Since its launch in 2006, Twitter has amassed a staggering 500 million users (an estimated 20 million accounts are fake) with China leading the way as the country with the most users – 35.5 million.
170 billion tweets have been sent over the past seven years, with an average of 400 tweets per day. The majority of users access the platform via a mobile device.
View the latest Twitter stats in this Wishpond infographic. Click to tweet this
Backed up by research from Hubspot, here are seven tips to help you drive your Twitter marketing forward.
“Title tweets” start each word with a capital letter — just like a headline. They are tweets with just the title of a blog post or article and the link to that article. There are no extra words. However, a “copy tweet” presents the article or blog post as a sentence or question.
Hubspot’s research showed that their average tweet copy got an average of 98 clicks, while headline-based tweets got an average of 110 clicks.
Insider Tip: The fundamental rule of clickable tweets is the same as the rule of clickable headlines. No matter how amazing your content is, few people are going to click through to read it if they’re not immediately captivated by your headline. Read 15 Ways To Crack Captivating Headlines to find out more about creating better titles for your tweets.
A URL shortener is an online tool that converts a regular URL into an abbreviated version that is around 10 to 20 characters long. Use a third-party tool like Bit.ly to help you do this. Here’s what a bit.ly link looks like when it’s shortened.
Insider Tip: Don’t necessarily place the link at the end of the tweet. Zarrella’s analysis of 200,000 link-containing tweets concluded that putting the link approximately 25% of the way through would achieve the highest CTR.
Adding visual appeal to your tweet is a smart way to make your content stand out among a sea of tweets.
Insider Tip: You can add up to 4 images to your tweets ( all you have to do is click on the photo icon after you have added your first image, then add up to 3 more images) so take advantage of this and create a carousel of images to draw a reader’s eye.
Twitter uses Likes and re-tweets as indicators of popularity in the algorithm.
Insider Tip: Though I’d be wary of over-doing this strategy (from a narcissistic viewpoint) it appears that you can also increase your exposure by liking and re-tweeting your own content. An experiment from Buffer found that retweeting their own tweets generated significantly higher click-through and engagement rates.
What kind of action do you want your followers to take when they read your tweet? Whether it’s “Sign Up Here” or “Download Now”, adding a call-to-action to your tweet increases engagement by 13% according to Hubspot.
At about 18 minutes, tweets have the shortest lifespan of any social media post. Even though the latest Twitter algorithm means that posts are no longer displayed chronologically, Twitter is fast-paced, and messages get buried quickly. To counter this, you need to share your post multiple times on Twitter to increase visibility (use a scheduling tool to optimize the times you post it).
Insider Tip: Practice writing multiple versions of your tweets. Then A/B test them by changing some keywords, playing with the structure, etc. to determine which works best for your specific audience. This doesn’t mean you should post the same update every time. Using best practice headline tips, write multiple versions of tweets to post — and don’t forget to include a compelling image too.
According to Hubspot, if it makes sense for your account to tweet about social media — do it. It found that their tweets that included links to blog posts and offers about Twitter and other social media topics received 22.5% more clicks on average than the average clicks for a tweet during a set period of time.
Insider Tip: From the Neil Patel playbook:
How can you talk about Twitter if your subject has nothing to do with Twitter? Try one of these:
The key to success with Twitter, as with life, is to work smarter not harder. Implement these tactics the next time you post on Twitter and watch your engagement rate rocket.
You might also like to read What To Post on Twitter: A Cheat Sheet For Healthcare Tweeters
Welcome to this week’s social media quick tip. Today I want to show you how to use Twitter’s Analytics Dashboard.
The Tweet activity dashboard is a tool you can use to learn more about your Tweets and how they resonate with your audience. For instance:
How to use it
To get started, log in to analytics.twitter.com with your Twitter username and password to turn analytics on for your account.
To access your Tweet activity:
I’m going to show you how this looks on my account on a laptop.
From here I can click into an individual Tweet to see specific data for that Tweet:
Use Twitter Analytics to track your progress over time – see which tweets resonate most with your followers, track your follower growth and more.
Here’s to your social media success!
Twitter analytics is a simple but effective insights tool to help you analyse your Twitter activity.
It’s still surprising to me how many people who are using Twitter for marketing and communications have never checked this inbuilt analytics tool.
