Recipe For Tweet Success: Social Media in 4 Easy Steps, or How to Make Hay out of Disorganized Chaos

Are you frustrated in your attempts to get your message across using Twitter, Facebook, Linkedin, Tumblr, Bloggr, Posterous or any of the 99 (or more) social media? There are plenty of articles discussing how to get focused on your message, being relevant, and the importance of frequent posts and regularity.

This is not one of these. This post is on how to grow your social media following rapidly in the disorganized chaos we call the Internet, by following a ‘recipe’ with 4 easy steps WHEN YOU DO YOUR POSTS.

Try this with your Twitter account and see immediate results!

1. MARK your selection.

The first step is to choose what you want to Tweet about. This will generally be one of 2 things: either you re ‘re-tweeting’ someone else’s post, or you are tweeting an original post of your own.

Note that in this process we do NOT use the ‘retweet’ button on Twitter. Although this does a job, it does NOT do the job you want–i.e. build your social media presence. Like a lot of so-called ‘automatic’ stuff on the Internet, it generally just clutters things up for everyone. In this article we will list first the method when ‘tweeting’ original materials, then how to do this with ‘retweets’ (which are very important in building your social media standing).

For original tweets, find the specific URL of the article you want to tweet (about) and copy it into your computer’s memory buffer by pressing CTRL + C (PC) or Command + C (Mac). The URL is the long string of characters on the top of your browser window generally starting with ‘HTTP…’. Make sure you have a specific URL, not just the URL of the blog or site. For instance, when you go to your blog site it will likely show something like HTTP://yourblog.wordpress.com, and it will display your most recent post. This is NOT what you want to mark. Marking involves selecting a permanent temporal reference point that won’t return different results later. In this case the URL referred to would display the most recent article–not the exact article (even though it might show that right now). To get the specific URL, usually click on the title of the article, and your browser will now display something like: HTTP://yourblog.wordpress.com/2011/04/29/peak-self-analysis/ . Highlight this entire amount, then copy into the buffer.

For retweets, in your Twitter feed, highlight your friend’s tweet and copy it (CTRL + C / Command  + C as above).

2.XPRESS your choice.

The second step is to put the link into your Twitter. Open your Twitter account and where it says ‘What’s Happening?’ go ahead and paste from your computer’s buffer memory what you got from step 1. Press CTRL + V (PC) or Command + V (Mac).

If there are fewer than about 50 characters remaining (or it doesn’t fit at all), then there’s a little side step: go to bitly and first paste your memory in there (same way); then copy and paste the bitly result into Twitter. The bitly result will look something like this: http://bit.ly/j3LH2K (that’s this article’s name in bitly). Don’t worry you can’t read it–we’re going to take care of that.

If you are ‘retweeting’ DON’T press the ‘retweet’ button. Instead press ‘reply’ and then paste the entire tweet into your Twitter feed, as above.

3. SHARE your community.

Go to the beginning of your tweet-in-progress (before the stuff you just pasted in) and describe your community destination.

For instance, “Parents of autistic kids”, “Social media learners”, “70s movie fans”, etc.

Why do this? Because you don’t know where your tweets will end up and this will help the right people dig into them–while saving a lot of other people a lot of time!

This creates relevance and audience. Also, not all of your tweets may be for the same audience–this allows them to be searched through easier–again heightening relevance and the chances of them being read, passed on, and of gaining greater traction and more followers!

In the case of a ‘retweet’ the most important thing is that you type the letters ‘RT‘ immediately prior to the ampersand  as in ‘RT@DancinginLife’. This informs your community (and original ‘tweeter’) that you are passing on information from one of your friends. It’s better than using the ‘retweet’ button for a few reasons, primarily that your friend gets a private notification of your community ‘share’. As you probably know it is vital that people see you as community involved in all social media (hint: it’s called ‘social’ for a reason). Prior to the ‘RT’ you may again specify a community–especially as your retweets may not appeal to all your followers. For instance, on a recent post I’ve typed “Health and nutrition: RT” prior to my friend’s tweet. This helps MY followers, who know I primarily tweet about branding, that this one is different.

4. BRAND your offer.

Here’s what we mean by offer–think of making an offering at an alter (not buying or–heaven forbid–’selling;). IXNAY on the ALESAY talk!

You are offering the world a gift–gift your offer with a name! 

This is where you tell people what you are Tweeting about. A lot of people get this ‘collapsed’ into step 1. They think that because the URL may show the title of your blog (for instance) they don’t need to brand the offer. Trust me, you will benefit greatly by separating this and putting it upfront.

Again, go to the very beginning of your Tweet (before everything else you’ve put in so far) and type a short description (brand or name) for the whole Tweet. For instance, for this article, I might put ’4 Easy Steps to Tweet Success’. Note again, this is not the title of the article, though it may contain elements of it, like this one.

In this article we have shown how to use the four universal communications steps with specific suggestions for Twitter social media, including how to select your audience from within the Tweet and how to retweet strategically with better results than by using Twitter’s ‘retweet’ button. Use these principles with your Facebook, Linkedin and other social media to get superior results. Try it out today!

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