PowerPoint Presentation

DDD

November 2015Using Twitter to Bolster Your Brand

After overhauling our Social Media strategy in May, we have been able to gain some valuable insight about what does and does not work for our brand. I will share some tips, tricks, and tools of the trade that you should consider for your own social media strategies. 2

About Education WeekEditorial Projects in Educationthe nonprofit publisher of Education Week, edweek.org, the Education Week Teacher online site, Digital Directions, and other print and digital productsis the leading independent provider of news and information in K-12 education.

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Presentation DetailsPicturesLive and Post TweetingTwitter Tips and Tricks

Here are the main points we will cover in this short presentation. 4

Our Picture ExplorationALWAYS try to use pictures in Social Media.

Our motto in our office is pics or die. If you do not use a picture, your tweet will not get nearly the amount of impressions or engagements that it could. Always try to include pictures. 5

Why?

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This is the reasoning that we found behind using pictures. At least for the Education Week brand, we have found that numbers across the board rose significantly when we used pictures. The impressions; however, do not increase nearly as much as the engagements. We are seeing such large numbers in engagements because users want to interact with eye-catching content. They are drawn in by the colors, and they retweet because of the content. The most important number for our brand is link clicks. Every person that clicks the link is brought to our webinar page and has the possibility of signing up. Because we used pictures, for example, a user is 333% more likely to go to the webinar page. The more effort or action you put into a tweet, the more likely you are to get a reaction in terms of retweets, favorites, or link clicks.

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Live Tweeting

Everyone always thinks to post about their event leading up to it. This; however, is definitely not a stopping point. As soon as the event begins, it is a treasure trove for new information that you can use in your social media. You can utilize this newfound content in live tweeting and post tweeting.

When live tweeting, it is important that you do these main things:

Tweet as often as possible without making mistakes. Include relevant quotes to intrigue users who may be interestedInclude Q and A but avoid telling them the answer. This incentivizes them to join the webinar/event. Check the length of your tweet as you write. It cant go above 140 characters. Tag relevant actors so they see it in real time and retweet you. Also use relevant hashtags whenever there is room. People who regularly check those hashtags may join your event or webinar that normally wouldnt see that it exists. This is the most acceptable area to not use pictures. 7

Post Tweeting

Post Tweeting Best PracticesCreate post-tweets that include quotes or content from the webinar. This is where you can get the most creative because you have content and most importantly, time. Tag the people that said it, and try to get the tag of the sponsor or who the person works for in the Tweet content. This way, theyre more likely to see it. People are also more likely to interact with content that directly relates to them or someone they work with. Post tweet as close to the end of the event as possible. This way, sponsors and related users will still be keeping an eye out for the content. This will increase engagements. We typically create 8-10 different post-tweets and schedule them consecutive days after the webinar. 5 of those 10 tweets typically have photos. We have yet to find any evidence that there is such a thing as too many post tweets. Make as many as possible while ensuring that content is fresh and worthy of being showcased. Feel free to reuse posts as well. Twitter content becomes irrelevant so quickly, make it relevant again by tweeting about it later. The frequency really depends on how often you typically tweet. The best post-tweets are pictures, quotes, or thought-provoking questions. We will talk more about this later though.

**We followed many of the rules above in the tweets we have showcased. The first one, for example, got 16 retweets, 20 favorites, over 6,000 impressions, and 28 link clicks. This link click component is the most important, because 28 people may have watched the webinar after its air date from this post, which is the goal of these tweets. 8

Benefits

In just our first few months of the adjusted strategy we began to notice a rise in our numbers across the board. We found that live and post tweeting increased our brands reach. These sorts of posts garnered more impressions, retweets, link clicks, and favorites than our other posts. We will now look into which posts specifically produce which results. 9

Tweeting With Pictures

Here we reiterate why you should use pictures when tweeting. In this case, when live tweeting you increase your impressions and link clicks. For webinars, link clicks are the most important interaction you can get. It brings more people to the webinar page that may be consumers of the advertisers product.

