Twitter Teaches You How To Use The #Hashtag

Twitter has decided to teach users how to properly use the hashtag in a handy, dandy infographic!

However, more importantly than knowing how to properly use the hashtag is this: ensuring that you/your brand adds value when it joins the conversation.

Easier said than done.

Hat tip: Mashable

Twitter’s Best Practices For Media

Straight from the horse’s mouth, here are several guides and best practices to integrate Twitter with TV, music, entertainment, sports and news.

• Twitter on TV: A Producer’s Guide – A compendium of best practices for engaging and growing your audience on Twitter using the power of the TV screen. A simple integration can drive two to ten times more Tweets from your audience while your show airs.
• Tweeting for TV – Before the web, the water cooler was the place people would meet to talk about what happened on television. Now this practice occurs in real-time, and people don’t want to wait until the show is over. Here’s how to join that conversation effectively.
• Twitter for Newsrooms – Resources to help you and your organization at every step of the reporting and publishing process. We want to make our tools easier to use so you can focus on your job: finding sources, verifying facts, publishing stories, promoting your work and yourself.
• Live-tweeting Best Practices – Live-tweeting is an easy, flexible way to turbocharge your engagement on Twitter. We’ve found that across many different genres and levels of celebrity, it consistently boosts retweets, @mentions, and new followers.
• Twitter for Sports Organizations – Twitter and sports fit together because sports are live, immediate, suspenseful, and fun—and these are qualities Twitter mirrors and enhances in real-time. People use Twitter to follow their favorite players, sports writers, and teams, but most importantly: they use Twitter to talk about games as they happen.
• Twitter for Athletes – It takes a lot of work to stay on top of your game as an athlete. First you’ve got to stay healthy and focused. But then there’s all the rest: staying in touch with teammates and friends, keeping your fans happy, and even running other businesses and charities. Here’s the good news: from your sport to your passion, Twitter gives you one place to bring it all together.

6 Tips For Twitter-Friendly News Releases

Social media is a fact-of-life for the PR/Communications professional today. It is no longer just specially-invited “social media influencers” who live-tweet, even mainstream media journalists are in on it!

With that being the case, why not inject some guidance to steer and manage the backchannels while also providing a means to measure the conversations that are going on around your particular piece of news?

So here are 6 tips for more Twitter-friendly news releases, by way of PR Newser.

1. Have great headlines. Keep them within the range of 120 characters – perfect for a tweetable link. People like to leave a little comment when they retweet so leave about 20-30 characters from the 140 character limit. Also, give people enough information on what the press release is about – include something eye-catching and newsworthy, like facts and stats. If necessary, tailor the voice and approach of the release to the audience, which is more than just journalists.
2. Numbers, numbers, numbers. People like numbers and they make ideas real.
3. Make sub-stories tweetable. Several sub-topics within your main story can be worth individual tweets of their own. The subpoints, which are typically highlighted as a subheading of their own, should be of a tweetable length, making it possible for people to like something, grab it, and tweet it.
4. #Hashtag properly. Make sure keywords and search terms are in the release so it can be found. Keeping SEO in mind and being concise work perfectly for Twitter.
5. Make quotes tweetable. Make quotes interesting and substantive! Also, don’t be afraid to include the brand’s or person’s Twitter handle.
6. Include multimedia. Everyone agrees that video, audio, and other multimedia add value to a press release and further draws in your audience once they’ve clicked on the link in Twitter.

Remember: Twitter is more about trading information so tweeting a link to a news item is pretty much stock and trade. In fact, many look to Twitter as a news source, so it’s best to ensure that your news item is designed appropriately to leverage that fact.

A Helpful 3-step Web Asset Strategy

Got this from that free e-book on what should the hub of your social media marketing be, which I recently read. Although the person quoted, Mike Sweeney (managing partner, Right Source Marketing) didn’t exactly phrase it as a “web asset strategy”, it’s still a great way to view how best to use your web assets.

Our website tells people what we do.

Our blog tells people how we think.

Our presence n social media properties – Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, etc. – serves as a distribution engine for the content produced on both the site and blog.

 

Exploring the Twitterverse (Brian Solis)

Brian Solis, a noted New Media expert, recently released this infographic to help chart and explain what the Twitterverse (ahem… Twitter Universe) looks like. I think it’s a great piece of work and an excellent starting point for those who want to be familiar with what Twitter can do and what are the tools involved.

Check it out here.