The Science of Creating Must-Click Content on Twitter

Key Takeaways

for she welcome everybody we're going to get started in just a few minutes for for for for for for for hey everybody we're almost ready to get started just a couple more seconds for all right hey you guys let's go ahead and get started um welcome to the science of creating mus click content on Twitter um my name is Courtney cider I am the head of content marketing at buffer and we're really excited to come to you today with Twitter to talk about the science of musket content I'm here with Jimmy hang Jimmy you want to say hi and introduce yourself hi everyone I'm Jimmy h a marketing manager on Twitter's SMB team uh you know I really focus on helping businesses like yours to really understand the value of Twitter and really to how really to how to leverage Twitter to really drive your business growth you could also find me on Twitter at Twitter smallbiz excellent so just a little bit about what we're going to do today um Jimmy and I have about 30 minutes or so of uh science and information and stuff we want to share with you you can join in the conversation anytime on Twitter by using the hasht Tweet science you'll see that at the bottom botom of all my slides there and jimmies um afterwards we'll do about 15 minutes of Q&A as much as we have time for um we'd love to hear your questions that you can submit those uh wherever you're watching if you're on YouTube you can comment as a question and we'll um check that out if you're watching on Google+ you can do the same thing uh just post your question right there in the comments and we'll be keeping an eye on those and we'll try to get to as many of those as we can um by the time we get to the end of things so uh let's see what is on the agenda for today so our agenda is pretty simple we're going to talk about all the things that can make your tweets more powerful more clickable more sharable more favorable so that includes writing great tweets um the content The Voice the tone timing it right um what days of the week what times of the day what frequency works best and measuring and testing how do you know uh where you're doing well how do you know where you can improve um how can you sort of move your content forward uh with Twitter um we're going to answer a lot of questions that uh both Twitter and buffer here often and we're pretty excited to get started first of all we wanted to talk about why buffer and Twitter on this particular webinar why we would team up on this and to to do that we should talk about uh why people follow on Twitter Twitter users follow about six brands on Twitter on average and that means that your audience wants to hear from you on Twitter as a brand um they want information from you and as you talk to them as you start that conversation you may find that what they want to hear from you falls into maybe a few different buckets so um interesting and fun content uh news discounts promotions and more keeping up with all that is where buffer comes in uh it's the easiest way to share consistently on social media to see how your post performed and make sure you're always getting better and better results so we really jumped at the chance to team up with Twitter because Twitter is growing really really fast uh there are 255 million active users tweeting so much every day um and mobile is really growing as a source as well lots of folks are accessing Twitter on a mobile device and we'll talk more about what that means really soon and one stat that's really interesting for us today is link clicks link clicks account for 92% of user interactions with tweets so it really makes sense for us to do our very best as brand representatives to make sure that we're giving our audience what they want in terms of really clickable links in those tweets so building off on how Twitter is a fast growing real-time Network and why you should have a strong Twitter presence it's important to keep in mind that your Twitter's are your customers are actually on Twitter and they can really take benefits that benefit they can actually really take actions that actually benefit your business you know we conducted a recent study with a thousand smbs in the US and we found that you know overall 60% of respondents say they've made a purchase from an SMB based on something they sell on Twitter in addition 86% say they plan to purchase from a small business in the future and finally 43% of respondents plan to make multiple purchases from a business they follow on Twitter so with these stats it really demonstrates the importance of leveraging Twitter to connect with potential and future customers who can impact your top line so but before you start tweeting uh we just wanted to cover off on a few things um to really establish your business personality on Twitter and it's important to consider that the cons conversations that you have with your customers every day can also happen on Twitter and you can also approach these Twitter conversations in the same way like you're talking to a good friend so here are a few tips to keep top of mind so you want not be professional without being overly formal you want to strive for a really authentic and approachable communication style next we all know that competition is tough wherever you go so it's important for your business to really stand out you want to share content that will pull followers in encourage them to consume the content also knowing the difference between voice and tone is key to effective tweeting so voice doesn't change over time but your business's tone should vary based on a situation so if a follower did not have a positive experience your business's tone may be more sympathetic to their situation finally