By Laura Christianson – Follow her @BloggingBistro
As I skimmed my Twitter stream, only three tweets enticed me to click through to the blog post:
All three of these tweets are brief, unusual, punchy, and they feature strong nouns: vampire, bacon beer, Krazy Glue.
Entertaining teasers seem to be in short supply on Twitter. Normally, my Twitter stream brims with two main types of teasers:
Steroidal: Boost your sales 500% in 1 week! http://hyperlink.com
Put-you-to-sleep: Read my blog post about my book tour http://hyperlink.com
We can do better than that, people!
I created a simple system I call “Twitter Teasers,” which helps me get more mileage out of my archived blog posts.
First, I created a table in Word (Excel or any spreadsheet works, too). I assigned my assistant (my 13-year-old son) to go through my blog’s archives. He copied and pasted each post title, URL, and date published into the table. Here’s a sampling:
Next, I composed Twitter teasers – short previews of each blog post. I’ve discovered that my most-clicked teasers include one or more of the following elements:
- WIIFM (What’s In It For Me?) – Reader-centered; they use the word “you”:
- Do you have a business portrait?
- Need ideas for blog posts? Try Google’s Wonder Wheel.
- Do you want to increase your blog’s readership?
- Personal – First-person, quirky, slice-of-life:
- My teen son discovered that I have the original Boston albums… on LP.
- I need your help choosing my new business portrait.
- Our favorite pizza joint used the good, old-fashioned cold call to sell us 2-for-1 pizzas on a slow night.
- Questions – Questions implicitly promise answers that deliver useful information, controversy, or entertainment.
- Want a quick, easy, free way to get quoted in multiple media outlets?
- Are 40.5% of tweets truly “pointless babble”?
- Do people frequently misspell your name?
- Strong Words – Action verbs, specific nouns, and as many details as possible packed into one tightly-written sentence:
- MySpace for Babies? If you have a child aged 0-5, does he have his own social media site?
- Important things to know if you plan to market to Gen Xers and Yers.
- Why there are no clocks in Las Vegas & other marketing ploys you can use to grow your biz.
I draft my teasers in hootsuite http://hootsuite.com, because:
- It shows me exactly how many characters I have remaining.
- It shrinks the links to my posts.
- It allows me to pre-schedule tweets.
- I limit my teasers to 122 characters (including the link), so my fellow tweeps can re-tweet them.
In the table above, you’ll notice I’ve highlighted several teasers in yellow. In HootSuite, I track the clickthroughs for each teaser, and I highlight the most popular ones so I remember to re-use them. I note the dates and times I post each teaser so I don’t overuse a particular teaser… and so I remember to re-run it in a few weeks.
Often, I split-test my teasers – I write several teasers for a single blog post, tweet them at various times of the day over the course of a week, and check my stats to see which teasers get the most clicks.
Crafting Twitter Teasers takes time, but it’s time well spent. Teasers ensure that fresh, engaging content appears daily in your Twitter updates, and it’s a great way to lure more traffic to your archived blog posts.
@BalancedExist
There are some great ideas here that I’m going to get to work applying right now. Thanks!
Stephen
@kamaron_org
Appreciate your step by step instructions in your article. You reinforced the importance of headline writing skills, showed how to measure with hootsuite. I’ve also found headline testing aka teaser testing is worth the work and charting it is excellent away to be effective with my time. Thanks. Margaret
@los_ziegler
Honest? First time in a very long time I come back to this blog to read a complete post. And it paid.
Good Job Laura… You have a new follower and reader on me!
@genuinechris
very, very cool.
I’ve been thinking of some way to make some version fo this in a WP loop: a plugin that scans your twitter feed once every 5 hours, and if you’ve been slow, tweets blog posts from your archives.
Anyway, best.
@SheetalMakhan
I thoroughly enjoyed this and will definitely make it my next little project! Thanks for sharing this
@michaelmccurry
Laura, this article was absolutely excellent, and I also am going to immediately use some of the ideas presented. In particular I like the spreadsheet you created.
Thanks for sharing these best practices!
@michaelmccurry
@lavieconsciente
This is such a great idea. In the future it’ll be nice to give exposure to posts from the early days of my blog.
Seems like you’re giving your followers a lot of links to the same post… how does that work for you?
@bloggingbistro
Stephen and Guillermo,
Glad you found the information helpful!
One additional tidbit – I don’t exclusively use Twitter Teasers in my Twitter stream. Throughout the day (as time permits), I supplement the teasers with random thoughts, insights, entertaining links I find on the Internet, replies to others, etc.
Laura
@HolisticMom
FANTASTIC post. Now to make the time to do all this!
@BeachinTenerife
What a great idea! I don’t have enough postings yet, but I will now take this idea with me as my Blog grows. Thanks.
@stretchmarkmama
Laura! You’re on TwiTip! Our world’s collide!
That idea of charting out your old blog posts is so wonderful and geeky. Especially in my current state of not being able to blog on a daily (monthly) basis — pulling from the archives is likely the best thing for me to do. I mean, there is GOLD in them posts, people!
