by Angela Hemans | Feb 6, 2018 | Twitter Marketing
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It’s official! Twitter has moved from 140 characters and doubled it to a 280 tweet character limit for most countries around the world. It was a move Twitter was considering for a while, and finally, they jumped the broom and made it available to everyone.
The increased character limit is actually good news for business owners using Twitter. The potential to capture your audience with Twitter content has become a little easier. If you have stayed away from the social network because of the 140 limit, you can come back today. You have more leeway to communicate with your community.
Twitter has many moving parts that can make the platform awkward to maneuver around. There many businesses that still choose not to incorporate it into their social media mix. Let’s face it; this network is still relevant for building brand awareness, creating initial conversations, connecting with influencers, and creating a long-lasting business relationship.
Are you ready to give Twitter another try? Here are a few best practices to help you efficiently use the new character limit.
Do: Choose to be creative with your tweets.
There are so many creative ways to make your tweets stand out in the sea tweeters. With 280 characters you can now get your point across better and still be able to add images, gifs, and bitmojis.
Don’t: Be annoying
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Don’t be that person! If you’re wondering about the different ways you can annoy somebody, I’m happy to share.
- USING ALL CAPS FOR 280 CHARACTERS!
- All 280 characters worth of emojis
- Repeating the same sentence in a tweet as many times as you can
- Using 280 characters when it’s plain to see that you can sum it up and 100
Now you can’t please everyone all the time and feel free to do what you think is best for your Twitter account. There is a Saying that “too much of one thing is good for nothing,” Which means that you will probably annoy some people with any tweet that is repeated too many times.
Do: Have a choice of using all 280 characters
I must admit I wasn’t in favor of Twitter increasing their limit. I love the brevity of platform, which is one reason why I am personally attracted to the platform. But now that we have 280 characters to use, I thoroughly enjoy it. I believe it is helpful during Twitter chats, ongoing conversation, and back and forth banter. Every tweet doesn’t need to be 280 characters to get your point across. Just because we have space doesn’t mean it should be used it.
Ask for Liz which is a good friend of mine and does a great job with pairing text and imagery in less than 280 characters. She gets her point across.
Don’t: Create spam messages
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What is spam? I would consider it, unwanted sales pitches, salesy contents directly sent or tagging someone. You can still tag people on Twitter but to tag people continuously and unwantedly can be considered spam. You have more characters to use for good, take a moment to at least introduce yourself, before outright trying selling. Too many spam messages will get you blocked by people on Twitter and eventually banned by the Twitter platform.
Do: Tweet often
There are millions of tweets being shared every hour, how do you get through all the noise? One way to do it is to tweet more often. Tweeting only one to two times a day will not cut it if you’re trying to build an audience grow your brand become an influencer and generate leads. If you don’t tweet, you will be forgotten, And that’s a fact. There is no magic number of times to tweet. It is merely a test and trial journey. Are you currently tweeting 2 times a day? Then step it up to 5, if you’re tweeting 5 times a day try tweeting 8 to 10 times today and so on.
Don’t: Make all of your tweet about your services and products
People need to know what products and services you offer, and it’s okay to share it. But there are other ways to let people know you have something to offer without always saying it. One way you can do that is by sharing your excitement over something that has happened, or your frustration with your business without giving all the details. Here’s an excellent example from Jennifer Michelle. The tweet builds excitement surrounding her business and makes you want to know more. By sharing similar tweets, people will revisit your twitter account to understand more about you and take an interest in your business.
by Angela Hemans | Aug 11, 2016 | Marketing, Twitter Marketing
Have you reached your 5,000 Twitter following limit? And now you’re unable to follow any more of your target community?
To continue growing your followers, you’ll want to consider removing your inactive, fake, and unfollowers so that you can continue connecting successfully. (If you’re not sure how, read How To Remove Inactive And Unfollowers From Your Twitter Account blog post, I wrote earlier)
Why is this even necessary?
Twitter has a stupid rule that once you reach 5,000 Twitter community members, you can not add more than about 10% of your current following. (Remember all numbers are relative, and slightly differently per account)
According to Twitter’s https://support.twitter.com/articles/68916 policy, It’s done to limit the strain of the platform and limite the abuse.
The sad truth is, we really don’t authentically connect with that many people on Twitter and we don’t NEED more than 5000. But having the option to connect with more is an option that is needed based on your determined marketing goal.
What are some reason to have more than 5000 Twitter following?
- The number of people you’re connected with on Twitter can be a valuable asset to your business and personal brand.
- For market research
- Bring in new customers
- Hey, who doesn’t want a bigger Twitter community!
But whatever your reason is for wanting more followers, having the option to do so, is what we all want on any network.