remember that just not don't just talk to people but with them you know Twitter is a two-way conversation so reply to at Menin and address both positive and negative feedback when you have a chance you know Twitter is a real-time Network so don't leave your customers waiting too long so once you're ready to start tweeting um we want to give you a few tips to help you with your content strategy so first keep your tweets conversational you know you may be online but you're still talking to customers and more more likely more of them will see your content so avoid using business jargon when possible also think about how your content will be consumed by your followers would they want to retweet it or pass it along to their own followers you know to help encourage sharing incorporate humor inspiration and newsworthy content to draw your followers in next courney is going to cover off on a few viral words to potentially use in your tweets awesome tips Jimmy um he's totally right of course your own content written in your brand specific voice is the main idea to focus on for Twitter success but Twitter is really powerful at driving amplification for brand messages and that means retweets that share your message in fact 78% of user engagement with a Brand's tweets comes in the form of retweets according to Salesforce research so if you want a little bit of help with that amplification potential um we're taking a look at a few different studies on words and phrases that have been proven to be more likely to help content spread so on your left you'll see a list of three word phrases um that is from a study by a company called ripen they looked at the most viral words and phrases on four different sites that Focus specifically on viral content like Upworthy and Viral Nova um what we see here are a few patterns that are worth highlighting um you'll notice imperative words like see make do words that tell you to do something visual words appear like video and photos and we'll talk more about the importance of multimedia uh in a little bit but this kind of gives us a clue to start that visual words are going to be really important so superlatives like the most and the best you know we all want to click on uh the things that are the most sharable the uh the best list um audience referencing phrases like make you when you you see so it's really powerful to be addressed specifically um on on Twitter and anywhere really so those youword really work if you're talking to me I'm going to be more likely to retweet it uh we see the appearance of how to we always want to learn things so so um that's a good angle to hit uh sometimes and then on the right we've got a list of retweetable words and phrases so these are specific to retweets and these come from social media scientist Dan zerella of HubSpot so he compared common words and phrases in tweets and retweets to isolate uh the words that appeared more often in retweets and so this is his list of the top 20 words and phrases most likely to get retweeted and some of these patterns repeat you'll see a lot of audience referencing uh you and Twitter another mention of how to and a lot of those imperative words that tell you to do something like retweet or share in fact Salesforce found that tweets that specifically ask followers to retweet receive 12 times higher retweet rates than those that do not now when retweet is spelled out the retweet rate is 23 times higher than the average and when you use the shorten version the letters rt the retweet rate is 10 times higher so still higher but not quite as high as when you spell the word out and that is perhaps because maybe people aren't familiar with um the letters rt um once again as Jimmy said avoid jargon when you can um so if you can use that full form of retweet that might uh help you out there that study also found that tweets that contain more adverbs and verbs have a higher click-through rate than tweets with more nouns and adjectives so the general rule of of good writing you know use strong words use action words that tends to follow through on Twitter as well and make your content a little bit more clickable on to formatting so when you're just talking with customers uh followers having conversations responding to folks on Twitter you'll probably do that in sort of your regular sentence form but if you happen to be sharing any blog posts uh the company conductor pulled people on Headline format and they found that people prefer s case and that basically is the first letter of every word in the headline being capitalized uh more than they liked lowercase or uh all caps so if you're sharing any blog posts using this kind of format can sort of help set off your content and signify that this is a special kind of piece of content uh that your followers are seeing on Twitter that they may want to read or favorite or share so that might be worth testing with your own account just to see how your followers react to that so next up are hashtags you've seen them use everywhere so let's cover off in a few best practices first if you're not familiar what a hashtag is um a hashtag is a or a hashtag or the pound symbol is used on Twitter to really organize conversations around a specific theme topic or idea and if you're creating a hashtag you want to keep it short recognizable by followers and allows them to easily follow along if you're using existing hashtag ensure you're adding value to the conversation for instance when I tweet from Twitter smallbiz I like to use the hashtag small Biz in our tweets because a lot of the content focuses around helping small businesses awesome and the volume of hashtags is really important as well um you really want to make sure as Jimmy said that you're focusing on