Correct me if I'm wrong, but right after you've launched a blog, you'll immediately go and register a few social profiles for it. With Twitter and Facebook being the first ones.
But registering these social profiles alone does not bring you any visitors. You should have a solid SMM strategy if you want to be successful. And most importantly, avoid common mistakes that most bloggers make as they are starting out.
Just recently I asked 50 respected bloggers (including Ms. Ileane) for advice on Twitter Marketing, which made me recall some awfully stupid mistakes that I was making myself early in my blogging career.
And I am gladly sharing them with you today:
1. Tweeting All You Have In One Chunk
For a lot of people, tweeting is an activity that they’d like to get out of the way in one go at the start of the day, preferably when they’re sipping their morning coffee or enjoying breakfast.
However, if you tweet numerous times in the morning and that’s all you do for the entire day, you’re only going to get exposure tailored to people who check Twitter at that specific time.
Tools such as Buffer or HootSuite can schedule your tweets throughout the day so that you can get tasks done in the morning, even as your account remains active through the day.
2. Mentioning People The Wrong Way
If you start a tweet by @-mentioning someone without adding an initial character at the beginning of the tweet, the only people who are going to see your message are you, the person you’re @mentioning, and people who follow both of you.
If you want all your followers to see that mention, learn how to start tweeting like a pro and make sure there's at least one symbol in your tweet before you @-mention that person.
Check out how Gary Vaynerchuk illustrates this Twitter mistake in detail in this cool video!
3. Not Using Images
Pictures are a great way of interacting with your audience with Tweets today, as they provide compelling content. Twitter has recently introduced a feature that allows a portion of picture images to move through the feed naturally, providing a sneak peak to something that is typically more engaging than simply pasting in another URL to your blog.
Even if you just need to share words, adding in a graphic design or image when you're tweeting can cause that tweet’s popularity to skyrocket.
4. Not Motivating Readers To Tweet
Most bloggers have already settled with the fact that the vast majority of their readers never take action. Out of 100 people that read your article hardly 10 will bother tweeting it.
So we have to leverage all existing strategies and tactics to make our readers spread our content on social networks.
The two most common tactics are simply asking your readers to tweet your article and placing a tweet button right in front of their eyes. But recently lots of bloggers started implementing a new tactic that increases the number of tweets – “Tweetable Quotes”.
Tweetable quotes are catchy sound bites within a blog post that can be sent to Twitter with just a single click. People love sharing smart quotes on Twitter, so just write a few takeaways from your article and make them tweetable.
[tweet_box design=”box_04″]Are You Using Tweetable Quotes on Your Blog? Learn More [/tweet_box]
You can do that by using a free online service called ClickToTweet; or a premium WordPress Plugin – TweetDis.
5. Buying Your Followers
Some people think that they can just buy themselves a couple thousand followers and instantly appear as an influential, incredibly cool guy.
However, if you then tweet an article from one of your blogger-friends who checks his stats hoping for a flood of traffic only to see that nobody turns up, you’re going to end up feeling pretty embarrassed.
Buying followers shows how much you lack social skills and it simply doesn’t yield results. People who think that numbers are the only thing that matters for a presence on Twitter need to think again. Faking a bunch of followers is not going to get you anywhere; you need real, authentic traffic, leads and customers to make a real impact through twitter.
6. Neglecting to Use Hashtags
Hashtags are a fantastic opportunity for bloggers to sneak their way into trending conversations. Some studies even say that use of hashtags can double the engagement of your Twitter followers.
For example, the hashtag #throwbackthursday or #TBT could be utilized to mention one of the conversations that took place on a previous Thursday.
If you use hashtags strategically, then you can target your audience and reach potential followers in large numbers, helping to grow your influence and improve your fan-base.
7. Retweeting Everything that’s About You
If people are mentioning you in their tweets, that’s great, thank them by favoriting their tweets or replying to them, but don’t just retweet everything that mentions you and your company.
All that will do is make it look as though you’re desperately trying to win some kind of popularity contest. Just like constantly posting tweets all about yourself, it’s going to clutter up your followers feed and reduce your Twitter status and popularity pretty quickly.
8. Tweeting Your Own Links Only
If you’ve decided to use social media as a way to build your business – that’s great! However, the worst thing you can do is make your entire Twitter account devoted to promoting yourself.
