Best Practices for Sharing Content on Twitter

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Video Transcript | Intro

With Twitter’s short character limit, writing strong messages is vitally important. As with good headlines, clear, to the point tweets receive the best engagement rates. To maximize engagement further, use hashtags that people can search to find content associated with a particular topic. Research hashtags relevant to your location, industry and products and add up to two of them per tweet, where appropriate. For example, if you’re hosting an event, use a hashtag that attendees can add to their tweets which will build a historical timeline of content and discussion about the event.

Keep it short

Aim to keep your tweet short. At 120 characters long at most so your audience has room to add their own commentary when retweeting you. We also recommend shrinking your links to make your message more visually appealing, save characters, and track click through rates. With the Ow.ly link shortener, you can check how many people clicked your link over-time through Hootsuite Analytics.

Keep a cadence

Due to Twitter’s fast paced nature, you can post content more frequently. Start with three to five tweets spaced out throughout the day and then vary your pace to see how it affects engagement and follower growth. Aim to reach your followers during the time they’re online most, generally between 7am and 8pm. Weekends are also a busy time so make sure to post or schedule tweets for Saturdays and Sundays too.

Since your post volume is typically much larger, Twitter is a great place to promote the same piece of content multiple times and recycle evergreen content. If you’re releasing a new blog post, you can tweet about it a few times with slight headline variations to get your message in front of followers who may have missed it the first time around. 

Share content from others

When sharing curated content, make sure to tag the author in the tweet as this may prompt them to share your message thereby increasing your audience size. When retweeting, review what you’re sharing carefully to ensure it aligns with your brand positioning and to verify that the link is still valid. Be mindful if you’re retweeting popular content - has your audience seen it already? and are you adding value to their streams by sharing it? A good guideline for retweets is to keep retweeted content below 20% of the total volume of your tweets. This will help position your brand as one that adds value to online conversations. For that reason, aim to add a few words of commentary to everything you retweet to share your unique perspective. And if you come across a great piece of content but want to share it at a later date, just click Favourite to save it.

In summary, write strong tweets that include relevant hashtags and rich media. Use Twitter to promote your content multiple times and recycle evergreen content. Keep your volume of retweets under 20 percent and focus on selectively amplifying high-quality content that would be valuable to your audience.
 

Looking for more? Checkout our complete guide to marketing on Twitter.