at, can be awkward to navigate. Type in your username and the diagram will appear with legs dedicated to users you have tweeted, hashtags you have used as well as tributary users and conversations. It is a great way to visualise your tweets and the connections you’ve made on Twitter

More APPS

• TwitLonger

• Twitter is a hard task-master where TwitLonger is merciful and sympathetic. Sometimes 140 characters isn’t enough and TwitLonger understands as such. You don’t want to write an entire blog or a novel, but you just need a few more words to convey your point. TwitLonger will cut you some slack and then post a link to your extended tweet on Twitter just so everyone won’t miss out on it.

• TweetAdder

• TweetAdder is a management tool that is designed to get you get more Twitter followers, but more importantly, it helps bring in engaged followers suited to you and whatever you are pedaling rather then just pure numbers. It is a good tool for those that are new to Twitter or want to exploit social media to their business’ advantage. Fast and easy to use, TweetAdder will get you up and on your feet in no time, helping you add users and get properly involved with Twitter.

• ManageFilter

• ManageFilter is quite a behemoth. You can unfollow users and bots en masse, copy and follow lists of users from other accounts, and the in-built analytics are comprehensive and allow you to pick the best time to make your most important tweets. There’s even a search tool tailored to your account unlike any offered by Twitter itself; very helpful and essential for popular accounts/businesses.

Apps

• Qwitter• Qwitter is an email service that keeps you up to date on your followers and those who have

unfollowed you and the fluctuation in each. For people with a great deal of followers, Qwitter would be very useful with its daily updates, telling you how many people you have gained and lost and putting it in a statistical context as well. It has a clean design that is similar to Twitter itself and is perfectly effective if you really need to know these details.

• TweetDeck by Twitter• Perhaps the most well known Twitter app out there,TweetDeck is great and quickly becoming

the preferred way to use Twitter among dedicated users as it is far more expansive and comprehensive than a standard Twitter news feed. Instead of merely viewing your ‘following’ feed, you can view multiple feeds at any one time, and they can be customised to your choosing. Most likely, one would use it to view replies, mentions, interactions and search hashtags simultaneously, but there are plenty of possibilities

Twitter SEO

• Social media and SEO has a close relationship. One complements the other and it shouldn’t be any surprise that you can optimise your Twitter account to take advantage of this. There are many ways you can do this:

• – The first is to pick a name and username that has the main keyword you want (if it’s marketing then @ABCmarketing etc.). If you already have a Twitter account, then you can change your actual name, but don’t change your username.– Include your website address. it’s an obvious statement, but you want to make sure people can find your site. Don’t use a URL shortener and whatever you do, don’t make your address direct to your Twitter account, that’s just silly.– Your bio is also important. Above all, you want your personality to shine through, but you should include some main keywords in it. You only have 160 characters so make sure the words in question are high value.– Your profile photo is also handy for this. Make sure you rename it before you upload it. If you’re happy with your profile photo, then just upload it again, but under a new name.

Guides on Twitter

• Twitter itself has a vast range of guides and blogs for different sections, which is bound to come in useful at some point. Some of them include advertising & business, developers and newsroom just to name a few.

Last Minute Tips

• 1. Follow the leads. Twitter isn't just about your tweets; it's also a great source for information on your competition. Monitor their engagement, find out what the hot topics are. This will give you fresh insight on how to broaden your own following and what those people are looking for. It may even show you what your competition is doing better than you. With a little tweet tweaking, you may be able to get those followers to convert to your own company.

• 2. Save the sales pitch. Don't get caught up in using Twitter as a selling tool. Instead, use it to increase customer loyalty and offer valuable information to your followers. Overmarketing will merely leave a sour taste in followers' mouths, and you may even end up losing them if their feed gets too clogged with too many promotions. Be viewed as a resource, not a door to door salesperson.

• 3. Keep it short. Posting links and content is a great thing, but Twitter users are all about brevity, so be sure to shorten your links by using a redirect service. http://bit.ly is a good one for measuring your click-thrus and performance, but if you don’t use something like that, Twitter will automatically shorten your links using their built in T.CO shortner.

• 4. Reply with a period. Twitter filters allow users to only view replies if they are following each side of the conversation. But by starting off your reply with a period, the post won't start with @--it will instead be viewed as a separate tweet and will be seen by all of your followers. Breaking grammar rules never felt so good.

• 5. Lose a few characters. Yes, 140 characters is the technical limit on Twitter, but all the cool kids are now only tweeting with 125 or less. Short, punchy tweets will grab your followers' attention rather than getting lost in their feeds. The more characters left, the easier it is for people to retweet and add their own comment as well.

Tips

• 6. Ask Questions. People want to feel like you value their opinion and asking questions, even simple ones, tend to receive more engagement.

• 7. Be a resource. Providing value and being seen as a resource is a sure way to build a quality follow and to get retweeted. In a sea of nonsense and worthless tweets, if you’re the one sharing quality, interesting content; you’ll stand out. If you spend all of your time sharing what you ate or just having personal convos, you very well could lose followers.

• 8. A picture's worth a thousand tweets. I can't stress enough how important pictures are in any social media platform, and Twitter is no exception. Twitter now displays images in timelines, and if you’re not taking advantage of this you’re missing out. An image attached to any tweet is sure to increase visibility and engagement.

• 9. Don’t be too good for people. No matter how well known you are, or how busy you are don’t be that person who thinks they are too good to reply to anyone. I’m typically slammed, but I still take time every day to answer each and every person (that I see) who tweets me, thanks me, says they are reading my book etc. I believe in building your fans and brand champions one engagement at a time. It’s amazing how one quick conversation or reply can make someone feel appreciated and turn them into a brand champion or personal fan.

Conclusion

• I hope these tips and clear and helpful. Thank you for taking the time to read my presentation.

• Thanks again

• Abigail Pike