We sincerely hope Twitter plays a big part in your marketing strategy for the coming year, as it’s shaping up to be even more important in 2016 than it has been to date. With that in mind, we’ve looked at some of the big issues on Twitter over the last 12 months, what companies are doing wrong, what you need to avoid and what the future holds for the social media platform.
To start with, we recently looked at three moments that shook Twitter in 2015, and highlighted three of the trending topics that caused international shockwaves. If we said the words “the dress”, you’ll probably guess what one of them is – although you may not be clear on the colour. What this shows us is the power of Twitter to create a global storm and bring millions of people together at once, all talking about the same thing on the same platform. There is no other medium in the world that can do this – not even Facebook.
This is why you MUST be using Twitter for your business. The audience you can reach has no limits. The budget required is purely the time you’re willing to invest.
Running your business Twitter account poorly can lead to the ultimate in bad situations: picking up a Twitter parody account. We recently looked in great detail at parody accounts, what motivates them and how you, as a business owner, can avoid them. If you’re serious about using Twitter for business you’ll want to read the article as it contains some invaluable advice on what you should and should not be doing with your business Twitter account.
We also looked at one company in particular that really should read our anatomy of a Twitter parody account, and analysed exactly what they’re doing wrong with their Twitter. If you’re making any of these mistakes with your business Twitter you’ll need to rectify them immediately. Some of the mistakes are obvious, some not so much, but all can irreparably damage your online reputation and, consequently, your business.
Last week we also looked at a great feature of the Twitter scheduling software TweetDeck and how you can use it to see which members of Twitter have ‘muted’ your account. ‘Muting’ means someone wants to still follow you, but doesn’t want to see your tweets – therefore when you make a tweet you may think it’s going out to all of your followers but, in fact, anyone who has muted you will not see it.
This is a great hack because it will tell you the real number of people who will see your tweets. If you find more and more people are muting you, then you may need to change the types of things you are tweeting.
One final word on Twitter for this month – let’s look into the future of 2016. Last week rumours were abound that Twitter was expanding its 140 character limit to a slightly more roomy 10,000 characters. If you thought a Twitter timeline looked busy now, imagine how it would look then!
It should be noted these are just rumours at present, but ones which are being taken very seriously. However, don’t expect a timeline filled with huge tweets you have to scroll through – the idea is that the timelines wouldn’t look any different to what they do now. To see the longer tweets you would just click on the shorter, 140 character tweet and be taken to a new page on twitter with the expanded tweet. It would work similar to Facebook’s posts or LinkedIn Publishing.
It makes perfect sense too, as Twitter would be retaining people on their website instead of sending them elsewhere. This, of course, helps Twitter’s ad revenue with increased impressions.
These rumoured updates are further rumoured to happen before the end of Q1 this year. Is your Twitter strategy ready for this?
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