It's a skill to be succinct and to the point in anything.
Drawn out presentations bore the audience. Poorly organized resumes and cover letters give hiring managers a headache. Heck, even a lengthy blog post on sales-proliferating marketing tactics can be too long for some. Nevertheless, getting to the point is a skill.
I'm here to tell you that it's extra important for your tweets - and I'll show you how can become a master of creating engaging tweets.
There are a number of instances on the Internet where you MUST convey all that you need to within character or spatial limits in order to get someone to click through. Here's where being succinct on the Internet is important:
1. Title Tags
The title tag of a given web page appears in search engine results pages (SERPs) as your title. It's your chance to convey in 55 characters or less what your business offers or what makes your brand unique. The space you have is actually calculated by pixels and not characters but we use a rough character number as a guideline.
2. Meta Descriptions
Writing meta descriptions can be tricky. You've got under 150 characters to get someone to click through to your page. The difference between here and your title tag is that here you've got an opportunity to be a bit more descriptive - but still concise. Again, these are calculated based on pixels and not characters. But as a guideline, keep these under 150 characters.
3. Tweets
Every tweet you construct can be a maximum of 140 characters. It can be as simple as a line of text and your link - but (beware) - what you say matters. That's what we'll get into in this blog post.
Buyer Personas
Before we get to the meat and potatoes, it's important to consider your audience - as you'll be writing to entice them to click on the link in your tweet. We need to know what gets them going. You can do this by asking a series of questions to find out more about them. These are questions that delve into who they are, what they do, what their preferences are amongst other things.
Here are a list of questions you need to know the answers to:
How old are they?
What do they do for a living?
What does their average day look like?
What are their pain points? What do you help them solve?
What do they value?
How do they search for products and services? Where do they go for information?
What kind of an experience are they looking for?
What is their biggest problem with your offerings?
In answering these questions, you'll be able to understand your ideal buyers enough to make a fictional character out of them. This fictional character should represent your ideal customers and must be a referring point for all marketing actions you take, especially with how you communicate over certain Inbound marketing channels, like social media.
For example, knowing the occupation of your ideal buyer is important. This allows you to address them directly - something direct-response copywriter John Caples always harped on. Remember - tweets can be seen as sales pitches to click through the link in the text. Understanding your audience and who you want to target can make your tweet copy more engaging which will result in more retweets, favourites and click-throughs.
Share Content Your Audience Will Want To Consume
Before I show you how to construct tweets, it's important to properly strategize what content you'll be sharing. The previous step - creating buyer personas - is critical. Your ideal buyers and have needs, wants and issues. Your content should solve their problems and answer their questions.
You can find what people are searching for in a number of ways. Conduct in-depth keyword research to discover what people are searching for - this will give you ideas for content you can produce. Additionally, look up specific keywords through Twitter's search bar and see what the 'Twitterverse" is saying about them.
Keyword research and finding out what makes your audience tick is just one part of a content strategy for social media. You need to create content ideas and topics that are unique and still valuable to your audience.
Lastly, the way you communicate your content to them should be through asking a question and then solving the problem with what you have to offer. That's what we'll examine next. Let's dig deeper.
The Anatomy Of A Tweet
In this post, I want to show you how exactly you should write a tweet that will empower people to click through.
Here's an example of a tweet we at LocalTrifecta sent out on April 24, 2014. Read it a couple of times before proceeding:
In creating a tweet, there are 6 key parts to making one engaging enough that your audience will HAVE to read and click through. Here they are:
Question That Addresses A Problem. Think to the last section about buyer personas. What makes your audience itch? What gets them curious? Those personas should shape what content you're sharing and what words you use to share it. Start the tweet off by posing a question but keep it short. You don't have many characters to use! Considering the tweet in question, with all the sites that are getting hacked these days, who doesn't want to beef up the walls of their business online? Prevent the problem from happening before it occurs. Now, I'm not saying that having a question is a requisite for a great tweet. BUT, engaging tweets more often than not pose a question to the audience.
Text That Offers A Solution To The Problem. Following the question, you'll need to offer a solution - unless you're asking your followers an open-ended question. This is more of a call-to-action type text. Consider using something like "Read this to learn more:" or "Learn about it here:". We used "These tools are necessary:". That text offers a bit of curiosity. The thinking then becomes "What tools? I guess I should click and find out." Nevertheless, you don't have a lot of characters to use so keep it concise with this part.
A Shortened Link. According to MarketingSherpa,, shorter URLs get more clicks than longer ones. This is in the context of creating URLs on a site. In the context of social media, this still applies - and it makes sense. Shorter URLs are simpler and make for easy click-throughs. Additionally, shortened links also offer click through analytics. So always use a link shortener in your tweets. Bitly is a free tool to shorten your URLs. I personally use Buffer because of its many capabilities. HootSuite and HubSpot also have their own link shortener tools and their monitoring platforms are top notch.
Credit To The Source. This only applies if the content you're sharing isn't original to you. If you didn't create it, give credit to the source by mentioning them. The added benefit to this is that they might thank you for mentioning them by mentioning you back and possibly retweeting it.
Disclaimer Text [Optional]. I've seen a few direct-response email marketers do this in headlines and more recently, I've seen the Huffington Post do this. In order to draw attention to the rest of the text and the link, it's a great idea to add some sort of disclaimer text. In our tweet above, we said "CRITICAL" to convey how important website security is. If you've got a blog post to share, consider putting in "LEARN". If you've got an infographic to share, use "LOOK". Putting square brackets around something attracts attention to what's inside them. Give this a try.
Include A Relevant Hashtag. Hashtags are an absolute must for any business, big or small, on Twitter. They're an avenue for you to 'index' your tweet for a related keyword. If you're following certain conversations on Twitter, you usually search for a hashtag. Consider the hashtag we used, "#WordPress". It made sense to use it as the article was specifically about WordPress tools and plugins for security. Think about who will be using and monitoring this hashtag. For WordPress, that'll be anyone with problems, thoughts or opinions on anything to do with it. Since WordPress is a reasonably basic Content Management System (CMS), a lot of small to medium sized businesses use it for their websites.
Now, here's the example tweet with each of these 6 key items:
This is everything a tweet you create should include!
If you're investing time and money into Twitter, then you ought to be getting the simple art of composing tweets down pat. But alas, it's not overly simple to create tweets that people will want to read and click. Hopefully, this post gives you a better idea on what's involved and how you can improve your engagement and overall metrics over Twitter.
Leave a comment below or ask me a question! I'm be more than happy to answer.