Are You ‘Doing Twitter Wrong’?

June 26, 2012

Collective Measures
A Buddy Media report says marketers are 'doing Twitter wrong.' We highlight some key findings and give some best practices.

I woke up at 6:15 this morning, with an optimistic outlook on my day. By 6:19, that was all over. Mashable tweeted that a report said marketers are doing Twitter wrong. PANIC! After getting ready in record time (lie), barely taking time to eat breakfast (lie) or have coffee (are you kidding me?), I rushed to the site to read the article, based on a Buddy Media report, in its entirety. No one wants to wake up one morning and learn they’ve been doing everything wrong. That is no way to start a day. I’ll highlight some of the report’s main findings, and try my best to make sense of them. The report says brands…  Are tweeting too much on the wrong days.

Great. Now even more people are confused about “when to tweet” and “which day is best to send a tweet.” The answer? It depends on your audience and your experience. But the middle of the night is probably not a good time to tweet, and the end of a Friday afternoon might not be ideal unless you’re promoting a local happy hour special or weekend event. Also, many people are afraid to tweet something more than once, but it’s OK to send second-chance tweets if you have audiences in various time zones and you feel the content is important enough.

Aren’t tweeting enough on the weekends.

See below.

Don’t realize that tweets published during “busy hours” (i.e. on weekdays) perform best.

See above.

Not using hashtags enough.

This is a joke, right? Is it me, or does it seem like #every #brand #uses #hashtags #constantly? In fact, I would argue that many are using too many hashtags, or aren’t using them effectively. For example, the use of multiple hashtags in a tweet will likely distract people. They’ll click a hashtag and get lost in a sea of tweets barely (maybe) related to what you’re actually talking about. If you’re sharing a link and also include even one hashtag, you risk followers not clicking the link you want them to, and again, getting lost in hashtag land.

Here are a couple of good example of hashtag use:

One hashtag to connect everyone who joins the conversation.
No hashtag, just a link. Keeping things easy.

And a not so good:

So much going on. Where do I click?!

This is a promoted tweet, meaning Pepsi is actually paying for every interaction: every click of every hashtag and link. Yikes! Even Twitter says using more than two at a time is “probably overkill.”

Then the phrase “tweet spot” was used and I went back to bed.