e Twitter Engagement Recommendations

2

Twitter engagement recommendations

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3 TWITTER Recommendations

Use Twitter for: •  Signposting to richer content elsewhere

•  Timely news updates

•  Regular conversation and engagement through multiple daily tweets

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4 TWITTER

1. Don’t overcomplicate it – be honest, transparent and human 2. Tweet about things your followers care about – what is affecting them? What is newsworthy? What do they need to know about, quickly? 3. Use Twitter to signpost to the website or blogs, where the detail is. 4. Seize the moment- engage with followers in a timely way – leverage journalists and staff in the field to provide real-time, engaging content. 5. Be strategic – link to and follow other people in the service, industry and field. 6. Be supportive – follow and retweet other users, link to news stories from partners and they might reciprocate. 7. Optimise your profile – make sure it contains relevant keywords and a link (Twitter List) to all company’s websites.

GUIDELINES AND PRINCIPLES

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5 TWITTER

8. Personalise your page – use imagery and photos to bring the page to life 9. Follow a content calendar – regular tweeting every day. Adjust timings depending on location of the followers. 10.  Use hashtags - join in relevant Twitter conversations and trending topics by using #hashtags.

11. Theme your conversations - consider focusing on one topic for a day or a week. Use a #hashtag within your tweets – e.g. #govdigistat. 12. Ask questions - Use Twitter to conduct research, to glean ideas, to thank staff/departments and to ask questions of your followers. 13. Include links to relevant web content - tweets containing a URL are three times more likely to be retweeted.

GUIDELINES AND PRINCIPLES

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6 TWITTER

14. Measure your links’ popularity - Use free URL shorteners like bit.ly whenever including a link. 15. Have one regular, daily tweet - Consider sharing a “Photo of the Day” or “News Item of the Day.” It gives you a chance to link back to your website or blog. 16. Be courteous - Respond to people when they mention you. Reply when people ask questions. Remember this is about two-way conversation. 17. Be succinct. Leave enough characters at the end of your tweet to enable people to manually retweet it. 18. Rephrase it, then tweet again. It’s OK to use the same tweet more than once, as long as it’s reworded and spread out.

GUIDELINES AND PRINCIPLES

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7

Creating a Twitter content calender

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8 WEEK view: example content calendar 12 - 18

12 Monday 13 Tuesday 14 Wednesday 15 Thursday 16 Friday 17 Saturday 18 Sunday

Twitter Event Opinion Topic Policy Release Nr of Tweets Personal Personal / Retweets

Blog X X

Sharing Video content

x X X

Infographics X X

Images x x x

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9 Conclusions

•  Make sure your Twitter activity is aligned with the goals of your business

•  Plan the topics ahead using a content calendar, and make sure your activities are compatible with other channels, such as Facebook, LinkedIn and blog posts

•  Add value to the Twitter community, share interesting resources and news, communicate with others rather than being purely promotional

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10 THE SOMAZI EFFECT

This presentation is a part of the SoMazi Social Media Resources series. For more presentations, reports and learning materials, go to http://www.somazi.com/resources/ . SoMazi has offices in London, New York, Bergamo and Geneva. We’d love to hear from you. E-mail: contactus@somazi.com Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/SomaziWW Twitter: https://www.twitter.com/SomaziWW Pinterest: http://pinterest.com/Somazi

Authors

Ewa @Ewajoan

Marlies @MsSpijker

Clementina @CGZatSomazi