{"id":276296,"date":"2015-10-29T14:13:39","date_gmt":"2015-10-29T03:13:39","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/content.easyweddings.com\/au\/pro-education\/10-rules-tagging-re-tweeting\/"},"modified":"2015-10-29T14:13:39","modified_gmt":"2015-10-29T03:13:39","slug":"10-rules-tagging-re-tweeting","status":"publish","type":"au-pro-education","link":"https:\/\/www.easyweddings.com.au\/pro-education\/10-rules-tagging-re-tweeting\/","title":{"rendered":"Five rules for retweeting, hashtagging and mentioning on Twitter"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"best<\/a><\/p>\n

Twitter etiquette for businesses 101: tweet others as you would have others tweet you. In other words, respect the hash, don’t abuse followers’\u00a0feeds with unwanted\u00a0personal reflections\u00a0and be an active participant rather than a passive\u00a0spectator. Below\u00a0are five more tips for\u00a0creating meaningful relationships and contributions to the social media aviary pumping out 500 million tweets<\/a> a day.<\/p>\n

1. Think before you\u00a0retweet<\/h2>\n

How much value are you adding to the lives – or even lunch breaks – of your followers?\u00a0If all you EVER do is retweet, you\u00a0give wedding hopefuls\u00a0no opportunity to get to know the real you and true identity behind your brand and company culture. Of course, retweeting relevant<\/em> content is valuable for your followers, but remember to throw in your own opinion, useful resource, or link to your business blog<\/a>\u00a0every 4-6 posts to establish your own credibility and industry influence.<\/p>\n

If you simply can’t resist a\u00a0retweet, you can now add your own comment to a post when retweeting\u00a0by quoting a retweet<\/a>; a process by which the original tweet is embedded in your post, allowing you to add your own 116 additional characters.<\/p>\n

Fans of this\u00a0feature release\u00a0Hubspot<\/a>\u00a0say, “We love the spirit of this change because it discourages blind retweeting and encourages users to add their own voice about why they’re\u00a0sharing that Tweet”.<\/p>\n

2.\u00a0Consider ALL\u00a0interpretations<\/h2>\n

Because hashtags are not case sensitive, long or multi-word hashtags are, often, written with capitals at the\u00a0#StartOfEachWord to make it easier for readers to distinguish individual words. Sometimes though the capitalisation isn’t carried over when the hashtag is adopted by others and people run the risk of\u00a0unintentionally announcing the death of Cher<\/a>\u00a0with the hashtag #nowthatchersdead (originally intended to mark the passing of former British Prime Minister, Margaret Thatcher). Ahhh, #Whoops!\u00a0Then there was that one time<\/a> Susan Boyle’s PR team fell face-first into the Twitter mud with #susanalbumparty… but that’s another hashtag\u00a0altogether!<\/p>\n

So, for the love of the wedding industry and fellow vendors,\u00a0check\u00a0hashtags before publishing – with and without capitals – and consider the ramifications of your seemingly innocent, creative new hashtag!<\/p>\n

\"best<\/a><\/p>\n\n

3. Hang out with the popular hashtags<\/h2>\n

Adding trending hashtags<\/a> to your tweets will ensure your posts are visible in the most active streams and increase your chances of attracting new followers who are actively searching for those topics.\u00a0With Twitter’s tailored trends feature<\/a>\u00a0wedding businesses can view hashtags of relevance to them, based on their profile\u00a0location and who they\u00a0follow.<\/p>\n\n

\"twitter<\/a>
Source: Twitter<\/a><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n

To participate in a\u00a0trend, simply use the exact hashtag as it appears in your Trends list and publish a post relative to the trend; relative<\/em> being the key! Twitter filters search for quality, so if today’s top trending hashtag is #WeddingFail and you publish a tweet with this hashtag promoting your end of year wedding shoe sale in an attempt to capitalise on the activity, Twitter\u00a0will likely punish you by filtering your post out of search results – see\u00a0Twitter Rules<\/a>.<\/p>\n

