Opinion: To Tweet or Not to Tweet

Published on: 10 Dec, 2013
Updated on: 10 Dec, 2013

Emma Roberts

by Emma Roberts

There are people that tweet and people that don’t. I think Twitter is a bit like Marmite, you either like it or hate it. The difference is though, most of the people that don’t like it simply don’t get it.

I have to admit, in my case I am an avid tweeter. I absolutely love it. I also have to admit though, it did take me a while to get it. I felt like I was a party where I knew no-one. Everyone was talking ten to the dozen, in a language I didn’t understand.

When I did try to interact it seemed no one was listening. I stood in the corner and watched like a wall flower. I slowly noticed that people were actually really having a lot of fun. They were interacting with people they didn’t know, introducing people to other people who didn’t know each other, they were sharing information and retweeting tweets they liked.

Retweets were, in turn, thanked for and a link, or a thread was formed. Hashtagging was something else I noticed. This seemed to be the most important tool of all. Popular hashtags trended, in other words, the message in which they were contained had a massive, and often global reach, being read by thousands of tweeters.

The power of this overwhelmed me. I began RT’ing and ‘favouriting’ tweets and people began following me, thanking me for RT’s and retweeting my tweets. I linked my Facebook business page to Twitter so all my business posts were automatically tweeted, saving me time and increasing the reach of my message.

I remembered to hashtag important keywords and tag other relevant businesses also. Another great way to schedule tweets and posts is to use Hootsuite.

The maximum amount of people you can follow is 2000 if your followers are less than this. The key is to follow people who you want to follow you back, or tweet interesting, informative, relevant or indeed humorous tweets.

Twitter is about having fun. It’s about sharing information, learning new things and creating an audience who are receptive to your message and share it, increasing the reach.

To find out who doesn’t follow you from the people you follow use www.justunfollow.com. This is an easy and quick way of whittling your followers down to the people that will help you push your message/tweets out.

Emma Roberts is Head of Big Voice Management

With a diverse career spanning over two decades, encompassing PR, marketing, journalism, talent management and music and film production, Emma has a deep and natural understanding of PR, marketing and communications.