This is a guest article contributed by Brad Shorr.
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Smart marketers squeeze every possible benefit out of their digital content. But even top-notch companies overlook opportunities to repurpose Twitter content, which is unfortunate because Twitter is generally regarded as a somewhat frivolous medium. It doesn’t have to be, if you think outside the box. So for the purposes of this post, let’s think outside the tweet and take a quick look at five ways to get a lot more value out those 140 little characters.
1. Use Tweets As Testimonials
From time to time, people may give you unsolicited praise on Twitter. If you monitor your brand, you can catch these tweets and “favorite” them so they will be handy whenever and wherever you need credibility-building testimonials. @justcreative is a good example of someone who uses this favoriting method. Among the many places to display testimonial tweets:
- Website home page
- Interior site pages connected to the tweet’s content
- PDF literature
- A custom Facebook tab
- Email signatures
You’re only limited by your imagination — and since this blog’s community includes a lot of designers, my guess is you’ll come up with better ideas than these in a matter of minutes. See some of your favorite favorited tweets here.
Finally, if you don’t have unsolicited Twitter praise — solicit some! There’s nothing wrong with asking your Twitter community for feedback, help, or an occasional plug. I’m sure you’d be quick to do it for others if you liked them and believed in what they do.
2. Put Tweets In Presentations / Sales Material
As part of their content strategy, most companies tweet about the benefits of their products and services. They may also post astute comments on important industry developments and issues. If you favorite these tweets and organize them, you can later display them in Keynotes/PowerPoints, webinars, PDF literature, and on relevant site pages. The advantages of displaying this information in the form of tweet images:
- Tweets are visually engaging and spark interest.
- Displaying tweets is still a bit of a novelty, which makes your presentation stand out.
- Tweets provide a subtle element of credibility, since many will regard them as published and therefore authoritative data points.
A big benefit of doing this, by the way, is that it will improve the quality of your tweets. We tend to be more thoughtful about what we say if we know it may be used “in print” later on.
3. Use Tweets for Internal Knowledge Building
If a expert I’m following on Twitter says something insightful on say, SEO, I’ll shoot a link to that tweet over to our Director of SEO. This sort of thing can help keep everyone on the team being — and feeling — up to date and in the know. Sharing knowledge via tweets can be accomplished in a more organized fashion, by favoriting tweets by topic and emailing a digest of the links to the appropriate person. This technique works very well when a lot of team members are not on Twitter very much or at all. Because of that, circulating a digest of your own tweets also can be helpful; your team as well as your Twitter community should see your own great Twitter content.
This is how I try to communicate information from Twitter. These are a couple tweets about social media I grabbed that are tremendously useful:
Sure, I could just as easily link to the articles rather than the tweets, but I think it helps for people to see the source and sometimes, the commentary.
4. Feed Tweets Into Your Website
You may have seen business sites that display a real-time feed of five or 10 of their tweets, usually done via a widget. This is a great idea in terms of sparking interest, as we’ve already talked about. However, if you want to do this, be careful about what you tweet. For example, if your live feed displays a lot of random, silly tweets, it could confuse visitors and turn off potential customers.
What some people do to get around this is create a separate Twitter page that is exclusively for tweeting information around a particular product or service or department. For instance, a company could feed its customer service Twitter page tweets into its site’s customer service landing page. I like this idea a lot in terms of content relevance, but managing multiple Twitter accounts does have its complexities, so proceed carefully. Another possible way would be to use #hastags, but this could backfire too.
5. Feed Tweets Selectively Into Other Social Networks
I’ve written elsewhere about the dangers of overfeeding your social media accounts. However, selective and strategic feeds can relieve some of the content-production burden and strengthen your reputation across all of your social platforms.
The “secret” of smart feeding is understanding the nature of your communities on LinkedIn, Facebook, Google+, and whatever other networks you are active on. For example, I know a couple of things about my LinkedIn connections; first, a lot of them are not social media-savvy, and second, they are interested in high-level information. Knowing this, any tweets I feed to LinkedIn will be non-technical and relevant to business owners, leaders and managers. On the other hand, our agency’s Facebook page draws a lot of people who are interested in “how-to” marketing tips, so any tweets I feed to it will be on the technical side.
Probably the biggest takeaway from all of this is to be a strategic tweeter. There are many ways to repurpose Twitter content, but you won’t be able to take advantage of them if all you’re doing is haphazardly dashing off tweets.
More Twitter related articles:
- Ultimate Twitter Guide
- Twitter Interview & Tips with Jacob Cass
- 10 Twitter Design Lists to Follow
- The Power of Simple Engagement on Twitter
- List of Designers, Creatives & Geeks on Twitter
How do you re-purpose your Tweets?
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Brad Shorr is Director of Content and Social Media for Straight North, a leading Chicago SEO firm. He has been an active blogger and social media participant since 2005, and writes frequently on content strategy, SEO copywriting and social media topics. Photos by: Shutterstock and Gallivant.
© This article is copyright of Just Creative Design and should not be found elsewhere.
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