You can navigate to the platform either by visiting https://analytics.twitter.com/about or accessing it directly from your Twitter account under the More tab (on the desktop version).
From the Home tab, you get a summary of your account activity for the past 28 days. This includes your tweets, tweet impressions, profile visits, mentions, and follower count.
Scroll down on your account home page to view highlights of your account activity over the past few months, such as top tweets, top followers, and top mentions.
By clicking into Tweet Activity you can get a more granular view of how people engaged with a particular tweet.
Scroll back up to the Tweets tab at the top of the page to view your tweet activity.
The first thing you will see is a snapshot of the number of Impressions your tweets got over the past 28 days.
Twitter Impressions are simply when a tweet appears on someone’s timeline. It’s important to note that this doesn’t necessarily mean a person engaged with your tweet, but it does give you a sense of how many people your tweets has the potential to reach.
From the screenshot above you will also see you have the option of changing the date range – the default is the last 28 days. You can choose to view the last 7 days or any of the previous 5 months. You also have an option to specify a specific date range.
To the right of the date range selection, you’ll also see the option to Export Data. Clicking on this tab gives you the option to download “by tweet” or “by day” via a .csv file which can be imported to an excel spread sheet – great for reporting.
Now let’s take a closer look at the kind of data we can see on this page. Your tweets are analyzed according to Top Tweets, Tweets and Replies, Promoted Tweets (if you are advertising on Twitter), Impressions, Engagement and Engagement Rate.
We’ve already look at Impressions earlier, so now let’s turn to Engagements. An engagement is an interaction with a tweet ( e.g. likes and retweets. The engagement rate of a tweet is the number of engagements it gets divided by its number of impressions. This is a key metric to track over time.
You can also get a graphic representation of your engagement rate as you can see in the image below.
Looking into your Twitter data in this way is useful to show you how your content is performing on the platform. It gives you insight into the best days to post and which types of content people most like to engage with. If you run a campaign, it’s essential that you track the campaign from the start right through to the end. Keeping a close eye on the data will allow you to adjust your campaign as you go.
Use the insights you gather from Twitter analytics to inform your social strategy, optimize your content, grow your following and boost your engagement.
To learn more visit the Twitter Analytics page.
You might also like to read the following articles:
Become a Social Media Ninja With These 25 Smart Twitter Hacks
Take control of your mentions and leave a conversation with this week’s quick Twitter Tip.
Twitter is rolling out to all users across the platform the ability to leave a conversation and it couldn’t be simpler to do.
Simply click on the ellipses (three dots) beside the Twitter conversation you wish to leave.
Choose leave this conversation and you will be untagged from the original Tweet and all replies. You can also see from the screenshot below, you have other options too – stop future mentions (people can’t mention you again in this conversation) and stop notifications (you won’t receive further notifications but will still see the conversation).
You might also like to read How To Mute Accounts, Keywords & Hashtags on Twitter
Welcome to this week’s social media quick tip. This week I want to show you how to use the Mute feature on Twitter.
Mute is a handy feature on Twitter, which if you’re not familiar with, can be a real boon to your Twitter experience. It allows you to remove an account’s Tweets from your timeline without unfollowing or blocking that account. Muted accounts will not know that you’ve muted them and you can unmute them at any time.
Some things to note about Mute:
Twitter also gives you the option to mute Tweets that contain particular words, phrases, usernames, emojis, or hashtags. Muting will remove these Tweets from your Notifications tab, push notifications, SMS, email notifications, Home timeline, and from replies to Tweets.
If you would like to stop receiving notifications for a particular conversation, you can choose to mute it. When you mute a conversation, you won’t get any new notifications about that conversation. You will, however, still see Tweets from the conversation in your timeline and when you click into the original Tweet.
For more on how to use this feature, visit advanced muting options on Twitter.
Welcome to this week’s quick social media tip. Today I want you to show you how to create Twitter threads.
Not sure what a Twitter thread looks like?
If you spend any time on Twitter you’ve probably already come across a Twitter thread, but perhaps not know that it was a thread. Threads are a series of related tweets shared in succession by one person.
With a thread, you can provide additional context, an update, or an extended point by connecting multiple tweets together. When used well, threads are a powerful way to illustrate a larger point.