specific hashtags where you can really add value and not overdoing it with hashtags um one or two hashtags can get you up to two times more engagement than tweets without hashtags according to by Buddy media but when you use more than two hashtags your engagement could actually drop by an average of 177% so it's important to uh make sure you're focusing on the hashtags that make the most sense for your business the most sense for your industry and you're really being uh judicious about when to use those and what you can add to the conversation as you use those hashtags on to length there's probably no perfect length for a tweet but research by track social they studied 100 well-known Brands popular on Twitter and found that the perfect tweet length for them was right around 100 characters um as we see on the chart here their analysis saw a spike in retweets among those in the 71 to 100 character range that's the medium uh length tweet column in this chart so um you know probably not a perfect tweet length but this research does make a lot of sense a tweet at that range is long enough for the original poster to say something of value and it's still short enough for the person retweeting it to add a little bit of their commentary as well if you can Veer toward the shorter side it might be worth a try for your clicks as well tweets shorter than 100 characters get a 70% higher engagement rate according to Salesforce so will this work for your brand it's probably worth try you know the best plan is to really experiment with different links and see what resonates with your audience great so rich media is also another great way to really Drive engagement with your tweets so you really want to equip your marketing Arsenal with photos and videos like Vine to really Drive retweets and replies you know research has shown that tweets with photos or videos can drive twice the engagement with users and as we like to say we give you 140 characters to start off with but a photo worth a thousand words so use them regularly in your tweets so true we have found a ton of success at our own uh buffer Twitter account with images um this chart you're looking at is from a little study we did um we add lots of images to our tweets from our buffer Twitter account it makes a big difference in the engagement rate we get so much so that last year we decided to do a little study we took a sample of 100 tweets including links from our own Twitter account and and then we compared the engagement averages of tweets with and without images using buffers built-in analytics so what we found you can kind of see uh where this is headed when you look at the chart but the results were pretty astounding tweets with images received 18% more click-throughs 89% more favorites and 150% more retweets so they make a huge difference in terms of how people consume your content and what actions they want to take with it we've also found that um images that tell a story within the image itself can also be really powerful it can't just be an image of anything to get these results um in our case we really um focus on creating visuals that tell a story visuals that can be passed along on their own and that's been something that has been really powerful for us and might be worth a try so once you get into the routine of tweeting and start using IM in your tweets you know try running a special promotion to really excite your followers you know you could launch something we call a to exclusive which is a exclusive offer on Twitter that your followers can't find anywhere else you know when you run your offer use unique coupons to really track your results and reward your customers so if you have a brick and mortar location tweet a discount code for followers to redeem at the register and if you're an online store send a direct message to followers with a discount code that can that you can track at checkout or try what we call a flock to unlock which is really a concept to help incentivize followers to spread your message by retweeting or sharing your Tweet to unlock exclusive content like a sale or a special product or early release to learn more about how to do a t exclusive or flocked unlocked you can visit business. twitter.com so next it's important to keep in mind that different tweets can be used to achieve various marketing outcomes you know we suggest the 8020 rule where you f focus on content that generates engagement first then mix in your direct offers and and when you really want to drive more direct response from your tweets consider these suggestions so start by simplifying your Tweet um have a compelling offer and then communicate a sense of urgency next you want to include a very a strong call to action with a link to your website finally avoid using hashtags or at mentions that may distract users from clicking on your link next is our lead generation card and lead generation cards really make it easy for potential customers to really demonstrate interest in your business and it's no longer necessary to link your potential customers to a form or even a landing page to retype contact information so when someone expands a tweet that contains a lead generation card they will see a description for your offer then the user simply clicks once to sec to SEC securely share their contact information with you and then once all those leads have been collected you can easily download them from the Twitter ads UI and you know lead generation cards are completely free to create and using your tweets but you will need to sign up for a Twitter ads account first to get started so now let's cover off on a few FAQs we get asked pretty often regarding the art of tweeting so the first question is what day of the week should I tweet on