In terms of favorites and retweets; however, there was no statistical significance that using a picture correlated to more engagement. 10

Asking a Question

Similarly successful results are found when you ask a provocative question when live tweeting. 11

Using a Q&A

Tips and TricksThank sponsors

Thanking sponsors does a few things. It shows your appreciation of their business and partnership. It lets them know that you plan on creating content to make them look good. It makes them more likely to engage with your contentthey are a brand as well and want their webinars to get as many views as possible. Even if they dont engage, their users can still see that theyre tagged and it may bring in more vie13

Utilize Tweetdeck

Tweetdeck makes your life 10x easer---and the best part? It is absolutely free. With Tweetdeck, you have the unique function of scheduling tweets. This is not present on the actual Twitter page. Not only can you schedule your own tweets, but you can use it as a way to monitor particular pages. Commonly people would have a sliding update column of their homepage. They will also have one of their notifications. You also have the ability to create lists of users you generally tend to retweet or keep up with. This tool aggregates them all into one customizable deck. This will cut down on your time searching for things to Retweet. It will give you more time to engage with relevant content, and ultimately increase your presence on Twitter. 14

Create a Social Media LogAccountabilityEven out posting timeFind gaps in Tweeting

Creating a social media log has been extremely helpful in our own use of social media. Its a great way to track what posts are going out which days. It also allows you to better manage scheduling of posts far into the future. By social media logging, youre able to have intern turnaround with little need to fill them in. You also can have multiple people scheduling social media at the same time without overlapping tweet times and constantly needing to cross-reference with Tweetdeck. You also are able to have a visual representation of the tweets going out each day. If you see some days are more sparse, then you can fill it in easily with more. You also can have a better idea of how many tweets youre sending per month before it is too late to add more content. This can also act as an archive of tweets youve already done. 15

Utilize Twitter Analytics

A basic tool that many organizations dont know about, nor use to its full potential is Twitter Analytics. This is another free tool that requires very little technical know-how. In Twitter analytics, it will give you summaries of your data based on a time period that you specify. It could be December 2011 or November 2015 and it is just as simple. Many companies can use this as their sole social media reporting. Others, like us, utilize this as a means to drastically cut down our report times to 1 hour versus 5 hours previously.

It will automatically give you your top tweet, top mention, top follower, etc. It allows you to see readily your impressions, number of tweets, new followers, and more. Across the top, it also tell your how your tweets are doing compared to the previous week.

If this isnt enough, it allows you a more in-depth look at every tweet, and has a quick function to export data that you can use to create charts or your own analysis. 16

Keep Investigating New Apps

There are always new apps being created to make your job easier. You just have to stay savvy and understand where to look.

Canva drastically changed our ability to promote our own pictures. It made creating our own quote art faster and more put-together than ever before. TweetJukebox allows you to randomize posting of particular content over certain periods of time. It also will automatically thank your top interactors for the week. FollowerWonk is a new venture of ours. It is basically a more in-depth version of Twitter Analytics. It also has the unique feature of allowing you to better understand your audience. There is a free version that gives you a lot of information. I would recommend paying for the paid version ($99) once a year to get more in-depth analysis of your strategy. You can find new users to follow by typing in keywords that users have in their bios. It allows you to directly compare yourself to your competitors. It even gives you a Social Authority score that is based on the users influential content on Twitter. This then gives you ideas about how to improve. It gives you the most active hours of yourself and your followers to better tailor the timing of your tweets. It gives you word clouds of the most used terms from people you follow. Using this, you can better change your verbiage to reflect what your users care about. It even has a beta version of inferred gender of your audience as well as ages. With the paid account, you can sort your followers. This can allow you to sort via interests so you can better target them with DMs and content. For example, we use this feature to DM district level leaders personally.

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RememberYou can ALWAYS keep improvingThere is never a stopping point of perfection

Questions?