Publishers, let’s talk about the social network you’re not focused on right now and should be–Twitter.
Yes, it’s true, Twitter doesn’t have the built in traffic faucet like Facebook — only 22% of U.S. adults use it. But, the Americans that are on Twitter make up publisher's target demographic(s): high income earners, educated, and the hard to reach/convert millennials. In fact, 77% of Americans who earn more than $75,000 per year are on Twitter, users are 3x more likely to be younger than 50 than older, and 42% of adult U.S. Twitter users have at least a bachelor’s degree. (Pew Research & Omnicore)
Unlike other mass market social channels designed to keep your experience within the platform, Twitter is the only social media platform that users go to and expect to be linked out of. Users go on Twitter to get their news, keep up with what is trending, and —of course— read 140 character tweets of their friend’s fleeting thoughts… inherently, the platform is a collection of links out to other websites, an important distinction to understand when setting your Twitter strategy.
Also unique to Twitter, a users’ timeline is not shown chronologically, but rather, algorithmically ranked tweets show up first, then ICYMI tweets from accounts you usually engage with, and then tweets are in reverse chronological order. The algorithm favors rich media, including GIFs, videos, images and polls. Videos are 6x more likely to be retweeted than photos and 3x more than GIFs. Hashtags serve as a valuable tool that put your tweets into a feed specifically for that hashtag. Communities are formed around these, and people continuously engage with them over time. Take for example, #MarketingTwitter, a place where marketers can answer questions, give advice, and seek wisdom from other marketers.
Like all other social media platforms, engagement is key to showing up in those ‘ranked’ tweets presented to a user at the top of their feed. Two-way communication is key to engagement. Ask your followers questions, use relevant hashtags, piggyback on viral memes, and participate in the conversations that happen daily on Twitter about events in your local community. Monitor your mentions for at least an hour after you’ve posted, engage with comments and replies, retweet relevant comments to your following.
With the goal of bolstering site traffic from your Twitter audience, let’s start with the basics on upping your Twitter game by leveraging your author’s audiences, tagging other users, tweeting out links, threads, pinned tweets and trending topics.
Publishers have a unique opportunity to not only leverage their audience, but the audience of their journalists and editors, creating a web of content that reaches their core demographic, by retweeting, quote tweeting or tagging editors and vice versa. Publishers on Twitter that are leveraging the platform for promoting their web content well are: @BulwarkOnline, @TeenVogue, @TexasTribune, @Morning Brew and @NYTimes. Let’s take a quick peek at how these publishers are implementing the content web, leveraging their audience and the audiences that follow their journalists to drive users back to their site.
Humanizing Editors
Everyone that works at the Morning Brew has it in their bio, has a coffee cup next to their name, extending their subject line branding into the Twittersphere. Each editor and member of the team has built their own audience, and leverages them to build the Morning Brew brand.
Tagging other Twitter users
On a Twitter user’s profile, there are two main sections of their content feed: Tweets and Tweets & Replies. Twitter uses this to filter out conversations between twitter users from the content they’ve posted. As a publisher, if you’re tagging another user in your content because they’ve been featured in an article, avoid starting these tweets with an @ sign. If you begin your tweet with an “@” then it will post in the ‘Tweets & Replies’ section, because it is viewed as a comment rather than a tweet and will be seen by fewer people. Colloquially, it is agreed upon to use a period before the @ sign as a way to tag another user as a subject of the tweet, rather than banter back and forth. Tagging authors notifies them they’ve been mentioned, and they’re likely to retweet their article to their followers, extending your reach to a new audience.
Leveraging the audience of your authors
In this example, Lisa Stardust, a contributor for Teen Vogue with ~3200 followers, wrote about how cats are communicating psychically (lol), and Teen Vogue retweeted that to their 3.3 million followers. Now two audiences have had the potential to engage with this tweet. Turns out, they do this a lot. Their authors have their own followings, and they’re able to leverage those, changing up their twitter feed content with other voices, all still linking back to their website.