and you know our answer is it really depends on the business when your business first start starts tweeting you should start testing multiple days of the week to see what works best you know Saturdays and Sundays may have a higher engagement rate as that's when most people are not at work and therefore have more free time very true in fact there's a lot of evidence in favor of testing out a weekend strategy to see if that might resonate with your audience weekend tweets often can have higher click-through rates compared to those posted during other days of the week as we see in this study from Salesforce they discovered that Twitter engagement for Brands can be up to 177% higher on Saturday and Sunday compared to weekdays but at the point of this study not a lot of Brands were taking advantage of this they reported that only 19% of all brand tweets were published on the weekends so that might be a good opportunity to jump in and see if you can make an impact on the weekends they found that weekend engagements could be particularly high for a couple of Industries including sports brands fashion entertainment and Publishing Brands and just to quickly note you don't have to give up your weekend to take advantage of this I think a lot of people um think you know it might be difficult to sort of plan a posting schedule on the weekends but there are a lot of solutions out there like buffer and many others that are available to sort of schedule your tweets in advance and um let you reap the advantage of posting on the weekends though as Jimmy mentioned you will want to keep an eye on your applies and participate in the conversation when you can because it's so much more fun that way so a little bit more about timing um if you are working with a B2B brand you may have a slightly different experience when it comes to weekends um you may want to stick with weekdays or start with a smaller experiment on weekends this is from an Argyle social study and this study found that weekday is Kim provide 14% more engagement for B2B Brands than weekends do so you start to see how you know there's not a one-size fits-all for um for Twitter you know you've got to sort of consider your audience consider what they're doing during the day consider what their day is like as you uh make your decisions and um set up your your scheduling for B2B you know that's a more workplace environment um more work focused environment kind of makes sense that you might want to hit those those folks more on a weekday so the second question is what is the best time of day to tweet and you know we've seen that there is a 30% greater engagement rate when tweets are published during the day which is between the hours of 8: a. and 7 p.m. and it really makes sense if you consider that the majority of news store hours and activities happen during the day but again depending on the business test sending out tweets both during the day and evening hours to see what kind of response they get and also um you know schedule your tweets or send out live tweets based on different time zones to see what works best for you definitely true so the daytime is going to be um you know the sort of busy hours for Twitter and specifically the afternoon and evening early evening can be a good time to see more engagement and more clicks these Doats we're looking at here are from Kiss metrics and they say retweets have been shown to be highest around 5:00 p.m. and that noon and 6: p.m are the best times to post for a higher clickthrough rate now another study on optimizing for clicks from bit.ly showed that one to 3 pm is the best time to tweet so you can start to see that a lot of this advice is you know conflicting different studies find out um different conclusions um but at this point it's all kind of staying in that afternoon to early even evening range which um might be uh worth testing for you um all these findings can get really complicated but the main thing is to put yourself in your follower shoes considering the patterns of your audience what's their day like when are they busy when are they bored when are they most likely to want to hear from you if you want to know something a little more specific about your audience you can also try a tool like twad social bro or follower wonk that analyzes your account and gives you some key times that you can test and shoot for you can integrate those times right into your buffer account if you happen to be a buffer user as well and as we're talking about thinking about our audience's day what they're doing don't forget mobile there are a ton of users who primarily access Twitter on a mobile device and these people are a little bit different than your average Twitter user they're very likely to be on Twitter during their commute they're very likely to be on Twitter during school or work hours and these folks really might be the ones that you are looking for for your business to reach um I have some really interesting stats on them they're 44% more likely to click on links they're 66% more likely to retweet than an average user and they also tend to follow more Brands and they're 53% more likely to recall seeing an ad on Twitter than the average user so I know I threw a ton of stats at you right there but it's really interesting to think about um sort of optimizing for the mobile user particularly if you're the kind of brand where mobile makes sense if they're if you're a product that they're going to sort of grab at the end of their workday or a restaurant that they're going to want to drop by on their way home from work so it's really important to think about uh your mobile strategy as you um think about your entire holistic Twitter strategy so next up is how often should I tweet each day and