Twitter Campaign Strategy and First Impressions
Just like first impressions, your Twitter campaign strategy can go a long way. After setting up your account, it’s time to actually tweet! Here are a few Do’s and Don’ts to keep in mind, and keep your tweets optimized all while focused on the overall goal of your campaign.
Top Twitter Campaign Strategy Do’s
Do Tweet Often: The more you tweet, the more you optimize for your account. Tweeting often will help you get your message across to a larger audience and expand the reach of your message.
Do Engage: Social media, and especially Twitter, is all about connecting with other people. Engaging with your followers (e.g. the people you are following,) keeps you involved in the ongoing conversation around your campaign. Not only that, but it will help you expand your reach.
Do Post Relevant Content: Did your organization just write a blog? Publish an op-ed in a local newspaper? Did your candidate get an endorsement? Twitter can be a great outlet to promote your organizations agenda, your campaigns goals, or your personal objectives.
Do Schedule Tweets: Twitter is like NYC, it never sleeps. It’s fast, it’s instant, and if you blink, you might just miss an opportunity to tweet your message. That’s why a big twitter strategy “do” is to pre schedule or automate tweets. There are a ton of digital tools out there to help you organize your tweets and content, in fact you can check out some of TCW’s favorites on our 100 Political and Advocacy Tools list.
Do Use Twitter Cards and Twitter Ads: Whether it be for advocacy or political candidates, advertising is a valuable resource for any campaign and a great addition to any Twitter strategy. Twitter can target an exact audience, and market your content or campaign to them. Twitter cards help you streamline that content to that targeted audience - making it easier for them to complete a call to action by just one click of a button. These call to actions could be a generic tweet available for users to tweet from their personal twitter accounts or lead them to the latest eBook your organization has published on your website.
Top Twitter Campaign Strategy Don’ts
Don’t Overuse Your Hashtags: Hashtags are fun, they can help categorize your tweets and help expand the reach of your message. But sometimes too many hashtags can overcrowd your tweets. After all, you only get 140 characters. Studies have shown that tweets with more than two hashtags get less engagement.
Don’t Use Up All Your Characters with Long Links: You only get 140 characters, (although at the time this ebook was written, Twitter was beta testing 280 characters) use them wisely! Bit.ly is a great website to shorten links so you have more space to craft your message around the content in the link.
Don’t Forget About Account Security: In today’s political environment, Twitter seems to be a social media platform where people tend to get into trouble. Being careful who has access to your twitter account, and securing it correctly to avoid hackers or accidental likes on inappropriate tweets ( I’m looking at you @tedcruz) should be a high priority when using Twitter.
Don’t Publish Before Proofreading: Unlike other social media platforms, once you send a tweet out into the world, you can’t edit it without deleting it. If you grow your followers enough, or you are/become a high profile person or organization the chances of someone catching a misplaced typo or a badly phrased tweet increases. For example, no one would care if Donald Trump tweeted out “covfefe” if he was anyone but the President. However, now full conspiracies over its meaning exist. Bottom line, proof your tweets!
Don't forget your message: Twitter can help reinforce a message, but many candidates get lost in the twittersphere and tweet because they feel like it. Stay on message and take a breath before you tweet.
Don’t Be Mean: Follow the golden rule: Do unto others as you would have them do unto you. In other words, just because you are behind a computer or phone, don’t tweet things out to people you wouldn’t say to their face.
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