Articles Tagged with Twitter

4 Quick Twitter Tips for Award Ceremonies

Award ceremony photoI’m not a social media consultant, nor someone who’s ever run social media for an event such as an award ceremony. However I’m a heavy Twitter user and I’ve seen a ton of award ceremonies – new or old, big or small, hardly known or well-established – making what I’d consider to be major mistakes when tweeting about their award ceremony during the event itself.

Trying to run social media while running an event can be tricky, I get that (I know from my own experiences)… Unless of course you have someone else in the role doing it, or you make sure to dedicate some time during the night to doing the necessary tasks yourself. Whatever the case, here’s my tips on how award ceremony events can make a huge (yet simple) difference on the tweeting front…

1) Make the Twitter handle & hashtag (really) obvious on the night

This is the head-slappingly simple one which makes me want to cry when award ceremonies don’t get it right. Either they won’t actively promote their hashtag (missed opportunity!) or there’ll be confusion as to what the hashtag actually is, resulting in either a mix of hashtags being used (some of which will be incorrect) or potential tweeters abstaining from using a hashtag – or tweeting altogether.

Put your Twitter handle and hashtag everywhere. And I mean everywhere. Put it on the website; put it in Twitter profile bio; put it on the promotional literature that goes on the tables such as the ceremony booklet/list of nominees; put it on the banners and signage; put it on the big screens; put it everywhere. And if you put it on the screens, don’t just show it briefly – make sure that it’s visible at all times, whether it’s a slide deck, a series of videos or a mix of media. It’s bound to result in a higher take-up of hashtag/handle usage when people tweet their experience, whether it’s about the people they’re with, the food & drink, or who the winners are.

Speaking of tweeting about the winners…

2) Make sure you tweet the winners (i.e. don’t rely on others to do it)

I’ve seen this happen more than once, and it’s weird: when the official Twitter handle of the award ceremony only RTs other people tweeting about the event (such as the attendees) but doesn’t actually tweet anything itself. It’s bizarre. It also means that they don’t tweet the winners as they’re announced. Perhaps they’re too busy, and/or perhaps they’re simply relying on the attendees doing it for them – after all, there’s usually at least one person who’ll go to the effort of tweeting the names of the winners of every category. But what if that doesn’t happen? I was at an award ceremony a while back where people – neither the attendees nor the organisers themselves – were tweeting the winners, resulting in people tweeting saying “…So who won the [x] category?” – especially those who couldn’t attend, like myself. It was a complete mess.

So take the time and effort to tweet each winner as-and-when they’re announced, complete with their Twitter handle, maybe a photo of them grabbing the award, and – of course – the hashtag. Be the official spokesperson for yourself, as it is meant to be.

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24 Hours of Selfies: My Challenge for Red Nose Day 2017

Red Nose Day selfie photo
It’s a bit short notice (given that it’s only two days away!), but I’ve decided to set myself a challenge for Red Nose Day 2017:

On Friday 24th March 2017, I’ll take a selfie with everyone that I speak to face-to-face (regardless of whether I know them or not!)* and tweet the pics via my Twitter (@steviephil) using the hashtag #steviephilselfie.

* Obviously people can opt out and stuff (plus there’s a few other ‘rules’), but hopefully people will want to get involved.

I had the idea for this ages ago, and RND seems like the perfect opportunity to give it a go. I should be working at Welsh ICE (my coworking space) on the day, so hopefully I’ll have plenty of people to interact (and take selfies) with. If I’m not then it’s gonna be pretty lame, as I’ll probably work from home and I’ll only end up doing selfies with my family, haha… So fingers-crossed I’m at ICE, eh!

If you’d like to sponsor me (please do!), you can do so via my dedicated RND Giving page: https://my.rednoseday.com/sponsor/steviephilselfie. Even if it’s just a couple of quid, it’ll all make a difference. Thank you in advance.

