We spend plenty of time on Twitter every day, week and month; but why is it we’re doing it? Why not spend our time elsewhere? The very simple answer is that we get work and we gain enquiries from it. We’re a pretty honest bunch here; since I set this business up we’ve quoted for more than £250,000 from Twitter alone. Do we have a secret recipe for success? Not really; it’s nothing that you couldn’t do yourself, or we couldn’t train you to do.

The first port of call on the road to Twitter triumph is going to be to eradicate those very basic and simple errors we still see people making on a regular basis…

Twitter Sin 1: Tweeting only about yourself

Would you go to a networking event and not talk to anybody?

Ok so hands up if networking fills you with dread…perhaps for some the answer here might be yes, or more commonly, they might end up speaking to people they already know. Neither of them are going to cut the Twitter mustard I’m afraid; we get enquiries because we interact and we show interest in other people so if you’re only talking about yourself, or hardly ever tweeting, it’s time to step your game up.

Like. Retweet. Reply. Repeat.

Twitter Sin 2: Not using images

How many words does a picture paint again?

Oh that’s right, it’s a thousand! That seems a lot more than 140 characters so it should be a no brainer that at least some of your tweets include imagery with them, whether that’s gifs or photos. We often scroll through people’s recent tweets only to see a lot of text and no images. Twitter is full of information; those only tweeting in text are missing a real opportunity to stand out in a crowded market.

Twitter Sin 3: Automating from Facebook

Oh you didn’t just send me some automated stuff from Facebook did you?

Twitter yellow card, and be grateful it’s not a straight red! If you paste something onto Facebook then good, but how much more time does it take to tweet it? Is that extra 90 seconds going to be too much to handle?

Automating Facebook posts onto Twitter is a small time saver but is very poor practise and truth be known, you’re not going to get much from a short message, followed by an ellipsis and a FB url shortener.

What you will get is no engagement, no reach and no results.

Was it really worth that time saved?

Twitter Sin 4: Getting political

What do Donald Trump, Nigel Farage and Jeremy Corbyn have in common?

None of them should be tweeted about. We don’t talk about politics in our blog either. Let’s move on.

Twitter Sin 5: Not using analytics

Do you really know what it is they want?

So Twitter is all about content right? Does that mean you need to swamp it with a brain dump of everything you know about what it is you do? Almost certainly not! What it does mean is that you need to know what nuggets of gold they want to receive and will enjoy. How do you do that? By using the analytics available to you; Twitter show you how many people you reach with every tweet, and how many interactions it gains.

Other tools such as Hootsuite and Twittercounter will give you even more information; so using that to establish your most popular content and delivering more of it seems a bit of an easy win to me.

So that’s our first five! Are you guilty of any of them? We hope not, but if you are then don’t hang your head in shame, make the new year a time to start adopting a better approach to your Twitter account and we can guarantee that results will quickly follow. We’ll have another five errors we often see in our next blog post for you. Until then, happy Tweeting.