Alone or in The Pack, How to do Twitter Right: Why Bother?

If we only consider who is using Twitter to full advantage, the number is depressingly small.

There's been some improvement, but not enough. I think Twitter's internal identity crisis leaks out to the general population.

Twitter is not a micro-blogging platform. 

A micro-blog is a contradiction in terms.

Twitter is not an engagement platform. 

You can have conversations on Twitter. You just can't have good ones. Anything more than "question-answer-follow up-answer" is doomed. Like the SMS it was based on, Twitter is not about long conversations. You can't really engage one-to-one. You can try. You'll only end up confused by the sheer volume of tweets flying at and by you.

That humongous volume of tweets should give you a hint. Think about it for now. We'll get to it soon.

Twitter is not a stand-alone platform. 

It will never win Best Actor. It's just not the Leading Man type. If social media was the Lethal Weapon franchise, Twitter wouldn't be Mel Gibson. It wouldn't be Danny Glover either. It would be Joe Pesci as Leo Getz. Who doesn't love Leo(ah-k ah-k ah-k)?

Joe was the glue that held the plot together. Twitter is the glue that connects all your social media efforts into one. 

You don't engage on Twitter. You drive people where they can engage.

I don't think that was Twitter's intention. I think it's just a happy accident. 

That doesn't make it any less true. 

I already said the huge volume of tweets should give you a hint. The 140-character limit should give you another.

Let's Talk 140 and other numbers

• There are over 350,000,000 people on Twitter.
• According to Statista.com, Twitter has 328,000,000 Monthly Active Users (Dec 2016).  I'm not sure I believe that. One of these stats must be wrong.
• People who hate/don't understand Twitter complain about the 140-character limit. It sometimes annoys even those of us who do understand the platform.
  
• Twitter math is not regular math. Any link you use in a tweet is 23 characters long no matter how long it really is. Yes, even little bitly links. Use bitly to track clicks, if you like. They do nothing to increase your tweeting real estate. A link is 23 characters, plus a blank space in front of it (24) we have 116 to play with.
• Twitter screen names are a maximum of 15 characters. Add in a @ plus a blank space, a mention uses up to 17 characters. That leaves us 99.
• Hashtags are useful beasts and not just for their declared purpose. Make some IFTTT applets and you can automate cross-posting to other platforms. I like to alternate mentions and hashtags so they use the same character count. That's not possible without myTweetPack.com. I know of no other tool that allows for this. If you aren't a member, count 12 characters gone. Now we're at 87 characters available.

87 may not sound like much, but . . . 

We already accounted for a link to wherever we want to drive people. We already accounted for hashtags so that people can find the tweet and we can do other stuff with it. We already accounted for a mention.

All that's left is to give the post's title

Here's a scoop

If your title is over 87 characters, it's waaaay too long. Most experts set the ideal title length between 30 and 70 characters. That length works best for tweets, emails, Google search results, and text messages. It won't get chopped off.

The only time you get into space trouble is if you are using a scheduler to post with full-sized 600X600pixel images or with embedded video that will play in the tweet. You would lose 23 characters there. 64 characters are plenty for most cases.

If you tweet manually that problem doesn’t come up.

187,059 is another number.

beBee has many large accounts on Twitter. 187,059 combined followers and growing fast. They regularly promote member posts. So do other members. You must have a Twitter account, and have it on your beBee profile to benefit from that.

Think of it like getting featured on LinkedIn but with full reach to all your connections plus beBee’s 187,059! 

Getting beBee backing for your post isn’t some mystical miracle like a LinkedIn Feature. I don’t want to steal John White’s thunder, so I’ll leave it at that.

There is a problem, though

You need a tool to take advantage of Twitter's power as a promotional weapon.

It’s possible to use Twitter’s built-in scheduling system. That’s what I did for a while. It drove me nuts, so I started looking elsewhere. I found good tools for scheduling. I found good tools for automation. I found good tools for account growth.

I didn’t find a tool that combined it all. So I built one. 

People seem to like it. If you’re curious, try it out for free here.  Use Promo Code TheBeBeePack and your first month will be on me. That's a month after the 14-day free trial! 44 days total! 

Cancel anytime. 

I'm pretty confident you won't.

A Parting Off-Topic Thought

Those of you who read my stuff regularly may notice that the header image on this post is a 600X600 pixel square rather than my usual 930X620 rectangle.

Call it a test.

I changed the way our RSS/ATOM feeds pull in data. Now we pull in the header image. We store it on our servers then scale it to fit on Twitter without cropping. 

Subsequent tweets can reuse the image.

You see, Twitter scales images to 600px wide, then just chops off anything over 600 high. It’s the bottom that goes. Images always measure from the top left.

My normal header would shrink down to 600X400. That’s not bad. 

600X600 is better. That's the size of this one. Twitter should use it all. 

For now, only the @beBeeEmbassy feed works this way. That's where I focus on and promote participating ambassadors' posts. 

If all goes well, we'll roll it out to all feeds. I know Candice Galek is waiting impatiently for it. 

Big images of hot girls in bikinis. 

What's not to like?