Yes, push out information about your blog posts and the other things your website is doing, but remember to mention content that isn’t your own too. Link to news articles from your Twitter friends and other blogs that are relevant – if you find a good balance between promotion and appreciation of other information, your twitter presence will improve.
9. Losing Your Focus
So one day you’re tweeting about marketing on social media, and then you’re talking all about the argument you had with your wife last night about who should be the one driving your kid to school.
Never forget that people are following you on Twitter for a reason: they expect you to give them some very specific information. So once you lose your focus and start randomly tweeting about anything that surrounds you – your followers will stop paying attention.
Only Justin Bieber and Lady Gaga can get away tweeting random stuff that surrounds them, because that's what their fans want.
10. Forgetting to Act Human
Just because you need to stay on topic, doesn’t mean you should forget to act like a human. In an age where people are constantly being bombarded with different promotions, deals, and taglines, your personality is crucial if you want to stand out from the crowd.
Using automated replies and corporate jargon is going to send your audience packing pretty quickly. Remember, it’s not all about what you’re selling; you have to make sure that you followers care about what you’re saying too.
So that's it. I bet many of you guys are guilty of making some of these mistakes. But I am hoping that from now on your Twitter presence is going to be real smooth. And let me know if there's some outrageous Twitter mistake that I am missing. See you in comments.
Recommended Reading for Twitter Success:
- The Complete Guide to Using Twitter Lists Like a Pro
- The Tao of Twitter, Revised and Expanded New Edition: Changing Your Life and Business 140 Characters at a Time
- 5 Social Media Tools To Boost Your Results
- Embarrassed with Your Twitter Skills? Be a Pro in 14 Days
Excellent tips, Tim.
I just had a great experience enabling Twitter Cards for my sites,
that’s a fantastic way to increase your visibility and enhance your Twitter audience.
Also, I managed recently a Twitter Chat, another great way to get in touch with your followers and gain new ones.
Thanks for sharing your suggestions,
useful tips!
About point #1, I use to make this mistake at beginning of my online adventure.
Tweeting everything I had in few minutes and then nothing for days.
There are so many tools to help you schedule your tweets!
Like Hootsuite, for example (I use Pro version).
Have a great week!
BTW, Awesome design you have at your blog.
Hey Erik! Thanks a lot for your comment! Glad you loved the tips 🙂
Thank you Tim for this article.
You have mentioned almost all the mistakes that keeps away the users from success on twitter. #2,#5 and #8 are the biggest mistakes done by twitters on twitter.
I want to inform you about one more mistake that is responsible for failure in twitter is using the sites by the help of which users can exchange followers. There are many sites which allows their users to exchange their twitter followers which fills garbage in your follower list.
Tim and Ileane,
I so appreciate your tips here. I admit I need to be better about a few of these. I tend to be a little all over the place about what I share, and I had no idea about the characters before the mentions! That’s definitely good to know.
As far as creating tweetable quotes, I have a plugin called Quotable that I love. Have you ever seen it in action?
I’ll make sure to tweet this!
Brittany
Hey Brittany!
thanks for letting me know about Quotable.. never seen it before 🙂
Great tips. Thank you. I have another one. I think it’s great to ask questions on twitter and to use the answers in writing a blog post. However, it’s important to be clear that that’s happening and not to take the answers out of context. I was alienated, and angry, by one twitter user basing a blog post on my supposed “answer” to a question.
Hey Rachel.. Awesome tip indeed! But I didn’t include anything like that because this post is about mistakes you can make on Twitter.. and your tip is about using Twitter for crowdsourcing new ideas for content 🙂
Thanks for sharing these beneficial tips to get success on twitter. We learn lot of things with these methods.
Each Twitter novice MUST read this article. The second bullet point is really helpful. I thought i was good at twitter, but it turns out that I have made some mistakes too. Thanks once again!
Hey Tom… yeah.. we need to keep up with all the latest trends in social media if we want to succeed 🙂
These are some really interesting tips Tim, but I think the one that speaks to me most is your last point about forgetting to act human. I think we all need to remember to behave like we are chatting informally to our friends when we communicate with out audience. That conversational tone is the one that most people will engage with.