So how do you get around this small but aggravating issue?
Let me start by saying, Congratulations on reaching your 5000 Twitter following limit!
I’m happy you hung in there on Twitter to achieve that goal. But what can you do about the hold on your account.
- You can wait till you have more people following. If you’re impatient like me, this is probably not the option you’re hoping for. But if you are not in any rush. Keep tweeting, keep engaging and being helpful to others, and you will find that people will add you to their community.
- Manually unfollow accounts. You can go to twitter.com/yourprofile and start removing people you haven’t connected with, those that haven’t bother to follow you back, and followers who have given up on Twitter. It’s another time consuming option but faster than the first and will free up your account so you can continue growing your Twitter community.
- Use a tool to unfollow accounts. There are quite few tools that you can use that have free and paid version to help with making the process quicker and less time consuming. One tool, I recommend is ManageFlitter. It has a freemium, which allows you to remove 100 people every 24 hours and there is a paid option that allows you to remove the upper limits allowed by Twitter. If you don’t have time, then consider using any number of tools that are out there.
Growing your Twitter account shouldn’t be a hassle! Take control of your account so that you can connect with anyone AND everyone that you want to.
If you absolutely, don’t want to deal with having to do this yourself, then have someone do it for you! Let us save you time and effort to clean up your Twitter account, connect with us and tell us how we can help you. Get all the details here. https://www.angelahemans.com/twitter-services/twitter-clean-up/
by Angela Hemans | Jun 6, 2016 | Twitter Marketing
Starting a new Twitter account or taking over and rebranding an old one?
Maybe you’ve noticed that you’re unable to add new Twitter followers and your account has too many unwanted fake or inactive followers?
Do you want to remove those less than desirable people from growing Twitter community, so you can start connecting with those you really want to be connected to?
Keep reading, I’m going to share with 4 tools to remove those inactive and unfollowers from your Twitter account, so you can start enjoying your Twitter experience!
Now, I have to share that Twitter terms of services doesn’t allow for bulk removal of Twitter followers because basically this option has been abused too many times.
To a certain extent, unless you have someone doing it for you, there is some manual work involved with all Twitter tools when cleaning up your Twitter account yourself.
- Twitter.com
The safest way to clean up your account is by going straight to the source itself. When you go to your list of followers, on everyone’s profile it will tell you whether they are following you or not.
You can choose base on relevancy if you want to continue to be connected or unfollow them. Simply click unfollow everyone that is not relevant to the community you want to grow.
Although this process is simple to do, it’s also one of the most time-consuming methods on this list.
- CrowdFire
Similar to other Twitter tools Crowdfire has a freemium price point that allows you to remove 50 followers from your account daily. It’s easy to log in using your account and automatically shows you who is following you and who isn’t.
It provides several options, that you can choose to pick from:
- Whitelist people who are not following you. Whitelisting if for adding people or brands that will probably never follow you back, but you are still interested in reading and receiving tweets from them.
- Reply to them on a Twitter message
- Add them to a Twitter list that you’ve created.
- And a big red circle that allows you to unfollow.
- Untweeps.com
Is another free to tool that puts all of your unfollowers in a list that you can check off to be removed. My only issue with the website, is that it’s a bit hard to look at for a long period of time, it’s not the most visually appealing site.
But as a free tool, I really can’t complain, it does what it says it can do!
What options do you have with Untweeps?
You can choose the number of days between your unfollowers last tweet days. This is helpful because the person may not have followed you back because they haven’t tweeted in a few days.
That’s a decision you have to make. If you’re not the most active on Twitter, then you may want a bigger time frame to consider when removing a follower. So if they are not active between 45-60 days then you may want to unfollow.
If you’re like me, I remove followers who are not active in about 30 days, but that’s my preference. It doesn’t have to be yours.
On Untweeps, you also have the option to Whitelist Your Unfollowers. There is a Pro version that you can pay for, if you have more than 7500 Twitter followers. And if you want to use the platform more than 3 times per month you will have to pay to upgrade.
For a small account, this program can be useful for maintaining your account.
- Manageflitter.com
Currently, this is my tool of choice! Manageflitter has a freemium business model. The website is easy on the eye and also simple to use.
It does everything all the other tools, I’ve shared in this post.
- Whitelist Twitter followers
- Responds to people’s tweets
- Remove the inactives
- Remove the unfollowers
- Or consider removing people who are not consistent on Twitter.
- Plus you can add people to different targeting options.
You get to remove 100 people every 24 hours with the free version and within Twitter limits on the paid.
Ultimately, what network you use to clean up your account is solely based on your preferences, needs, and finances. All of them are free to use, so you can test them out, it won’t take you long to figure out which one you will prefer using.
