Today I read a great article called “6 Ways to Improve Your Twitter Marketing Results” on Social Media Examiner. There were a couple tips I thought were interesting and wanted to comment on. The first was tip number two about communicating less and tweet more links. It’s countering the idea that if you engage in conversation people are more likely to follow you. The author is saying that it’s more effective to spend time tweeting relevant links to your existing followers to get more followers. The advice seemed counterintuitive that to obtain a greater social following you engage less in conversation.

The other point I found interesting is that it’s no longer necessary to use link shorteners on twitter. In the beginning of  twitter people used link shorteners to save space in their tweet. Now twitter counts any link, long or short, exactly as 22 characters. So using a longer URL wont waste characters in your tweet. In light of this the author notes that using a link shortener is inefficient because it takes more processing power to go through a link shortener service like Bitly by lengthening the load time thus hampering the user experience.

There are so many opinion and techniques out there on what is the best way to work online. The best method is to take a scientific approach and experiment with your audience. What works for one may not work for others. My advice is to continue learning new techniques and try it out. Keep what works and leave what doesn’t.

Hope you all have a great week.

Bryce Thomas