Once they are running, Cards have the potential to take your message even further than your profile: when users tweet a link the website you created a card for, a Twitter Card will appear and be visible to their followers.
There are four types of Twitter Cards:
Summary Cards are composed of just text and they give the user a preview of the content they will see once they click the link on the card.
Summary Cards with Large Image are exactly what you are thinking: a Summary Card with a clickable image attached to it. The image should have a ration of 2:1, a minimum of 300 pixels by 157 pixels and a maximum of 4096 pixels by 4096 pixels.
App Cards promote mobile apps and they can include the name of the app along with its description, icon, rating, and price.
Player Cards include video and audio and they are the most complicated ones to set up.
The Trending Section and Hashtags
If you go on Twitter’s initial page, there is a section called “Trends for you.” These are the most popular topics on the microblogging platform, according to your location, the accounts you follow and the tweets you post. You can search for other locations and the trends that appear will change. These trends are clickable and each of them takes you to a list of tweets that include said trend.
Some of the trends that appear in your profile will probably be hashtags. Hashtags are a big part of Twitter, since this was the platform they were first used in, and they can be a very useful way of widening your audience. When you put a ‘#’ before a word or expression (with no spacing or punctuation), it becomes clickable and takes you to a list of tweets that include that hashtag.
Twitter Analytics
Everyone on Twitter has access to a part of platform related to the Analytics of their tweets. This Twitter’s sub-website includes five tabs of information about your performance.
Home
Shows you a summary with the highlights for each month that you are on Twitter: the top tweet of the month (the one with the most impressions), the top mention of your twitter handle (the one that gave you the most impressions), your top follower (the one that has the most followers), the top media tweet (your top tweet that includes an image, video or GIF) and the top tweet card (your card with the most impressions).
Tweets
Shows you a line graph of the impressions (number of times a tweet showed up on a user’s feed) you got with your tweets during the month up to that point, as well as the totals of your engagement rate, link clicks, retweets, likes and replies you had on that period of time, and those same KPIs for each of your tweets.
Audiences
Shows you a bar graph of the evolution of your follower count. You can also choose to see the “All Twitter users” page, which gives you some insights on the users in the country: interests, demographics (such as education level, occupation, marital status and net worth), consumer behavior (buying styles and consumer goods purchases) and their mobile footprint (their wireless carrier).
Events
Shows you the events in several different categories and locations that people talk about the most on Twitter, with the amount of tweets about it, its total reach and impressions.
More
Includes analytics about videos you posted and about conversions you got to your website and/or your mobile app.
Twitter Statistics 2018
In the last quarter of 2018, Twitter reached 321 million monthly active users worldwide (Top 10 Twitter Statistics – Updated March 2019 - Zephoria Digital Marketing, 2019).
In 2018, there were 500 million tweets being posted daily (Cooper, 2019).
From 2017 to 2018, ad revenue increased by 25% (Top 10 Twitter Statistics – Updated March 2019 - Zephoria Digital Marketing, 2019.
Twitter ads are 11% more efficient than ads that play during live events on TV (Cooper, 2019).
The most popular emoji last year was the crying laughing one (Cooper, 2019).
46% of the people on Twitter use the app every day (Cooper, 2019).
Tweets that include a video have an engagement 10 times higher than tweets without a video (Cooper, 2019).
The biggest age group that uses Twitter is between 18 and 29 years old and represents 37% of the users (Aslam, 2019).
US, Brazil, Japan and Mexico are the four countries with the most Twitter users (Aslam, 2019).
80% of the users go on Twitter through their phone (Aslam, 2019).
71% of the users get their news on Twitter (Cooper, 2019).
Personal Branding on Twitter in 2019
Twitter is a microblogging platform and microblogging can be done about any topic, which means that no matter what your area of expertise is, you can use Twitter to your advantage. Twitter is one of the most promising social media platforms for personal branding and there are countless successful cases of people with Twitter accounts that showcase its potential in promoting individuals and their careers. Those people probably followed these tips I am about to talk about!
Check your privacy settings
When you create a Twitter account, your tweets are public by default, which means that anyone, even people without a Twitter account, can read your posts. However, you can change your Privacy and safety settings, which will determine who can see and interact with your profile and the tweets you post. My suggestion is that you don’t protect your tweets, your followers will not have the option to retweet them and you lose a great opportunity to increase your Twitter network. Moreover, if your tweets are protected, other users will not be able to find you through hashtags and trends (or outside of Twitter, through search engines) and if you reply to a tweet by someone who is not following you, they will not see it and that also negatively affects your chances of networking. What you want for your personal brand is the complete opposite of all of that.