Can’t agree with you more! 😉
Exactly true things of comparing my twitter usage, Past I have created many tweets I’m used WordPress evergreen tweet plugin and many other social media automation tools, But no luck. So This time I know what was the mistakes. I will must buffer This Post. Thanks Tim.
I’m really glad you’ve enjoyed my tips, Noufal! Hope Ileane will give me a chance to share some more tips with you guys 🙂
These are great tips, Tim, many thanks. there are a handful of things that I will be doing differently thanks to these pointers.
Tim Soulo,
Thanks for sharing your article on Basicblogtips.com. when I start my blogging journey, I have made lots of mistakes. I did Twitter marketing in a wrong way, so i didn’t get any reader from twitter. I was worried. Then I have started reading online article on Twitter marketing and day by day my Twitter marketing strategy is being improved. Now I am getting some visitors from Twitter.
The mistakes which have been discussed here can’t help to run a successful Twitter Marketing Campaign. We have also found out the ways to solve this problems. Thanks for sharing such an wonderful article.
Hey Moumita! All of us make mistakes… but we just need to learn our lesson and move forward.. try harder.. and then we’ll inevitably succeed!
Thanks for your comment!
Hey Tim!
Excellent tips. Honestly, gaining twitter followers are more difficult compared to gaining Facebook followers/friends. Twitter needs more dedication and hard work. Oftentimes, I see that people horribly fail at twitter (I’m a live example and in fact this is the reason I do not have any active twitter profile) marketing.
Let’s hope that I get myself back on the track with your advice 😀
Great post Tim,
I used to write posts and individually share them, like sign in to multiple social accounts and realized that took a bit of time so i had them integrated with my wordpress to auto tweet or share on fb, so i wouldn’t have to go all over the place making sure if i did this or that. Thanks for the post
Hi Tim,
All the points which you mention in your article are very helpful in this scenario. And i am 100% agree with you that these mistake are the biggest hurdles of your success on Twitter.
Thanks for sharing such an informative article.
This was a great read I’m recently starting my own blog and Im actually scared, I have not started to use my twitter yet but this post have open my eyes and make me realize that if I want to be successful I really need to stop being shy with social media.
There’s no reason to be shy with social media 🙂 Just be valuable and entertaining and people will love you!
I personally learned taking time to write a natural headline with relevant hashtags on Twitter is a great way to get the discussion started. And, taking the time to personally respond to Twitter followers when they acknowledge your tweets is a great way to maintain a positive online relationship.
Another tip, never ever buy fake followers. They don’t do any good, and they will harm you. I noticed certain blog owners will have a 1k followers after 3 days of opening an account. That’s unusual!
Wonderful I have found my mistakes by reading this post. These are is really awesome tips about tweet. Thanks for giving these tips I will follow these now 🙂
You’re very welcome, Aquib 😉
The only one I’m really guilty of is the posting all at once mistake, I have used buffer in the past I must go back to that
Regards Dexter
hi Tim
Excellent tip, i wasn’t really aware that if you put mention in the beginning without any character than your followers don’t see that post.
Motivating readers to tweet is a wonderful case in point, i think it is not about settling with the fact that people will not tweet but it’s more about being more and more creative on this stuff. You have a valid point and click to tweet is a great tool for this.
Good post
Hey Harish… ClickToTweet is cool, but I prefer using a WordPress plugin for that.. it’s just more convenient and looks much cooler 🙂
Honestly i have been using twitter since the fisrt days of twitter , but could not reach any success with it maybe i am not a twitter person and i do almost all those mistakes you have mentioned. I will try to fix some 🙂
Hey Jossef! Make sure you focus on producing great content that is worth tweeting about.. and the followers will come naturally 😉
Wow, great tips!!
Yeah, I agree with the Drewry ‘s comment. We should take time to respond to our twitter followers when they acknowledge our tweets
Yeah, just like we should take time to respond to our article commenters. Right, Avinash? 🙂
Hi Tim,
Being stingy will certainly not get you anywhere. Your tips are so spot on and I’ve seen great growth utilizing many of the ideas you’ve shared in your posts.
I am a big believer in giving and sharing, and it has a great way of paying off. Everyone wants access to a new audience and connecting with people who serve the same audience you do but in a different way is a great way to gain access to it.