again it depends on your business you'll definitely come across businesses that tweet one per day or 20 times per day and they'll still see good engagement again it really depends on several factors but the main takeaway is for you to really develop a Cadence of tweeting there isn't a right number of tweets per day but your followers should know that they're going to get regular updates from you and it might turn out that uh more frequency could equal more engagement for you um consisten is the best plan no matter what you have time for just be consistent about it but it's also really okay to tweet as often as you have the content to support it and the bandwidth within your organization to uh get back to people and talk with them Twitter is a high volume Channel and it really helps to tweet enough to get you noticed in the Stream uh what we're looking at here is a study from track social they looked at 100 well-known brands that are active on Twitter to put together this data and what we can generally glean from it is that as Brands tweet more the total number of retweets generally increases there are a few different little spikes you can see on this slide um when responses jumped at different volumes like around four to five tweets a day around 11 to 15 tweets a day around 21 to 30 tweets a day and the general rule here is just make the most of the time that you do have if you are a small business owner with a million things to do you might be better off trying for that uh smaller tweet Zone you know maybe three or five tweets a day just to make the time of that you have if you have the time and the content to post more often tweeting regularly is probably only going to help you it's going to help you establish yourself as an authority it's going to give you more opportunities to engage with your fans and it's going to give you a chance to get more total response greater volume is generally going to correlate to Greater total response don't be afraid that you are are tweeting too much as long as you've got great content and you're following all the general rules that Jimmy has talked about you should be really good to go there one little caveat is that you might want to space out your links a little bit um as we mentioned most followers are really fine with a healthy amount of brand tweets throughout the day um but uh social media scientist Dan zerella we're back to him found that the higher number of links and account Tweets in a given time frame frame the lower the click-through rate on each individual link so if you want to get your tweets noticed and retweeted you might want to try experimenting with your posting rate and mixing up those engagement tweets we talked about those tweets that sort of start a conversation or show the uh inside scoop about your business you might want to mix those up with your more salesy type posts with links so that each link you post gets a little bit more attention at buffer uh we tend to do this we'll spend a few minutes in the morning finding um high quality social media tips and tools post because that's what we're interested in we'll drop those into our buffer queue and space them out and sort of mix them up with our own content questions conversational posts photos of what we're doing that day uh since buffer cues up your posts and space them out for you it can provide a really good opportunity to get your mix for the day or your week just right so that you can maximiz your schedule so finally uh one of the last questions we could asked often is what should my business tweet about so we've put together a few ideas to help you get started so for example on Monday you could launch a Twitter only promotion for your followers you know tweeted online code or even a secret word for customers to use when they visit your business on Tuesdays give people a behind the scenes tour of your business by highlighting your products where they're made from and how the mat materials are sourced on Wednesday you can create a regular series of tweets that are informative or surprising such as tips and on Thursday you can retweet a few positive uh customer reviews or industry related news and finally Fridays you know give customers a glimpse into your workplace culture you know use photos or Dev buy videos to really highlight your colleagues employees hard at work or having fun great tips I'm hearing that you guys are not able to see the slides when uh Jimmy is speaking so I'm just going to give you guys a minute to check out this awesome content calendar and the Tweet templates over here these are all really great ideas it's um always good to sort of like have a plan in mind as you start tweeting makes the days um much easier to uh to plan for and there's no surprise Panic moments all right Jimmy want to talk about measurement yes so once you get um into the routine of setting up your content calendar you know you want to start thinking about how you will measure your progress or success on Twitter and you know we'd like to tell people to really start by asking yourself what you want to achieve so is it a bigger brand presence do you want to drive more website traffic or do you have a specific proot promotion you're gearing up for you know whichever goal you may have you can also run several campaigns simultaneously to Target those um goals you know you can raise brand awareness with one set of tweets while driving traffic to your blog with the other and you know here are a few metrics to uh for you to consider to help you measure sucess on Twitter you know follower growth it's pretty simple how many new followers you get every day week or month uh follower quality engagement is you know how many people interact with your account your tweets your