After four years, I came to a realization. Improper tagging habits have cost me thousands!
I have been involved in social media for four years. I hired an outside firm to help me with my Twitter, Facebook, Linked In, and other social media tasks. I do my own blogging, and enjoy it thoroughly. I do it myself because others can’t do it. Others can’t think of interesting ideas and write about them. Professional bloggers want to charge an arm and a leg, yet can’t deliver consistent good results. How sad!
After several years, I wanted to become smarter about social media, so I created my own twitter account that only I would have access to. I wanted to experiment with different types of tweets and see what worked. When I give tweets to the marketing firm that handles my Twitter, I have to give the tweets to them weeks before those tweets will be published. So, there is a huge delay in seeing what works, what doesn’t, and why! I typically will give them 80 tweets all at once labeled, “May 2014 Outsourcing Tweets” and arrange them by the day.” This system works well for the operators who input my tweets into the system. But, my personal Twitter lets me get results right away.
I can tweet the same four variations of the same tweet and see which one is most popular. I can also experiment with a variety of different tags and see which one helps the most! After four years of social media involvement, I am finally beginning to understand that my tagging strategy has been horrible. The reason why is that I never got immediate feedback from my experiments. Now, I’m able to get at least double the retweets, favorites, and interactions for each tweet simply due to my optimized tagging strategy.
I learned a lot about tags on Google. You can look up tags for specific industries, try them all out, and see which get you a better following. For the travel industry, the normal tags are #travel and #traveltip, but #ttot and #tbex, #lp, #nomnom for foodie topics, #traveltuesday and a few others worked well. You can look up tags yourself and find out what works. If you get retweeted from someone whofound you on a particular tag search result on Twitter, you might be able to maintain a presence there for a longer period of time, which could help you gain more followers!
One of my biggest problems with Twitter has nothing to do with Twitter. Two of my twitter accounts are in niche markets. The audience for my services are very small, especially since in those two markets, but followers don’t seem to like Twitter (not sure why.) The only way to get followers is to reach out into larger markets. I run an outsourcing twitter for example. There are very few active members in that industry on Twitter. But, by using more general business tags like #business, #marketing, #management, #motivation, etc., I am able to get seen, at least for a few minutes on keyword search results on Twitter, and that has gotten me a lot of retweets! Obviously, don’t use tags recklessly, the tag has to fit the tweet, otherwise you won’t get retweeted on the search results for that tag. But, experiment because you don’t know who is watching the search results.
There are internet “trolls” who sit and watch twitter search result feeds all day long. Some of them might like you and might retweet you regularly — it is a very personal thing. Even if your tweet doesn’t exactly match the tag, if the trolls hold you in high regard, they will retweet you. I sometimes tweet about travel topics and get retweeted by #foodie types. Food and travel are related topics that go together, but are not the same. People who travel typically like to enjoy some good street food, or an unusual gourmet restaurant. So, don’t prejudge – experiment with tags, and have your employees do the same. Make sure your employees document their results so you can see what type of results they are getting.