Marketing Intelligence: How To Use Twitter Notifications
Do you use Twitter for business? If so, do you know whether it’s paying off?
By engaging strategically within your niche with target connections and industry leaders, you can grow your authority and influence within Twitter and drive traffic to your business.
Not just on “transmit”
Engaging strategically means taking both a proactive and reactive approach. Proactive means intentional interaction with industry influencers and providing useful, timely and credible information. Reactive means not spending all of your time on transmit, but rather paying it forward and engaging with others on Twitter. Twitter notifications help you identify the types of engagement you’re getting and from whom.
Between push notifications and unsolicited emails, the information overload can tempt anyone into tweaking settings to silence them all. But while halting the email notifications can reduce your sense of overwhelm, ignoring the marketing intelligence that Twitter notifications provide is a missed opportunity.
Not just junk mail
Twitter notifications aren’t spam. They show recent activity relating to your account, providing insights to help you engage more purposefully. Included are new accounts that are following you, profiles that have retweeted or favorited your individual posts, as well as posts in which you’ve been tagged and any lists you’ve been added to.
Leverage your Twitter notifications
By applying a disciplined process to handling your notifications, you can assess the value of each profile and the specific engagement. Leveraging your Twitter notifications allows you to use Twitter more strategically to amplify your authority and visibility within your targeted audience.
But you need a way to use notifications on your terms, without adding another email or push notification to your jam-packed life. We get it. You need a system.
Easy as 1, 2, 3, 4, 5
Follow these steps on a regular basis to amplify your Twitter effectiveness.
1. On Twitter, click on the Notifications tab. You’ll see a variety of items listed in reverse chronological order, including new followers, likes and other engagement by the Twitterverse. Activities are grouped by date and notification type, such as retweets or new followers.
2. Work your way through each notification item, clicking on one avatar at a time. Start by reviewing the profile’s bio. Any unpersonalized avatars (indicated by the default “egg”) can be ignored; these aren’t worth your time. The content of a profile’s bio can indicate whether they’re of interest or not.
3. Next check the activity on the profile. Looks at the tweets count as well as the actual posts. Is the user active and potentially worthy of greater exploration — or was their last post months ago? If they’re active, explore their cadence a bit more thoroughly. Do they post constantly, potentially cluttering your home feed?
4. Consider the numbers of followers and following. While large numbers of followers don’t always indicate an account has merit, very few followers can be meaningful, especially if the ratio between following and followers is very unbalanced (with fewer followers).
5. Now explore a few tweets for the type of content the individual posts. Are the topics of interest? Do their tweets amuse, inform or provide value? Do they offer original content or do they primarily retweet content from others?
By systematically reviewing each notification and assessing its value, you can make an informed decision whether to follow or engage back. Adhering to this process over time, you will grow your followers and Klout score, or social influence.
Get started now.