Before threads, users would have to just continue replying to their own Tweets in order to link them together. This was a way to work around the old 140 character limit.
1. Click the “Tweet” button to compose a new Tweet.
2. Click the new “Add another Tweet” button.
3. This brings up a second Tweet window.
4. Continue in this way adding threads until you’ve said all you want to say. You can either publish the entire thread by hitting “Tweet All”….
Or you can hit post each tweet in succession, which allows you to build momentum, perfect for a live event or an ongoing train of thought.
Publishing the entire thread gives your followers a fully-formed story — a better choice for a message you want to control a bit more, like a nuanced company announcement.
Here’s how your published displays on Twitter when complete.
Check out this guide to Twitter threads on Twitter’s business blog.
Here’s to your social media success!
Twitter Lists are essentially filtered timelines and it’s one of the most effective and simple ways to get a handle on your Twitter engagement.
Here’s how it works:
1. Click on Lists on your profile page
2. Click the icon to create New List
3. Name the List and provide a description
4. Designate the List as Public or Private & then hit Save List
It’s so easy to build a Twitter List and it is such an effective and simple way to get a handle on your Twitter engagement. Each time you follow someone new on Twitter, get into the habit of adding them straight to one of your lists. If you haven’t already started with your lists, start building them today!
Related Reading
Visit Twitter’s Help Center for more information on:
In the past decade, social networks have evolved from “a nice to have” add-on to a necessity for healthcare marketers.
If you haven’t yet incorporated social media into your marketing mix, now is the time.
Not only is social media marketing more affordable than traditional forms of marketing, but it’s also more accountable, with specific tracking and monitoring options at your disposal.
When it comes to using social media for marketing or communication, it’s important to understand that it’s more than just creating social accounts and posting updates every now and then.
Nor is it merely a digital tool to broadcast updates.
To make social media an effective means to reach patients you need to take a strategic approach.
Before you start using social media, you should consider what you want to achieve. The temptation is to get started right away by establishing a presence on one or more of the popular social media platforms.
However, this is not where you should begin.
You need to start with your “why” before your how.
Lee Aase, communications director for the Mayo Clinic Social Media Network (MCSMN), has stated that “everything starts with why you are using social media If you do not have that “why” out there, then it’s going to be easy to not be motivated enough to stay with it.”
When I take on a new client, I always start by working deeply with them to uncover their motivation for wanting to use social media. I believe this step is so critical that on occasion I have to advise some clients that they are not ready to commit to social media.
Social media will only work for you if you are prepared to put the work in.
For those of you reading this who are ready for the challenge and willing to work at it, read on to find out the next steps you need to take to ensure the time and effort you spend on social media will pay off for you.
Without goals, it’s hard to know exactly how well your social media strategy is performing. Clear objectives will not only propel your strategy forward, but will also serve as defined metrics for measuring your progress. Describe the specific goals and outcomes you hope to achieve through your social media activity. These should be in line with your company’s objectives and clinical priorities.
Do you want to attract more patients? Communicate more effectively with existing patients? Create and maintain an online reputation? Drive traffic to your website? Chances are you may want to do all of these things, but it’s best to identify your top two to three goals and focus on them first. Whichever goal you wish to pursue, make it as detailed and specific as possible. The more trackable your goal is, the easier it’ll be in a few months to see if you have achieved it.
Take Action: For a goal to become a reality, it needs to be specific, measurable, attainable, and realistic, as well as time specific — these are often called SMART goals.
Before you jump into the tactical and practical details of your social media plan, it’s critical that you take the time to understand your audience. Where do your patients go online for research? What health issues concern them the most? Which online communities inform or influence them? What times are they online? Consider your audience’s engagement time, not your work hours.
Take Action: Start by finding data on your existing audience. Use the Demographics and Interests sections of Google Analytics and the audience analytics features contained within Facebook Insights and Twitter to help you.
The perception that social media is free is misguided. The days you could make an impact with a few tweets or Facebook posts are long gone. Running a social presence now requires an investment of resources. You may need to buy-in services such as SEO (search engine optimisation), analytics software, content or creative support. You will also need to budget for paid advertising, particularly if you want to make an impact on Facebook, where organic reach has steadily declined over the past few years.
