How many blog posts have you read with tips about how your business can effectively use Twitter?
More than you can count?
Yeah, me too.
Many of these posts place emphasis on how to encourage retweets, and after reading so many, it's easy see patterns emerge.
Unfortunately, for all of the awesome Twitter tips that are shared, there are a number of recurring tips that I feel are ill advised.
Following are 5 common Twitter tips that your business should ignore:
1 - Ask for retweets
If your content is valuable, people will retweet it, or share it on other social media platforms. If you're finding that you need to ask for retweets, maybe you should focus on getting to the core of why your content isn't being shared. Alternatively, maybe your audience technographics are such that they are much more inclined to consume your content, and not necessarily share it.
2 - Tweet between time X and time Y to maximize retweets
Instead of picking the right time of day for a retweet, you should be picking the time of day to publish tweets based on when your audience is likely to be on Twitter, or checking their Twitter streams. There's not much use in tweeting between time X and time Y in hopes of getting more retweets if nobody in your audience is on Twitter between those times.
3 - Include retweetable words or phrases (i.e. use the word X to get more retweets)
Sure there are words and phrases that statistically get retweeted more than others, but you shouldn't let those words and phrases influence your content. Focus on providing valuable content and if there are ways to optimize tweets, consider testing various phrases to see what your audience responds to.
4 - Publish your tweets on day X to maximize retweets
Similar to picking the right time of day to tweet for your audience, picking the right days of the week to tweet should also be dependent on when your business' audience is using Twitter. Also, it would be ill advised to limit your tweets to a certain day of the week just because you might be able to increase the likelihood getting retweets on that day.
5 - Tweet the latest news
If you pay any attention to trending topics on Twitter, you know that high-profile breaking news frequently makes the list. This said, just because there is news that is garnering attention and retweets on Twitter doesn't mean that it is going to be relevant to your audience, business, or achieving your pre-established social media marketing goals and objectives.
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For many businesses, number of retweets is seen a highly important quantitative measure of success.
The problem with this is that the relevance of these retweets is often ignored in favour of sheer volume, which is a flawed method of measuring success.
Retweets by people that are completely irrelevant to your business, to audiences that are completely irrelevant to your business, won't lead to any meaningful business results.
Additionally, if your tweets are tailored specifically to achieve as many retweets as possible, but deviate from a meaningful and strategically relevant content strategy, the sharing of that content also won't lead to any real business results.
Try to stay focused on sharing valuable content with your audience and you will be rewarded with loyalty, sales, affinity, advocacy, and other meaningful business results.
How do you maximize the effectiveness of your tweets?
What metrics do you use to measure the effectiveness of your Twitter activity?
What common Twitter tips do you find to be of most value?
What are some uncommon Twitter tips that you find to be highly valuable?
Let me know what you think in the comments, or on Twitter @RGBSocial. It would be great to hear from you.