5 fast ways to up your library’s Twitter game

I spend a lot of time on Twitter.  Nevertheless, it is a tricky social media tool to get right.  Things move so quickly, and engagement is perhaps more elusive than on some other platforms.  I’m always looking for new tips, so I’m sharing some of my recent finds.

1. Use up (nearly) all the characters.  In SimplyMeasured’s 2014 benchmark report, which analyzed more than 23 million engagements, tweets with over 120 characters averaged twice as many engagements as tweets with fewer characters.  Don’t use all 140 characters available, but use more than 120.
2. Use IFTTT to post your Instagram pictures.  If your library also has an Instagram account, you may have experienced the frustration of posting directly from Instagram to Twitter.  Pictures don’t show up on Twitter, when posted from Instagram. You can bypass this by using IFTTT to do your posting for you.  (If you’re not already familiar with IFTTT, you are missing one of the greatest workhorse tools on the Internet.)  Then your Instagram pics show up as regular Twitter images, in people’s timelines.
3. Make hashtags a habit.  A study done by Buddy Media found that adding hashtags to tweets can double the engagement rate.
4. Space tweets out.  Dan Zarrella, well-known social media data scientist, found that tweets that had sufficient gaps between them had higher click-through rates.  Space your tweets at least 30 minutes apart.
5. Put links early in.  Zarrella also found that the click-through rate was higher for tweets where the link was placed only one quarter of the way through.  This is different than than the typical placement of links at the end (and a hard habit to break, I’ve found!).

What other quick tips do you have for Twitter?  Please share in the comments.