The lesson here is don’t waste your time abusing trends when you could be using more relevant hashtags to draw attention to your wedding shoe sale from\u00a0people actually interested in a #BadgleyMischkaSale\u00a0and #WeddingShoes.<\/p>\n

There are a multitude of paid and free platforms available for monitoring the best Twitter hashtags for your business<\/a>, including Tagboard<\/a>: a platform where\u00a0users create ‘Tagboards’\u00a0to follow the current\u00a0conversations and activity across multiple\u00a0social platforms pertaining to particular\u00a0hashtags, including how many posts per minute are published.<\/p>\n\n

\"finding<\/p>\n\n

Of course, keeping an eye on your competitions’ Twitter accounts is one way to improve your business by watching your competition<\/a> and can provide great insight into which\u00a0hashtags are working for them and those that aren’t. Use this information to test on\u00a0your own followers and wider\u00a0Twitter\u00a0world to optimise your hashtag strategy.<\/p>\n

As a quickstart guide though, here are\u00a010 fun wedding-related hashtags to watch<\/a>\u00a0that wedding enthusiasts are already chattering about across the Twittersphere.<\/p>\n

4. Don’t get hashhappy<\/h2>\n

Tweets with hashtags might get two times more engagement<\/a> than tweets without, but this does not mean that by doubling your hashtags, your\u00a0engagement increases\u00a0proportionately. In fact, stats gathered by Linchpin SEO<\/a> revealed that adding more than two hashtags can cause an average decline in engagement of 17%, indicating the sweet spot to be a total of two hashtags.<\/p>\n

\"hashtagging<\/a>
Source: Linchpin SEO<\/a><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

5. Don’t automate\u00a0the love…<\/h2>\n

Ok, so scheduling social media on\u00a0platforms like Buffer<\/a> or Hootsuite<\/a> is the exception to this rule. If scheduling saves you time and means you’re not\u00a0chained to devices 24\/7, we’re all for it!<\/p>\n

In particular, this rule\u00a0refers to automated follow-back tools\u00a0that send people completely transparent, blanket\u00a0direct messages (DMs) telling them\u00a0how thrilled the profile or person is\u00a0that you’re following them and they just can’t wait to read your tweets – which is a stretch, given they didn’t even have the time to write a personalised greeting.<\/p>\n

Agora Pulse <\/a>says, “It\u2019s always nice to get a thank you but when they are lumped into an automated tweet with other users they lose their impact.” Personalised thank you messages or mentions are far more genuine attempts at reaching out to your followers and they let them know there really IS someone on the other end.<\/p>\n

To show your new followers some love, mention them in a tweet<\/a>\u00a0by using their Twitter handle (the ‘@’ sign and letters that follow) and ask them a question about their favourite wedding movie of all time<\/a>, or share with\u00a0them an interesting fact, quote or meme to start a conversation and begin building rapport.<\/p>\n

\"engaging<\/a>
Read: Must-see wedding movies<\/a><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Has your business encountered\u00a0success or challenges with\u00a0retweeting, hashtagging or mentioning clients, celebrities or\u00a0wedding bloggers on Twitter? Let us know in the comments with a\u00a0link to your Twitter profile so we can give you a follow and keep up to date with your latest news and product info… We promise not to respond with a cheesy automatic follow back message!<\/strong><\/p>\n

Oh, and don’t forget to follow us on Twitter<\/a>!<\/strong><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":269062,"template":"","au_pro_edu_tags":[],"class_list":["post-276296","au-pro-education","type-au-pro-education","status-publish","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","au_pro_edu_categories-share-worthy-articles"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.easyweddings.com.au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/au-pro-education\/276296"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.easyweddings.com.au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/au-pro-education"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.easyweddings.com.au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/au-pro-education"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.easyweddings.com.au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.easyweddings.com.au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/269062"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.easyweddings.com.au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=276296"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"au_pro_edu_tags","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.easyweddings.com.au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/au_pro_edu_tags?post=276296"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}