In our ongoing effort to provide you with a series of overviews on various social media platforms to help you understand how each can be personalized, below I tackle the challenges associated with the most real-time social media platform – Twitter.
Despite the millions of tweets to be read, followers to consider and verbiage (hashtags, mentions, retweets, etc.) to include, Twitter still offers a number of ways to make the platform personal, so that it meets your needs.
Personalization on Twitter
You probably thought that all of your Twitter followers saw your tweets, right? Well, sorry to be the bearer of bad news, but that is just not the case.
Here’s the challenge:
• Most tweets only last 18 minutes on users streams, before being replaced by new content (500 million tweets are sent per day, according to Twitter)
• Someone has to follow you in order to see your tweets
• You have to tweet content that Twitter will deem relevant enough to place onto your follower’s streams
Twitter also has a powerful learning team that looks at the following:
• Your profile information
• The correlations between those you follow and who they follow
• Your language preference and geo-location
• Your gender
• All of your interactions on Twitter
• The frequency with which you utilize the “tweet this” button from sites you visit
And they use all of that data to personalize your Twitter experience.
So what does all this mean for marketers?
1. Understand the behavior of your followers and use your data to create an editorial calendar of tweets that you know will appeal to your target audience and will be published at times when your followers are most likely online
2. Engage with your followers and users who are replying to your tweets
3. Install the “tweet this” and “follow” button (which you can get from Twitter) on your website
4. Take advantage of trending topics to gain more exposure for your content (keep in mind all relevant hashtags and links)
5. Run Twitter ads to ensure that all of your followers see your tweets (their ad platform is extremely user-friendly)
6. Evaluate your data and readjust as needed
By understanding the above functionalities, marketers can position their brand’s Twitter content to be seen and engaged with by the 140-charactered masses.