content reach how many people are actually favoring or retweeting your content clicks you know pretty self-explanatory there and finally conversions how many users sign up for your service or even buy your product you know from there track your results on a weekly basis using third party tools like buffer excellent I'll give you guys a second to check out that measurement slide a lot of good metrics there and I'll go ahead and say that I'll post these on a slides share as soon as we get done here and you'll be able to check all of the slides out see anything you missed see all the sources that we are citing here and the more you tweet the faster you'll be able to learn what works and what doesn't in terms of your metrics in terms of what you want to optimize for um you can test different headlines different days and times different types of media and lots more to isolate and find out what really resonates the most with your audience and all you need to do this testing is a way to easily track the metrics of all the tweets that you're sending um you can do that through a URL shortener like bitly or or you can do it with buffer which is what we are looking at here I'll show you um how we do it at buffer with this slide so this is an example of us testing timing and how we do that is we'll take one piece of content we'll choose three to four different times uh to test it on the same day um if we can to keep the data as consistent as possible we will try to make the tweets very similar each time just a headline and a link because if you add you know a hashtag tag or a photo to one you're skewing your results a little bit maybe that had something to do with um that tweets pickup and what we'll do is intersperse those uh similar tweets with other types of posts that are perhaps more conversational in tone so maybe a quote or a question something like that um we'll let those run and then the following day we'll check our analytics and see how the tweets compare for clicks and favorites and retweets and from then we'll just optimize our schedule based on what we have seen and repeat on a regular basis and just kind of keep testing as your content changes and you get more followers it's really important to make sure that you're always tweeting at the right time so you got to keep that testing going and we do the same thing with headlines uh we always try to have a handful of different headline ideas for each post and we'll test Variations by tweeting out the article three or so times throughout the day with a different title each time um ideally the closer together you can post them like all in the morning morning or all in the afternoon uh the more reliable the data is going to be buffer is going to generate a different URL for each tweet so you can easily go back and look at that AB test track the results in the analytics to see which headline perform best so here we pitted an ultimate list superlative type headline against a number headline 17 unique places to find great content to share and that number headline definitely beat out our superlative headline which I maybe wouldn't have guessed when I put those in the buffer que so it's really cool to be able to test get that real-time feedback and often we'll actually even go back into the blog post itself once we realize which uh headline has one we'll go back into the block post and change that headline to reflect what we have found and once you get started testing you're going to find a lot of different elements that you want to test hashtags formatting timing headlines there's a lot you can do uh with some quick AB testing to improve your performance so that wraps it up for us we hope you know a little bit more about creating mus click content on Twitter including writing great tweets timing it right measuring and testing uh to keep learning on these topics we've got a few resources for you I'll start with the the buffer bits um we've got a Blog at blog.bufferapp.com that we'd love for you to check out we do a lot of this um science uh data stats and studies uh type content we're always really interested in uh learning more there and you can follow us at buffer on Twitter we also have another blog called open where we talk about um what we're learning as we um grow the company uh transparency productivity stuff like that so that would be a great one for you to check out as well and Jimmy has some resources on Twitter for you too yeah for additional tips and best practices on tweeting and optimizing your profile on Twitter you can visit our website at bu . twitter.com for the latest news and product releases you can follow us at our blog new latest blog um blog. twitter.com small-business and you can always follow us on Twitter Twitter smallbiz awesome and we have a few extra special resources for you guys um buffer would love to invite all of you to try a free month of buffer for business uh so you can tweet consistently build out that content calendar we talked about perform those simple AB test that we just went over and really discover what works best for you and for your audience so we would love to have you give it a try I would love to hear what you think about it you can go to buffer app.com Twitter Biz right there for you to sign up for that special offer and there's also a little bit more Jimmy all right um Jimmy has a special offer as well a $50 Twitter ads credit and you can get that by going to twitter.com Twitter smallbiz so we would love for you to take advantage of both of those offers um let us know what you think we're very interested to hear and um as I mentioned before I know some of you have not been able to see all of these slides so I will definitely uh be able to put those right on slides share right