Photo tagging, however, is a different story. For the same reason I mentioned when I was talking about other people tagging you on Facebook, I advise you to try and reduce chances of you being tagged in a post that negatively impacts your brand. Twitter does not offer the option to review each post you are tagged in like Facebook does, but you can choose to be tagged only by people who you follow. That does not 100% guarantee that you will never be tagged in a post that you don’t want to be associated with, but it is less likely to happen (especially if you are “picky” about who you follow) and it makes the damage control a lot easier to manage.
Regarding Twitter Teams (a feature managed on TweetDeck, a tool created by Twitter to manage multiple Twitter accounts, track certain topics and hashtags, and organize your Twitter experience as you would like), also only allow people you follow to add you to their teams. This will prevent you from being added to teams that are not related to your area of expertise, while still allowing some people to be able to invite you into their groups. Since you are going to be promoting yourself, in the beginning you will probably not have to worry about Twitter Teams, but as time goes by and you become more influential, it will be useful for you to have these settings already defined as you will want them to be.
Take your time to choose a good Twitter handle
As well as fill in your information and add high quality imagery. Regarding your handle, it should be something easy to remember, that is related to you and what you do. Your first and last name would be the best option, but with the amount of Twitter accounts that exist nowadays, it is probably already taken (still try it though, you never know). Something you could do is add the letters of your middle name in the handle; so, if your full name was Carl Bergen Rogers and @carlrogers is already being used, you would try @carlbrogers. You could also create a handle that includes your name and something related to your brand: @alanatheyogi for Alana who practices yoga, @veganchef-tommy, for Tommy who is a vegan chef, @vet_robert, for Robert who is a veterinarian - you get the idea.
Your bio should definitely contain a link to your website (especially if you are thinking about creating Twitter ads) and a short description, so that
people understand right away what you are about, as soon as they go on your profile. For the images, just make sure you use the dimensions we recommended above (for those of you who forgot: it is 1500 pixels by 500 pixels for the header image and 400 pixels by 400 pixels for the profile photo), that they are good quality, and convey the image of someone who is really good in their area of expertise. These three things - your bio, profile photo, and header - are what the user first sees when they open your profile so it is important that you try to make a good first impression.
Follow the trends and hashtags related to your industry
The trends that show up for you probably also show up for people in the same area as you, and who have the same interests as you. Those people are also known as… the people you want to connect with! A great way of growing your personal brand is by keeping an eye on your trending topics. If you see that there is one that you can talk about (and by talk about, I mean say something relevant, that adds to the conversation), tweet away.
Doing so not only shows your followers that you keep up with what happens in the industry, but it has the potential to make your follower count go up. As you may remember, I mentioned that when you click on one of the trends in the list, it takes you to a list of tweets that include that hashtag. That means that if you use the hashtag, you too will be in that list. Of course, if the trend refers to something huge, like a globally known event, chances are a lot of people are talking about it and your tweet might end up getting lost in the middle of such a big conversation. An example of this would be the Web Summit. If you were already on Twitter when it happened, you probably noticed everyone was talking about it. It was very hard to stand out, unless you were a celebrity, a big technology thought leader or a speaker.
For that reason, you should not underestimate the power of the smaller events and trends related to your area of expertise. Those give you a way bigger chance of standing out, since not so many people will be talking about them. And if you think about it, when a trend or event is really specific to an industry, only people who are truly interested in it will talk about it.
But your use of hashtags should go beyond the trends. Studies conducted by Hubspot in 2018 have shown that tweets with hashtags can get up to 1,065% more engagement than tweets with no hashtags (Sabanty, 2019), so you should definitely include one to two hashtags on each of your tweets. To make sure you use the best ones, my suggestion is that you use a tracking tool that helps you find the top hashtags related to whatever you want to tweet about. Two good (and free) tools for that would be Tweet Binder and Twitter Search (Twitter’s native search, available on “Advanced Search,” on your profile).
One extra tip: include one hashtag in your profile bio. It is another way for you to get found by the right people, not only on Twitter, but also through search engines.
Follow the right people and interact with them
Personally, I find this one to be the most important thing to do in terms of personal branding on Twitter. You know who the thought leaders in your industry are and they probably have a Twitter account. Follow them as soon as you start your account (or if you already have one and don’t follow them yet, make a pause on your reading, go on Twitter, hit those follow buttons, and then come back). If one of these thought leaders ends up following you back, make sure to DM them a well thought out message. They may or may not see it/respond to it, but it is only possible to message people who follow you on Twitter (unless they have their settings set so everyone can message them, but that option is more commonly used by business brands), so if you have the chance, take it.
