RSS feedIn order to get unlimited traffic to your website from Twitter, it is important to understand what to tweet about and how to come up with a good tweet. Especially since you only have 140 characters to get your message across, it is critical to have it right. What should you tweet about? Here are a few examples:
- Insightful comments about current events in business, and/or articles
- Thoughtful and relevant responses to thought leaders
- Interesting news from the company: projects launched, events being held, awards won, new hires (and, if applicable, special offers)
Before you write your tweet, you should ask yourself the following questions:
- Why am I tweeting?
- Who is my intended audience?
- How can I make this more interesting?
- Would I enjoy reading this if someone else wrote it?
Now that you have answered these questions, you need to get ready to write your tweet. If you are referring to a person or an entity, you should find out if they have a Twitter account. If they do, make sure you reference it. This informs your readers about interesting people and businesses on Twitter and it will tell the people and/or businesses that you are talking about them, which will get their attention.
Always make sure to provide the context around what you are talking about and include a (shortened) link for others to check out the information for themselves. Use hashtags to make it easy for people to find all the tweets around a certain topic easily. 
Here are some examples of how to change a bad tweet into a good one. A bad tweet would be:
AutoMarker: Joan Balmers was great on Saturday Night Live last night.
This statement is of no good to anyone. They cannot find out more about what was said, so if they did not see it, they would have a hard time finding a way to get any questions answered or curiosity satisfied. You can turn this into a good tweet like this:
AutoMarker: Enjoyed @joanbalmers‘s funny explanation of bungy jumping on @Saturday_Night_Live http://bit.ly/UXOC
With this information they can tweet the person, find out what this person is tweeting about and follow the link to read more about the event you are referring to. Here is another example of a bad tweet:
AutoMarker: Reading an awesome article in Wall Street Journal about the BP oil spill.
This tweet does not give the reader of the tweet any opportunity to find the article, or figure out what the article was saying. No relevant information was provided, nor was there a link to go to the source. You can turn this tweet into a useful one as follows:
AutoMarker: Great article in @WSJ discussing the implications of the failure to end the BP oil spill http://bit.ly/ATIW
Not only does the reader of this tweet have a better understanding of what you are talking about, but they also have the ability to read the source text that prompted this tweet or send a tweet to the originator of the post. In other words they can take action if they so desire, which makes the tweet useful. Just providing your own experience is of no value. As you can see, by being more specific and adding the source of your information you can add a lot more value and it will benefit your reader.
As long as you are not just sending out affiliate links or links to your own sites this practice will help you establish a relationship with your readers. Are you paying attention to the layout and style of your Tweets? Is it making a difference for you? Any other suggestions to improve the effectiveness of tweets? Share your experiences with us. Leave a comment so we can all benefit.
