Twitter Tip # 15
The Message: What You Are Saying
The content of your Twitter message is the most important thing to optimize over the life of your Twitter account. Here’s what you should know about how to provide value and optimize the content in 140 characters.
In general, your Tweets should each be able to stand alone as a complete and understandable message in case a user sees the message outside of the Twitter stream - where surrounding posts would not be available to provide context to its meaning.
Consider the use of keywords in every message. Think of each message as the <title> of a Web page you are optimizing for SEO.
Consider what topics are trending in Twitter at the time - do any of them match your message in terms of content? If so, incorporating those terms or hash tags is a great way to intercept Twitter traffic around popular topics.
The content of your messages must provide value to your target audience. Of course, you should have some personality to your account. If you are marketing yourself, or if your personality is your brand like it may be for a celebrity, then personality is the value you provide. However, if you are trying to provide value around a different topic, then personality should make up less of your messaging content. If every post is all business your followers may lose interest. Inserting personality into your messaging can help you build relationships with your followers to the perceived value associated with your Twitter account.
Once you’ve started thinking about the content, you can use tracking URLs like from cli.gs, bit.ly, or awe.sm to track the engagement of your different posts. If the post contains a hyperlink to a Web page then you can use this as a way to measure which posts are most successful and hone future messages to get more clicks. Some of the factors that can affect number of clicks you achieve are the time/day of the post or style and tone of the message itself.
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