Keep working on your Twitter network and follow a couple more relevant people every day (or as regularly as you can). Hopefully you will get those users’ attention and start getting follow backs. It also works the other way around: keep an eye on people who follow you (as well as people who retweet or like your tweets -- anyone who appears on your notification page, really) and, in case you find someone who seems interesting for your personal brand, follow them back. And then, it is time to start the talking!
Don’t let your Twitter profile be just a conversation between you and yourself, you will not attract anyone that way. You should reply to tweets by other people in your industry, pose questions to your followers and, if you want, you can even welcome people who give you a follow (maybe not everyone though, as it might turn into too much work, when your follower count starts growing more rapidly). Besides that, retweet and like other people’s tweets!
Needless to say you should also try your best not to ignore any of your mentions. If you don’t really have a reply for it, simply hit like and it will let the person know that you saw their tweet, which is the most important part.
Make a Twitter List (or more)
I have not talked about Twitter Lists yet, but they can be very, very useful for someone building their personal brand on Twitter. A Twitter List is like a Twitter feed, but only with the users you choose. You can have multiple lists for multiple topics and you can also keep updating them as you find more good accounts.
The reason this can be so useful is because, as you follow more people, the chances of you missing some more relevant tweets increases, since your feed gets updated more constantly. To make sure you don’t miss anything, choose a few accounts that post the most informative, timely tweets and add them to a list. Then, make sure to check your lists everyday and, if there is anything worth talking about, do it.
If you get big on Twitter, you might even end up being the one who others add on their Twitter Lists. It is actually a great way of checking how much you are growing! You can access this information when you go on your own Lists: there you will find a section where you see which Lists you were added to.
For Inspiration: a Twitter Personal Branding Success Case
If you are a social media aficionado, you have probably heard the name Guy Kawasaki before. And if you are a social media aficionado who has a Twitter account, you are probably following him. Guy Kawasaki is not exactly a celebrity, but he sure is one of the top examples I could use as someone with a great personal brand on Twitter. Yes, maybe he has an advantage because he is a social media management expert and he has even given interviews on how to create a personal brand on social media. But hey, that also means that if you are looking for someone for inspiration, you can be certain that he is a great choice.
If you go on Guy’s Twitter profile, you see right away that he follows a lot of the tips I mentioned above:
His images are high quality and his cover photo is of him on the stage of a TEDx conference in Palo Alto. Can it get any more professional looking than that?
His bio includes a small description of who he is and what he does, his location and his website.
On Guy’s feed, you will see that he retweets other people’s tweets and sometimes uses hashtags (particularly the one he created to promote his book, #wiseguy. Creating hashtags for your own campaigns can be a great way of making it go even further, if it actually gets attention). Two other things Guy constantly does - that you too can do on your Twitter account - are curating content and retweeting his old tweets. By curating (high quality, relevant, and accurate) content, you become someone people go to to find out about the industry’s updates. By retweeting some of your past tweets (the ones that performed the best when they were first posted), you can get more likes, retweets, and responses, increasing both your reach and your engagement.
When you click on his likes, there are two things that are important to notice: the first one is that he likes tweets regularly. Not everyday, as I can imagine that Mr. Kawasaki is a busy man, but you will not find a bigger difference than four or five days between the likes. The second thing you should notice is that he doesn’t just like tweets from verified accounts with a lot of followers; he also likes posts from people with just a few followers who mentioned his handle in their tweets. That makes him look very approachable, even as a social media guru with more than one million followers.
Chapter 10: Youtube
YouTube is quite different from Twitter, Facebook and Instagram, because it focuses on one single format of content: video. Nowadays, YouTube is a really popular platform, with thousands of creators posting regularly and getting huge followings (and huge checks). It is so popular that it even led to the creation of a new profession - the YouTuber - and some of these YouTubers get so big that they end up becoming “traditional” celebrities and getting into acting, singing and/or hosting.
If you have a Gmail address, you already have a YouTube account, because both of those belong to Google, so they are connected, which means that you will not need to create a new account. However, there is still a lot to be done for you to be ready to start posting.
The 6 Tabs of a YouTube Profile
Each YouTube account has a profile page with channel art, i.e., a cover photo (that should be 2560 pixels by 1440 pixels) and a profile photo, which is the one you have set for your Gmail account and should be 800 pixels by 800 pixels as the dimensions. You can change it if you want to, keeping in mind that, if you change it on YouTube, it will also change on your email, and vice-versa. For the cover and the profile picture, follow the same suggestions I have given you for the other three platforms on this ebook: go for high quality and for a professional look that relates to what you do.
Social Media Marketing Workbook 2019 Page 5