TWITTER BASICS FOR NEW FREELANCERS (OR ANYONE)

Welcome to Day 16 of the 31 Days of Marketing Your Freelance Business Series! For the month of October we are going to be covering a ton of different ways you can market your business and get more clients.

When used right, twitter can be one of your best marketing tools. If you’re brand new to the platform there are a few twitter basics you should know.

#1 Avoid the urge to link Twitter and Facebook

Linking up your social media accounts may seem like a great time saving short cut, but it really isn’t an effective strategy. Facebook and twitter are different platforms with different features and different audiences, and they should be treated as such. For example, when you @mention someone in twitter and autoshare that post to Facebook, the mention makes no sense. People that link these accounts look like amateurs that don’t understand the platform.

It is best to create unique content for each platform. This way you can take advantage of the features of each platform and make the most of your social media marketing efforts. It is totally fine to share some of the same content on Facebook and twitter, like all of your blog posts for example, just make sure the way they are written is a fit for the channel. You can easily create multiple messages with a tool like Hootsuite or CoSchedule.

#2 Share and retweet other content

There’s nothing worse than going to a party and getting stuck listening to the dude who only talks about himself. Nobody likes that guy. Don’t be that guy on twitter.

Mix in content from other sources in your twitter schedule. Credit the author, or just retweet it from their account. People looooove getting retweeted, so they’ll be grateful and may even return the favour by retweeting your content someday.

#3 Favourites

A ‘favourite’ on twitter is similar to a ‘like’ on Facebook. When you hit favourite the person who sent the tweet will get a notification, and a smile on their face since you took the time to let them know you are digging what they’re saying. Your favourites will also show up on your profile in your favourites feed, so anyone can see what you have favourited. Most people favourite any compliments or positive mentions of themselves so that those can appear in your feed forever.

#4 Use images in your tweets

Twitter made some changes a few months ago that put a much stronger emphasis on visual content. Since then, engagement on tweets with photos has skyrocketed! Tweets with photos get 150% more retweets so do yourself a favour and get on the twitter photo bandwagon. You can use an image from your blog post, do a screen grab, or create something in canva. The ideal size is 1024 x 512 pixels.

#5 Hashtags

Hashtags are a great way to find people talking about a certain subject. Do a little research and find some of the common hashtags your customers and colleagues are using, then add them to your tweets. Now your tweets are going to pop up when people are looking for info on that subject. Just don’t be a hashtag abuser. Keep it to 2 or 3 hashtags max per post, and don’t force it if it doesn’t fit.