Everybody wants tweets that drive conversation and ultimately sales but what one person would class as a perfect tweet another might not. Different techniques work for different people but the following tips might just help you craft tweets that get shared more, favourited more, engaged with more and most importantly drive even more traffic to your website.

Here’s my top 6 tips to creating a ‘perfect’ tweet:

1. Be specific

Keep your main message informative and to the point. It should be punchy and leave no doubt with the viewer what your tweet is about. If it’s a more conversational than promotional tweet ask something that requires a reply or offer a helpful piece of advice or industry insight.

2. Keep it less than 140 characters

This allows followers to retweet adding in their own hashtag or modify the tweet to make it more relevant to their followers. Keeping a tweet to around 120 characters should allow this. Twitter recently added the ‘Quote Tweet’ option which allows you to add a comment to the original ‘packaged’ tweet – much the same way you can do when you share someone else’s post on Facebook. It’ll be interesting to see what impact this has on the way people retweet and share content.

3. Add a link

If relevant, add a link to the main article or product/service page on your website giving them instant access to the details. Use a url shortener to allow you to track clicks – it also reduces the number of characters you use.

4. Add a photo

It’s generally agreed that Tweets with images are approximately 94% more likely to get retweeted but you must ensure that if you add an image you make sure it’s relevant and eye-catching. If you’ve got photo manipulation software you could consider adding branding or ‘text’ to your image to aid your character count message and retweet potential.

5. Reference a trend or company

If you’re promoting a product, service or event see if they’ve got a hashtag or username that you can leverage to try to get a retweet from or join in conversations surrounding the hashtag – it’s great for your business exposure.

6. Add a Twitter card

By ensuring the web page on your site you link to has an active ‘Twitter Card’ and using that url (long or shortened versions) it will include additional promotional content (text and optional image) to your tweets that don’t form part of your normal 140 characters limit. It’s important to note that if you have a Twitter Card set up for one of your web pages that this will override any image you may already have placed in your tweet.

Summary

There you have it – the potential ingredients for a ‘perfect’ tweet. With a limit of 140 characters you have to become more focused in what you want to say and be a bit inventive in the ways to achieve this using a combination of the above.

Don’t forget whether you’re promoting your own content or sharing others content you should always balance this with conversational tweets. Remember the principles of Twitter – listen, engage and share but most importantly ‘be more social’.

If you need any help with Twitter or want to know more about how social media can help your business get in touch with me at http://paulkirkdesign.co.uk or at @PKirk_designer