Take Action: Set a realistic budget and create a digital marketing strategy that works within it. Whatever you decide to spend money or time on, be sure to track how your content performs on social media relative to the amount of time and money you put against it. This is your social media return of investment (ROI) and it is closely linked to the goals you set at step #1.
Armed with information on who makes up your audience, the next step is to determine which social media platforms they use and direct your efforts accordingly. Most marketing efforts are focused on the trifecta of Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn, but visual platforms such as Pinterest, Snapchat, and Instagram are also very popular for healthcare marketing. This doesn’t mean that you have to be everywhere at once. It’s important, especially if your resources are limited, that you’re focusing your social media efforts in places that will generate the most return for your time online.
Take Action: Do your research to determine where best to focus your social media efforts to be successful. Read Which Social Network Is The Right One For Your Medical Practice? for more advice.
If patients are searching for health information online you need to be creating and sharing what they are searching for. Tune into the health stories patients are reading about and be ready to provide context, counter misinformation and dispel myths with medically factual information.
When creating a content strategy for your medical practice consider the following points.
What makes you uniquely you? What values does your organization stand for? Use social media to communicate the “who” and “why” of your practice. What unique qualities make you stand out?
Consider your social media tone and voice. How do you wish to communicate on social media? Do you wish to be seen as authoritative, inspiring, friendly, approachable, or helpful? Authentic communication and engagement are highly valued traits online as much as offline. Look to build and strengthen trust and credibility in all your online interactions. The tone and voice you use should be consistent through all social channels. Your patients should be able to instantly recognize the tone in your social media messages as identifiably you. Establishing a clear and identifiable voice can also make it easier for others in your office to post on social media for your practice.
Consider the type of content that works best on each platform. Facebook, Instagram, and Pinterest require high-quality visuals to stand out. A blog, on the other hand, is better suited to long-form thought pieces. Think about how you can vary your message delivery to complement how people like to consume online information. Alternate between written content, video, infographics, and podcasts to match your audience’s preferences.
Take Action: Create content that truly resonates with your patients. Generally speaking, patients are less interested in your brand, your physicians or your technology, than they are in how you can help them solve their problems. Great content is not about you, but about what you can do for your patients to improve their quality of life. Use a mix of original content and content curated from highly credible evidence-based sources.
How will you know if you achieve your social media goals? To determine how effective your social media efforts are, you will need to measure your results. Some key metrics to track are the number of followers you attract and retain, what people are saying about you, your company, or brand, and which social media channels drive the most traffic to your website. Social media metrics should always be tied to your social media marketing goals and your target audience.
Take Action: Use built-in tools such as Facebook Insights and Twitter Analytics, third-party tools, and measurement of social traffic and conversion with Google Analytics to track and measure your progress.
With currently 2.8 billion social media users globally, expected to rise to almost 3 billion users by 2020, social media’s influence has still not reached its peak. It’s a dynamic environment in which new networks emerge, old networks evolve, and user bases continue to grow exponentially. It’s easy to feel overwhelmed by this rapidly moving landscape and unsure of your progress. By building your social media strategy on a solid foundation you are less likely to become distracted by shiny new tools, and more likely to see results over the long-term.
Like what you’ve read?
Why not sign up for my weekly newsletter filled with fresh insights for healthcare communicators? Click here to have more posts like these delivered direct to your in-box each Monday morning.
Welcome to this week’s quick social media tip. This week I want to show you how to follow topics on Twitter. Following a Topic allows you to stay informed on what’s happening and see more relevant content about that topic.
From your Home timeline
From your Topics menu
Tap Topics in your profile icon menu.
Tap Follow some Topics to browse by category type.
From within each category and sub-category type, tap the Follow button next to the Topics you’d like to follow.
When finished, tap Done.
Note: Just like with accounts you follow, you can unfollow Topics at any time.
From your Home timeline:
From your Topics:
Topics you follow are public.
Anyone who can see your full profile can view the Topics you follow. If your Tweets are protected, only your followers will be able to see your Topics.
How to see the Topics someone follows
You have the option to see the Topics that someone else is following. You’re able to view their Topics if their Tweets are public, or if their Tweets are protected and you’ve been approved as a follower.
On the Twitter for iOS and Android app, and twitter.com:
Here’s to your Twitter success!
Health Care Social Media 