So, whenever I read great content I always, always, always tweet it out. You are so right, no one wants to see just your own posts. It says a lot about you when you engage with and share others.
It’s also critical when others share your posts to thank them and even extend the conversation sometimes on Twitter. It’s all about people connecting with people, not people reading tweets, right?
I really enjoyed your article and I hope you have an amazing week!!!
~ Don Purdum
Hey Don,
Thanks for your awesome comment.. but to be honest I think that at some point you just stop doing all these things.. If you have 50.000 Twitter followers – it’s impossible to thank all of them, communicate with all of them and tweet their content in return.. So I guess my tips are for people who are just starting building their personal brand on Twitter 🙂 what do you think about that?
I’m guilty of topic 2 discussed, I had no idea that mentions were so tricky. All are great valid points.
Thanks, Jon 🙂 Hope you’ll use your mentions wisely from now on 😉
Guilty on more than one account! Not using images has been bugging me for a while but keep putting it on a backburner. I get enthralled in my feed and led off track!
Hey Michael,
If you saw the new design of Twitter – they’re putting a lot of emphasis on visual content. So I guess it’s a must if you want to stand out in Twitter feeds of your followers.
Brilliant post Tim- I’m still learning how to make good use of social media and although Twitter appears to be a little easier, its still not as easy as I thought. I have to admit i genuinely didn’t know that there was a right way and a wrong way to tweet to someone so that’s helped tremendously!
oh Maria… there’s so much stuff you can do with Twitter 🙂 I’m actually writing a Twitter Marketing course right now and I’m overwhelmed with all the information that I should structure and explain there 🙂
What a helpful post this is. Thank you for sharing. Learned lots of things especially the @mention and retweets. Thank you.
Hello Tim,
There are a lot of new tips for a person like me , who is just scratching head all time and come across a lot of information that was not expected to be related to just writing.
I love to write but now I feel only writing is not important, it’s something how you will make people hear what you want to share.
Here I got a lot of links about twitter, I will surely get through them. I hope I will get some followers and subscribers, but for that , now I know , I have to make people do that for me.
Thank for a great post.
Hey Andleeb! The best way to get followers on Twitter that I know so far is become a person worth following.
If you’re someone that people are naturally interested in – you’ll get tons of followers. One way to do it is to become expert in some very specific niche and teach people about it 🙂
Tim,
Good points here. These points are the most dreaded to me:
3. Not Using Images
5. Buying Your Followers
9. Losing Your Focus
I think 5. is most common but people don’t realize they’re exposing themselves as phonies for doing this! When you have 200k followers and no retweets in a week? Fishy.
As for the others points, this is something that can easily happen. But with focus and dedication we can beat these bad haibits. Thanks for writing these great reminders.
Regards,
Luke Guy
Hey Luke Guy,
Thanks for the feedback 🙂 Twitter is a very cool tool for both marketing and fun 🙂 People just need to learn some basic stuff on using it the right way
Guilty of almost all of them, thanks for the article.
Indeed buying Twitter followers is the worst strategy you can follow.
I’m not so active on Twitter and as a result I have few followers however things will change in short time. Thanks fir sharing these great tips Tim.
You should never buy Twitter followers, Facebook Likes, or anything that doesn’t truthfully reflect the interest in your Blog/Business.
Hello Tim
Thank you for spending your time sharing this valuable content. Before i have failed with my twitter marketing. But i will read all those tips that you mentioned above to fix my previous mistake.
Thank
Nice tips Tim Soulo. But in Malaysia, the twitter still not very famous to user. Facebook is the only one many internet user like to share instead twitter. But as a blogger, you are right, i’m not motivate reader to tweet my articles
i’d say the hastag and @ sign is suprisingly underutilized. if you have the content and are posting on twitter, why are you not doing this! people will find yours tweets/posts easier.
by obey to these tips we can increase our popularity on tweeter.
thanks
Hi Tim,
Such a nice post from you 🙂 , It was a great article to know many of the stuffs like hubspot,Hoosuite. I learned from my mistakes.
And you said about the tweetable quotes, I understand that we should add a inspirational or catchy quotes along with our info, Isn’t right ?
Like to hear from you,
Siva
These are great tips, Tim, many thanks. there are a handful of things that I will be doing differently thanks to these pointers