away you'll be able to download that great content calendar you'll be able to see all the sources um that we've cited and get a lot more resources um Jimmy you want to talk a little bit more about the Twitter ads credit yeah so it's a $50 ad credit to use with Twitter ads um if you visit us at Twitter small Biz right now you'll see the latest tweet um with a link if you click on the link and just hit on hit the apply button it'll submit your information to us and then we'll get back to you in a few days to let you know if you qualify for the credit also if you look at at the actual link that's a good example of a lead generation card um that you could actually create for yourself awesome so we have gone a little bit long but we would love to answer uh your questions let me see if I can find some all right the first question is when you refer to best times to tweet is that just in US time zones that's a great question a lot of these uh studies of big Brands tend to be focused on the United States so I tend to when I get that information um check the uh the sort of how they conducted the study to see what they're doing there that can give you a lot of good information um generally what you can do if you don't have that information available is uh try those times um as they list them and then try them in your own time zone so we do that time zone conversion and test both those versions to see which one uh works better Jimmy you have any input on best times to tweet in US time zones uh no I completely agree with you I think it's always great to test different time zones and see what works for you got it next we've got is it good or bad to ask followers to follow you so a Twitter etiquette question maybe maybe Jimmy's got some thoughts on that one to be honest I think it varies I think you know once when you first start out creating your Twitter profile and you really want to build a strong follower base I don't think it's a bad thing to necess ask people you like hey are you following us on Twitter did you know that we have a Twitter uh account and you can find the latest news updates about our business on Twitter so I think um it's perfectly fine to ask but you know don't always lead in with that question every time you're speaking to your customers excellent um let's see when it comes to higher tweet volumes is it okay if they are in burst or do they need to be spaced out um you know it depends on I think some timing of you know a he heavier time period of tweeting can work for you I would see how your customers are reacting to that I tend to want to space them out a little bit and perhaps that's because I work at buffer and that's kind of our our whole deal I like that philosophy um but if you find that there's a time where your customers are particularly active and particularly receptive to what you're saying then I think you should definitely take advantage of that time period um it comes comes down to testing and making sure that you're available when your audience wants to hear from you jimm you got thought I I totally agree I think um you know it's good to space out your content but you know depending if you're having a event a new product release those kind of uh those of things cause natural spikes in conversations so sometimes it's okay to have you know a stream of tweets going out you know we do it for live chats we do it when we're attending um conferences or even when we do um webinars like this one so I think it's uh just based on the situation if you have something that's a little more high profile and really gets followers excited it's okay to send out uh more tweets than spreading it out over the course of the day great Point uh another question is retweeting other people's posts beneficial to me as a brand that's a great question and an interesting question um I tend to think and this is based on nothing but my own experiences that retweeting other people's posts can be really beneficial to you as a brand particularly if you're talking about um you know people who say positive things about you um you don't want to retweet those you know all day and night because that could get a little much but you know occasionally throwing that into your content mix could be good um sharing other people people's content in your industry um can sometimes help you form a relationship that could benefit you sharing people um who post about complimentary Industries can be a big help to you and if you're a small business that can't create a ton of your own content I think it's a great strategy to find uh the people who are creating the best content about your industry and sharing that information because that's the kind of stuff that your audience might want to know and um they'll probably think it's really nice that you're going out of your way to find that great content and sharing it with them Jim you want to add on to that anything yeah no I totally agree like retweeting it's all about sharing great content that other people should be aware of and their own followers want to see so I think it's a great source for really um getting a lot of content from influencers um industry experts when you're first starting out but you know it's try to find a balance you know people follow your business to learn more about um the latest news and products about your business as well so just kind of find a balance between um generating your own content and retreating others but like courney said if it's positive reviews and you know interactions from customers those can always be retreated excellent um this one is a an interesting question um the company this person manages for social media has a product in common with someone else how can they differentiate themselves from the competition