Five Tips Twitter Teaches the Media About Tweeting

Mark Luckie, a former Washington Post journalist, is one of a handful of specialists that Twitter employs to help the press get the most from their platform. This is for a good reason: journalists do drive a majority of the Twitter conversation.

You can become a Twitter Jedi master:

• Live tweet your beat – Tweet in your sweet spot. And look for events in particular to tweet around. This can help your content become more discoverable. This is especially true when coupled with the next couple of tactics. (If you’re not a journalist, your beat is your expertise!)
• Engage in conversation – Use @ handles to engage others but also occasionally do so in ways that exposes the tweet to a larger audience by using a period before the handle – like .@steverubel
• Use hashtags – This alone can boost engagement on your tweets by up to 50%. The key is to use simple, natural language. I often don’t include basic hashtags like #media or #journalism in order to save space – but I am rethinking that after meeting Mark. Do so around your “beat” as well.
• Share other people’s content via retweets – Use Twitter’s advanced search tools to identify influencers, hashtags and photos around your expertise/beat. This can drive your exposure among TV journalists who are always looking for new talking heads, I learned from Mark.
• Use photos and videos – Tweets with visual assets see four to seven times the engagement vs those that are just text. Use them.

For Twitter veterans this may all sound very basic. However an experienced pro or a newbie, I believe, can grow his/her flock by focusing on the basics. That’s what I learned from Mark this week. Sometimes the simplest things can go a long way- just like a social network grounded in 140 characters.

By Steve Rubel, EVP/Global Strategy and Insights at Edelman