Zela's Guide to Twitter
@Zelaeria
Researching Your Audience
1. Researching Your Audience
Twitter is no different from any other social media site, building a persona of your audience is important for growth. Think of a persona as a profile of your audience. Knowing your current or desired audience is a method to know what to post to get there. Let's say you're an Artist, is your audience learning to draw? Are your audience veterans in drawing? Are your audience just fans of your artwork? These three questions are just a few questions you should ask yourself, already you may see how they could change what you post. Looking at your analytics will help to show you what kinds of posts your current audience likes the most. Whether the current posts are what you want your audience to like is a different story.
"Where do I start with building a persona?" I'm glad you asked! You ask questions and lots of them, such as the ones we explored above, to be more specific. With that said even questions like, "What would they eat?" could prove beneficial depending on the desired post you want to make. The questions you ask yourself shouldn't be answered by you though, they should be answered by being in the mind of your audience. There are many different persona-building type worksheets you can use, even Twitter has one! I do think these are great to use for starting but there are other questions you should ask yourself regarding your specific case, desire, business, etc.
"I have a persona, how does this help?" Let's go back to being an artist, the artist found their current audience prefers posts about learning. That's easy, you want to post more tutorial-like content right? Yes, but that doesn't mean you should limit yourself. You want to be as appealing to as many people as possible without losing the primary audience you have. "How do I do that?" is a difficult question, is it not? This is where being somewhat creative help, think outside the box to accomplish your goals. For example, the artist, may post a final piece and encourage their audience to draw their version of the piece and, in return, the artist could give them some constructive criticism. They're promoting themselves as an artist but still helping their main audience in the same tweet.
"What if I don't want that initial audience?" First, you want to be transparent in any changes you have in your postings, whether it's major or minor your audience deserves to know. You may see a drop in followers but don't be alarmed, some will continue engaging with your content! There is nothing wrong with changing the content you produce, but you should have a general idea of what you want to do for your content long term. Major changes, later on, could lose a huge chunk of followers and/or engagement the longer you had your audience. You should ultimately post things you enjoy creating and posting, your audience will notice the difference.
Formatting your post is another key skill you need to have. Twitter is more likely to show your post if it has custom media attached to it. This doesn't mean a post without media won't do well, but it is a lot harder to get engagement with those types of tweets. Twitter isn't doing this because they don't like text, they do this because the majority of Twitter users pay more attention to post with media attached. Think about it for a minute, whens the last time you read a tweet with only text? Do you even remember seeing any? Most of you probably don't remember any, but you probably remember the last bit of media you have seen.
You know what to post, now how many should you do? Well, this is completely up to you, but remember to stay within your abilities. Not everyone has the same energy to post every second of the day, know your limit and keep to it. Having one tweet a day is better than going a week without anything! Keep in mind you should keep your post consistent daily if you don't have time every day to make a post for noon, either don't do it or schedule your tweets. There is a such thing as too many tweets as well, you don't wanna flood your audience with tweets. Remember to write down any ideas you may have, and if the idea is still in your head that's pretty good telling that it's even better.
"I have to find the sweet spot! When should I post though?" This all depends on your audience, does your audience work a 9 to 5? then posting around 10 am probably won't get any views, but posting around noon would. Generally speaking posting around 8 am, Noon, and 6 pm and after are the best times. This doesn't mean posting any other time isn't effective, it always depends on your specific case and audience!
Most of what I mentioned so far has been very generic. "So what specific things should you do for Twitter?" Generally, only Twitter knows what or what not to do, so everything said here is more from personal experience. Including links in your post is a poor move, Twitter tries to hide these to keep people on their site. Having every possible tag in existence is also not a good move, I'm not sure why specifically but these are found to have the worst performance than ones with 2 major tags. I feel it's a way to block bots in some way but I have no proof or confirmation of this. Try to experiment with your post, doing one post and seeing it fail doesn't mean it's a bad post. Try posting similar content at different times, and on different days. One is never enough evidence of anything. Remember to interact with the community you're involved in, and reply to the people that reply to you! The most important thing anyone can do is have fun with your post.
There's always more to anything that people want to "master", but whether you wanna learn more depends on your drive to succeed on any social media. You may have noticed how most titles of each subject are generic, this was done on purpose. Every social media has a slight difference between these, but generally speaking these work for anything with of course minor or possibly major changes.
"Why should I listen to some nobody?", I have seen this coming or I wouldn't have mentioned it. Most if not all of what I mentioned in this is publicly known with a little bit of googling. I encourage everyone to do their research no matter if they believe my words or not. Seeing people improve and enjoy what they are doing is what I love to see!
"So why write this entire thing? You know people won't read this right?", Yes I know about both of these. I like helping people no matter what the case is. If only one person reads this and benefits from it, then it's a win. If no one read this, I still enjoyed writing this document and that's what counts no matter your medium. If your draw/paint, Streaming, make videos or write anything that you dislike, your audience does notice this.
Thank you all for reading this very long guide to Twitter and social media in general. I do hope you found some value in one way or another.