on Twitter that is a really good question um Jimmy want to take that one you got thoughts there um I think it's really about highlighting you know what your B your service or product um does so well and how it differentiates from the market how it stands up from other competitors I think you know you know giving people behind the scenes look at the people the product the value of your business can only help to really diff differentiate and help you to stand out than other people a lot of products may be similar on Twitter but at the same time the way that they approach their Twitter presence can really help them to stand out you know using photos using videos giving testimonials highlighting case studies all of that will really help to really um differentiate you from competitors awesome thoughts there I think a lot of it has to do with uh voice as well you know a lot of people point to um a company like Oreo being really really good at Twitter and there are you know probably a lot of cookies that are like Oreo but Oreo has a very distinctive voice on social media they've got a very distinctive um thing they do and people uh really respond to it um it's fun it's playful um so depending on the industry you're in you can really sort of take some initiative with your social media presence and create something that is really special that your followers feel included in and part of um that can also help you uh differentiate yourself from competitors another question I think we have time for maybe a couple more how much is too much when it comes to repeating content so I assume we're asking here like um posting the same thing or uh a similar thing uh multiple times Jimmy what do you think about that one so I think it it varies I think sometimes if it's really great content you really you can potentially share similar content uh multiple times just to hit different audiences in different times of the day but I think you know um you know with the help of the content calendar that we've kind of outlaid outlined in the presentation it can really help you to generate your own content um on a weekly basis that you can apply through um throughout the year so I think you know start testing out with you know certain topics and themes that you can do on a weekly Bas basis and see how you know what reaction you get from your customers and from there building off into like U additional content but you know it's okay to reshare content but um you know balance it out yeah testing is definitely the way to go there and I'll also say that um there are ways to repeat the same theme of content without repeating the same exact content so if you want to share a blog post multiple times uh maybe you'll do it once with the headline maybe the second time you can pull out uh an interesting photo maybe the third time you can pull an infographic or pull a quote from the article or pull an interesting stat from the article so there are a lot of different ways you can frame your content um so that it feels different even if uh the person who is seeing it has seen it once before and it's also um you know you've got to remember that Twitter is uh like a stream you know it's most people aren't sort of living in Twitter every single moment of their day some people are but um a lot of times you know they're just dipping in when they have a few minutes between a meeting or they're checking out Twitter on their phone while they're on the train on the way home so um I don't worry a ton about being too repetitive to the audience because there are a ton of different audiences on Twitter it's all about um just testing and finding those times that that are right for you I think we have time for for one more question um how do you know which hashtags your audience is using great question I bet Jimmy has some insight on that one or not all right I'll take that one um how do you know which hashtags your audience is using um a lot of times you can use the Twitter search or Twitter advanced search um use both of those and I would just put in some like key phrases that are important to your business um what you do what your product is um other names people might call your product Industries um that you're involved in and I would just kind of poke around Twitter and see uh what I can see there as far as hashtags you may find that um there are sort of like weekly chats that go on um surrounding your topic um you may find that there are different ways of referring to uh what you do or your industry um just kind of poking around that um the Twitter search in advance search is probably the best way to address that on Buffer we recently did um a post all about hashtags that has a lot of really interesting tools that you can use to sort of identify hashtags for your brand and I'm going to throw that one into um the Google+ conversation as well as the YouTube conversation um so you guys can check that one out if it would be helpful to you and I think that's about all the questions we have time for um we really really appreciate you guys being here um it's been a whole lot of fun I'm sorry that um some of you weren't able to see some of the slides um what I'm going to do is run to SlideShare and put these up there right away and I will also um put that link in the Google+ and YouTube channel so you'll be able to check those out whenever you want get all those sources download all those great resources sources um and make sure that you take advantage of the Twitter special offer as well as the buffer special offer we would love to have you um give it a try and let us know what you think thanks so much for being here um we really appreciate it we'll keep the conversation going on Twitter and um hope to see you again soon thanks bye