When using Twitter for marketing, commenting on and responding to tweets and Twitter threads are two of the most common things you'll be doing for your business. This is how you increase engagement with your audience and get your business in front of new people. Other than creating and sharing content with your followers, social media engagement and interaction is the sole most important task when managing your social media marketing.
Although you may be replying to Twitter threads that other users are sharing, creating your own Twitter threads can be a great way to generate interest around your topic and get people in your community responding back to you.
What is a Twitter thread?
Essentially, it's a long comment chain of tweets.
Because tweets can only contain up to 280 characters (double the size of tweets at its inception), many people have created an alternative method of sharing longer stories on Twitter: by stacking them into multiple tweets.
Due to their popularity, "threads" are now something that Twitter has added the capability for to its own platform, but previously, users had to manually create a Twitter thread by replying to their own tweet.
Twitter denotes a Twitter thread by adding a "Show this thread" link to the bottom of the first tweet in your feed.
If you click the link, it expands to reveal the full tweet thread, which could include only two tweets, or it could be 100 tweets. Since a Twitter thread essentially is a collection of replies, there's really no limit to how many can be included. However, you don't want to use too many tweets or your audience might not make it to the end of your story.
How do you create a Twitter thread?
There are two ways you can create a Twitter thread. First of all, you can use Twitter's thread capability to write out all of your threaded tweets at once before sending them out. The option to create a thread looks like this:
Simply click the plus sign and a second text box will appear. Continue to click the plus sign and add as many tweets as necessary to complete your thread.
Second, you can create your thread manually. Many users still do this, especially if they're live tweeting something. This way, users can become engaged with your thread and start interacting with you while you're still sharing new content.
You create a Twitter thread manually by simply clicking on the comment icon and replying to one of your own tweets:
How can you use Twitter thread to increase engagement?
Within some industries, Twitter threads are an incredibly popular way to tell stories and interact with your audience. But for businesses, this is still a relatively new marketing strategy. So it's a good idea to jump on board with a few creative ideas before everyone else joins in.
Why do you want to do this? Well, as just mentioned, not a lot of businesses are currently utilizing this strategy. That, in itself, is a great reason to test something new.
Even more than that, social media software Buffer ran an experiment with their own Twitter threads to see if it helps improve engagement, and the results showed that threads actually did perform better than solo tweets in nearly everything but link clicks. (However, you can improve that by including a link at the end of every tweet in the thread rather than only the last tweet.)
Here are a few ways to test Twitter threads in your own Twitter marketing.
- Repurpose a blog post.
For digital marketing, businesses have to create a lot of content. Why not work out ways to use that content more than once? Instead of simply linking to your most recent blog post on Twitter and calling it a day, try out this new strategy.
Create a Twitter thread outlining what your blog post is about, explaining each of the subheadings briefly, and sharing the link so that users can read each item more thoroughly.
- Add your thoughts to curated content.
Do you often share links and articles from other websites and industry thought leaders? Using a Twitter thread is a great way to add in your own thoughts on an article. Use the first tweet in a thread to tag the author or publisher, share the link, and the basic summary of the article.
Then create a thread consisting of just a few tweets to share your own thoughts on the contents of the article. This is a great way to offer your own valuable input to your customers and your audience.
- Revive old content.
You could always share old content again. You can even retweet your own tweets. If you had a tweet that already had some pretty great engagement, you can even revive it just by replying to it and turning it into a thread. If you have new insight to add to an old point or a new experience to share about your topic, this can be a great way to do so.
- Tell a story.
Want to share a relevant experience with your audience? Telling a story, going behind-the-scenes, or being authentic with your audience is a great way to build trust with new and potential customers. Just be sure that everything you tweet is still relevant to your business.
However, if you do have an experience to share with your audience, doing so through a Twitter thread is an incredibly fun and creative strategy. Create a thread and piece together your story for your audience to follow along.
- Live tweet an event.
Although you could simply live tweet by posting over and over again using the event's hashtag, creating a Twitter thread for an event is a great way to keep your tweets about the event organized and in one easy-to-find place. If you would like to share any tweets you sent about the event, you can share the link to just the first tweet in the thread, and users can easily scroll through to access the rest of your tweets about the event at the same time.
Want to learn more about smart strategies to use in your business's digital marketing? Contact us today to begin a conversation about your digital marketing needs.
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