Craig Moore Computer Consultancy
Advice for website developers and business on how to use social media.
How to construct Twitter Marketing tweets

How to compose a Twitter promotional Tweet
One of your goals in using twitter, as a social media marketing tool to promote your website, is to try and write tweets that are so good that other people will re-tweet them to all their followers and friends. They will be providing you with free advertising that will be targeted at an interested group. It just does not get better than this.
It is an Ad agencies dream. I will use examples from my website The English Fly Fishing Shop. Notice the tweets mention nothing about selling. This helps in getting them retweeted.

Print this page, show it around the office, talk about this with others.

What I want to talk about in this article are some pitfalls that can occur if you do not construct your tweets correctly to cope with them being re-tweeted.

Put simply you should put your #tags at the end of your tweet and your links in the middle. Why I hear you ask. The reason is that when one of your followers re-tweet your tweet some twitter applications chop off the last … say 10 characters.

If those last characters are part of the link to your website then the whole point of sending the tweet has been lost. Twitter users will read the tweet that has been RT (retweeted) but will be unable to click on the link and visit your site that you have spent hours developing.

Just to show you what I mean have a look at these examples. The marketing tweets in the example on the left have all proved popular and have been retweeted RT, but look what has happened. The very important link to my page is missing as I had put it at the end of my tweet. Retweets are still governed by the 140 character rule. When you re-tweet a message twitter puts the letters RT and the e-mail address at the front which eats into the 140 characters

Now look at the way my tweets have been constructed in the right hand example. As the link is in the middle of the tweet when it has been retweeted it has not been cut or missing from the re-tweet. Missing #tags do not matter in a retweet. Your follower is republishing your marketing tweet to all their friends and followers. They are recommending the content to them all as being of interest. It is fantastic advertising and it is free. It drives traffic to your website pages.

So remember Text-Link-Text-#tags in that order.