SEO Blog | Ingredients: SEO, Business, Tech & You

How to Write Twitter Updates the Right Way

All business professionals should be using Twitter to spread the word about their work. It’s fairly easy to set up a Twitter account and to get rolling on the site. However, it’s not nearly as easy to figure out how to write the kinds of things that are going to drive traffic from your Twitter account to your website. That’s because we’re not used to marketing ourselves in 140 characters or less. It takes a new set of skills to be able to do this effectively. Once those skills are learned, however, this can be one of the easiest ways to continually drive people to check out your business.

The first thing that you need to learn how to do when writing Twitter updates is to get attention. Think of every Twitter update as a headline. When people write headlines for magazines, press releases and even blog posts the main goal is to make sure that the headline is eye-catching. It needs to have some shock value. It needs to be controversial. It is often on a topic related to the hot issues of the day. Your Twitter updates should be the same way. When you write an update ask yourself, “would I click on that to learn more about the rest of the story?” If your answer is no then you need to work on your headline-writing skills.

As you’re learning to write like this, you’ll find that you often get stuck because of the word count limit on Twitter. To avoid this, you must learn to be very direct in what you post. Eliminate all unnecessary words and rephrase to shorten the announcement. For example one update may start out as: “My business has a new product that we want you to check out. Let us know what you think.” You could alter that to read “Review our hot new product”. Of course, that’s not headline worthy so you’d throw in something to say why it is; for example you could go with: “Review our product; it’s hotter than Paris Hilton’s new jeans” or whatever the latest headlines are that day.

Finally you should make sure that you’re using proper Twitter etiquette when posting your updates. If you’re re-posting something that someone else posted, you should include an RT at the beginning to show that it’s a Re-Tweet. If you’re replying specifically to someone on the site, make sure that you’ve included the @name at the beginning of the post. There are a lot of great informative articles out there where you can learn about hashtags and other Twitter shorthand. And of course, make sure that you don’t have unintended typos in your posts. You want to come across smart at all times!

This article brought to you by the SEO experts at Real Deal Technologies.