*smile*
@BetterBodiesSFV
Sometimes there is so much information on how to better or best you Twitter that it can get kind of overwhelming. Your article, however, does alot to help minimize this effect by showing a very practical way of improving your use of the Twitter medium. Thxs… Also is this Hootsuite a few application?
@bloggingbistro
Andrea – From the looks of your avatar, you have a young ‘un — probably too young for you to hire to create a spreadsheet of your blog’s archives. But if you’ve got someone old enough to copy & paste hanging around your home, I urge you to hire them! I just transferred a blog from Typepad to WordPress, and I’m definitely hiring one of my teenagers to update the URLs of 800+ posts.
Margaret – Teaser writing is closely related to headline writing. I’m headline-challenged, so drafting teasers is good practice for me. It helps me discover the essence of each blog post.
Genuine Chris – Wouldn’t it be cool if we could automate this process? If anyone has suggestions for how to streamline my suggestions, I’d be happy to hear them.
Monique – I do provide multiple links to the same post. The day a post is published, I provide a link 2-3 times (at 8 a.m., noon, and 3 p.m., for example), because different people check Twitter at different times during the day. I usually provide the link once a day for the next few days, and then taper off after that. It works well — many people don’t click the link the day the post comes out, but they discover it a few days later and click through to the blog post.
Stephen – The best time to start your Twitter Teasers is with a new blog. As you add new posts, update your Teasers file. It’ll save you a lot of time in the long run.
@IndianGuru
Laura, this article was absolutely excellent. You have a new follower.
@avirtualbiz
Laura, I love this idea! You are so right about the same old boring, put-me-to-sleep posts (of which I am so guilty of!!).
This is a great idea and I am getting my Word document set up now to follow your lead.
I love HootSuite also and I use Bit.ly to track my links.
Great article!
@Bluefaqs
Thanks for the insight, there are really some great ideas here. I’m going to apply some of these techniques today.
@bloggingbistro
Chris – Hootsuite has been around a while (at least, in Twitter time, it has been). I began using it to manage multiple Twitter accounts for my clients, and I like its clean, easy-to-read, no-frills interface. I’m sure there are other great Twitter management apps, as well; I just happen to use this one and am content with it.
Terri – We’re all guilty of writing put-me-to-sleep Twitter updates (I know I am!), so don’t beat yourself up over it. I hope the Twitter Teasers help you eliminate a large chunk of the boring ones.
Appreciate your comments, everyone – I love “inventing” practical uses for Twitter and sharing them.
@Jeanwise
Wow this is a great idea. I agree and I am guilty of boring teasers for my post but now have NO excuses to do a better job after reading this. Thanks for the idea and inspiration!
@coreyfreeman
This is awesome! I’m definitely going to be using these ideas for twitter in the future.
@udallyss
What Twitter Teaser did you use to get people to read THIS post?
@cadilacjax
Thanks for such informative Shizzle! You’ve got to be one of the few who I have also read the whole post and comments section of as well. Left me wanting more. I so enjoy my blog(s) and twitter. Keeping them up to date and at the same time attempting to get the most from them for my readers and sponsors alike takes effort and research. So coming across some valuable info. like this once in a blue moon is a blessing. Thanks your going to have a new follower in just a few clicks!
@cadilacjax
Oh and one other thing I forgot. I see where someone asked what you tweeted to get us here and I’m sure you tweeted this but I found it by googling…Get the most out of your blog,,, again thanks
@bloggingbistro
Alyssa, You asked what Twitter Teaser I wrote to get people to THIS post. I tried several (of course!). Interestingly, the one that got the most clickthroughs was a nod to tweeps who re-tweeted this post. This proves that we like to see our name up in lights:
Appreciate your RTs on “How to Write Twitter Teasers” @tmaemarketing @susyflory @JanetKGrant @dubiousMa @tweetwell http://ow.ly/xiYo
Another teaser that got a fair amount of clicks:
How to write great Twitter Teasers that entice people into your blog’s archives. By me, on Darren Rowse’s TwiTip – http://ow.ly/xiVa
(It never hurts to mention Darren’s name!)
@larrybourgeois
Woa! What a Super piece on doing everything better, Laura! You’ve easily earned another follower with this insightful article. Oh, and the comments section is a real Treasure too! People Love ya!
LarryB
@Chaudalyn
Thanks! I read this post over and over again. I think I’ve gotten it. Thanks for sharing this info
@codenamemama
Just signed up for HootSuite – thanks for the tip! Now I have a dumb question – how can I track which Tweets result in click-throughs?
@bloggingbistro
Dionna,
To track click-throughs from within HootSuite, click “Stats” in the bottom lefthand corner of your screen. Then click the “Individual Message” tab. You can then click “View Stats” for any Twitter update and it will show you a graph that includes total clicks.
For a more broad view, after clicking “Stats,” click “Load popular tweets from Twitter” and it will display a list of your top 10 most-clicked updates, along with the total number of clicks for each.
@kurtmichaelson
This is great! I’m going to look at some of my older posts and see which ones I’d like to RT.
@nicolemgiordano
Thank you for this!!
What great ideas.