Posting on Facebook feels like traveling to the Emerald City to visit the Great Oz. You post a blockbuster article, or a hilarious behind-the-scenes photo, yet it’s some man behind the curtain that determines who sees it. What determines your “reach” on Facebook has little to do with variables that you control.
In contrast, Twitter is straightforward enough to let you maintain control of the factors that determine your visibility. This makes you responsible for its reach.
When using a tweet for content marketing, these are the variables you control, and the ways that you can improve each element:
- You control the copy: You have the ability to adjust your copy again and again to promote the same article. Test the title versus a quote versus pulling a snippet. Keep testing different clickable tweet formulas to get different results.
- You control when the tweet is delivered (and re-delivered): Whether you live-tweet or schedule posts, it’s in your power to decide when people read tweets. Rather than testing times by exhausting your followers with duplicate tweets, switch up your tweet copy each time you promote the article in the same day.
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- You control how a tweet gets shared: There are external factors at work here, but you have the ability to set up a tweet for success. The combination of great copy, room for comment, an @ with your name on it and even a please retweet increases your odds.
- You control the visibility: Instead of shouting your content aimlessly into the wind, you can use hashtags to define your content and inject it into existing conversations on relevant subjects. Any opportunity you have to @ someone in your tweet, use it because it gets the tweet in front of them and in front of their followers if they decide to retweet.
- Promoted tweets: If your ad budget includes room for Twitter ads, you can give your tweets preferential treatment to people with the demographics and interests that relate most to your content.
Tweeting sounds a whole lot like email marketing, doesn’t it?
The main difference is you can recycle content over and over again on Twitter. In fact, since nobody is monitoring their feed 24 hours a day, you could get away with promoting the same article five times in a day using a variation of these tips and a little creativity.
Next week I’ll follow up with the method we use to turn one article into 12 or more tweets that drive traffic all year long.