Tweeting out the same link more than once
Pro tip, it is 100% okay and encouraged to tweet out the same link more than once, even on the same day. By leveraging the content of another user, perhaps a few of your authors retweet, you’re giving users another opportunity to visit your site website and another opportunity for engagement, and has another chance to show up in their follower’s feeds, like the Teen Vogue sample below
Threads
“A thread is a series of connected Tweets from one person. With a thread you can provide additional context, an update, or an extended point by connecting multiple Tweets together.”
Threads provide publishers an opportunity to engage with their readers in a more longform way, giving users more reason to click through to their website. Buffer has a great article about their Twitter thread experiment to increase engagement. Here’s an example of a thread from The Texas Tribune:
Users that were interested in the information likely engaged with the first tweet and read through to the last tweet. Users have an opportunity to get a snippet of the information provided in the article, but notice how the first tweet in the thread has 1.3k likes, and the last tweet has 1.8k likes. Here are a few rules to writing your first thread:
Include a link to the article you’re giving a summary of in every tweet in the thread
Label each tweet in the thread, (Texas Tribune did not do that in this tweet thread, but take a look at this other thread).
Don’t give the entire article away in a thread. Remember, the goal of the thread is to entice users to click through to your website. Use a thread to educate the user on the issue at hand in the article, leaving them curious to find out more of the ‘why’ in the article.
If there are any trending hashtags that are relevant to your thread, include them in the tweet.
Remember to tag your author, oftentimes they will retweet a thread that features them, giving you an opportunity to leverage their audience for traffic as well.
If you have any other threads on the same subject, or any tweets link back to them inside of your thread.
Retweet the threads of your editors or journalists
Trending Topics
Everyday on Twitter there is a topic that every avid user ends up finding out about. Ironically, while you never want to actually be the ‘main character’ as a publisher, you should always know who it is and what it is about. Oftentimes, you may have content on your site or in the archive that you can resurface and create a tweet or a thread about the topic at hand, riding the coattails of the main character of the day. Consider checking in on the day’s trending topics, in the afternoon, giving yourself time to find content resurface, and give your users a midday pick me up after they abandoned after your morning newsletter.
Twitter Moments
While anyone can create a moment on Twitter, it is another opportunity for publishers to create longer form engaging content for their audience or even to sell as sponcon (why a moment vs a thread?). The secret to creating a compelling Moment is choosing a great topic, and bringing it to life with thoughtful comments, dynamic videos, and beautiful images. In order to know what to include, first ask yourself a few questions:
Will my audience be interested in this topic?
Is it timely to the conversations that are happening in my community?
What keywords or hashtags can I use in the title or description to improve discoverability?
Do the Tweets I'm curating include images or videos that will interest my followers?
Does each of the parts that I’ve selected add up to a comprehensive experience?
Pinned Tweets
Pinned Tweets are Tweets that stay static on the top of your profile. When people visit your profile, the pinned Tweet is the first thing they see, regardless of when it was Tweeted. For publishers, this is an opportunity to link to revenue generating parts of your business or even to content that is relevant in the present moment. Take for example this screenshot from the NYT twitter account on the night of the VP debates:
Because the NYT was tweeting a lot that day keeping up with the debates in real time, they pinned the summary of the debates to the top of their Twitter feed. Providing their audience a quick link out of the live tweet storm to a static experience on their website. They also sold advertising on that page, knowing lots of people would visit it that day.
The Bulwark uses their pinned tweet to reference their journalists, linking out to their Twitter accounts, and includes a link to their plus subscription, which has more content for users that pay a monthly fee.
Teen Vogue is utilizing their pinned tweet to link users back to an event they recently hosted, in the hopes that users that did not engage with the content while it was live, would engage with the content after the fact.
Updating or keeping your pinned tweet timely, communicates to the user that your brand is actively engaged and committed to the platform.
I could go on. Want to talk about Twitter in more detail? Email me natalie@twentyfirstdigital.com.