By: Gary Quinn, Head of Media, Tangerine PR, Manchester
I came across an excellent posting on the journalismnews.co.uk site and thought it was well worth sharing. It is all about creating news and content via twitter and Facebook and although it had ten top tips I’ve scaled it down to three, interspersed with my own thoughts too (for what they are worth).
Social Media Optimisation is the new SEO according to some experts and it seems to me to make perfect sense and the following tips will go a long way to improving how companies go about and improve their social media posting.
The guide includes lessons from experts in social media optimisation, who have all carried out research, analysing tweets and Facebook page updates.
1.Work out the best time to tweet using free tools
Leo Widrich, co-founder of Buffer, a platform that allows you to queue up tweets and post them at optimal times during the day, wrote an article for Mashable on five free tools to use to work out when to tweet.
He insists the best time to tweet is when most of your followers are tweeting too. Don’t be afraid of your post getting buried, this is the time to get the most exposure.
He said: "When the most traffic happens and when actually the most tweets go out is also the best time for you to tweet, which is sometimes counter-intuitive as people will think tweets will get buried and no one will see them. It's really during work hours when most tweets will happen that you will also get the most exposure."
Of course what he hasn’t touched upon here – but we will come onto later – is how to ensure your tweet stands out and doesn’t get buried.
2. Tweet often
Journalism.co.uk found that the five journalists with the greatest online influence tweet around 10-25 times a day. Other reports reveal that Twitter A-listers tweet an average of 22 times daily.
That research is based on individual journalists rather than news outlets, which generally auto-tweet as stories go live. But in order to encourage a growing audience, it is necessary to tweet often. This shows the level of commitment to tweeting that is necessary to compete with the major players. However this isn’t necessary from most companies as it could seem like overload, a steady stream of between three to six tweets a day should suffice.
Interestingly there is also a school of thought that says it can be beneficial to tweet a story more than once.
Leo Widrich said: "The idea, especially with Twitter, is that the frequency is nearly as important as the timing.”
He recommends tweeting news stories three to five times: one when the news story goes live, once a couple of hours later and then a third time the next day. I guess, depending on how important the story you are posting is, this can be scaled back or not but for big company news it would work really well and shows that perhaps many of us are not making our tweets work hard enough for us at present.
3. Ask questions and tease new stories to encourage people to comment and like
Tweets are content and we all know that content – whether online or offline – is king! There is still some way to go before many people fully understand the tricks and the methods to present your content in the most interesting way possible but here are just a few excellent suggestions.
When posting a link to a story write a tease in a way that tries to get people to comment or like. Don’t reveal all in your 140 characters because if you do then there is no incentive or necessity to click through and engage.
It is geared towards trying to get people to take actions that explicitly show the algorithm that they are interested in your content. Without a tease or a question there is no invitation for engagement.
It is linking and commenting that you should be seeking.
Some really interesting points I hope you’ll agree and if you want to see the full posting simply click here . For me what is so exciting about this area is that it is evolving before our very eyes and growing and developing daily. Now who wouldn’t want to be part of that?
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