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Quick Twitter Bio Tip: Utilise Returns for a Better Layout

Twitter bird image
2019 update: I don’t think this trick works any more, but I wanted to keep the post up just in case…

Twitter addict? Personal branding important to you? Then this might be of interest…

I made a cool discovery the other day. You can use returns in your Twitter bio, which some third-party apps will honour. While it’ll look exactly the same in Twitter itself (as if it’s ignored it) and therefore seem like a completely pointless exercise, other apps show them, which means that you can spread out your Twitter bio across multiple separate lines.

This is especially handy for me as my Twitter bio looks a little messy because it contains a lot of brief one-liners with @mentions:

Twitter profile with no returns screenshot
In its default form it looks a little higgledy-piggledy, especially on Tweetbot for iPhone:

Tweetbot (iPhone) bio, no returns screenshot
As you can see, it looks like I talk about being a freelance SEO consultant, then something about MOM and Welsh ICE, and then I’m a member of something, and then State of Digital… You get the idea. It feels a little disjointed and hard to read, as the parts that are connected are on separate lines from one another.

Enter the ‘Enter’ key

But fear not, my friend, for you can add enters/returns to the bio of Twitter. Go to your Twitter profile, hit ‘Edit profile’ on the right, make your edits in the box on the left, hit the ‘Save changes’ button on the right, and you’re done. Nice n’ easy, no?

(Pro tip: I suggest using an enter and a space each time, just in case places that don’t honour it don’t show a space after the full-stops, therefore looking like this: “@Welsh_ICE member.@stateofdigital…”)

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Username Taken? Alternatives to the Dreaded “1” at the End

Recently I fell in love with an Irish folk band called The Gloaming. I later found their Twitter profile, and quietly cringed when I saw their handle: @TheGloaming1

@TheGloaming1 Twitter screenshot
@thegloaming is already taken by a Taiwanese lady who tweeted three times in 2011, never to tweet again (as I type this). Claiming inactive Twitter accounts is a whole other kettle of fish that I won’t be covering today – that’s not the purpose of this post. What I wanted to talk about instead is what The Gloaming could’ve done instead of simply sticking a “1” at the end of their username, which looks really, really outdated and technologically naïve…

If you have a business/startup name that’s already been taken on Twitter (or perhaps the .com TLD as well/instead) and you don’t fit the criteria of Twitter’s inactive account policy to claim it, hopefully some of these suggestions will help you out.

Alternatives to “TheGloaming1”

“TheGloaming” is 11 characters long (without quotes), and Twitter’s username character limit is 15 characters. So they have an extra 4 characters to play around with. They could consider dropping the “The” and/or chopping part of it (e.g. “TheGloaminMusic” is 15 characters, but removing the “g” at the end of “Gloaming” looks naff IMO), but I think it’d look best if they keep the “TheGloaming” element pretty much untouched and simply add words/initials around it. Such as:

  • Reference of band/music – e.g. @TheGloamingBand
  • Genre – e.g. @TheGloamingFolk
  • Country (initials) – e.g. @TheGloamingIE

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The @mention Placement Fail (the Biggest Mistake I STILL See on Twitter)

Many moons ago, when this blog was only a couple of months old, I published a list of all the things I see people getting wrong on Twitter. One of the points (#1 on that list) ended up having its own dedicated blog post a year later.

Nearly 4 years later, it’s still the most common mistake I see on Twitter. I call it the @mention placement fail.

What is it?

If you put an @mention right at the start of your tweet, it’s treated as a reply rather than a standalone tweet. This means that it won’t show in your followers’ timelines, unless a) it’s RTed by someone else that they follow, or b) they also follow the other account being @mentioned.

It might not seem like a big deal, and it might feel like I’m picking on people who aren’t doing Twitter properly (I’m not, by the way – or at least I don’t mean to be). But it can be a big deal: it might mean that some of your tweets aren’t even being seen by your followers. And they could be important tweets, such as big announcement tweets.

An example of how it looks (and why it’s bad)

I was following the #recruitershortlist hashtag the other day as the Recruiter Awards 2016 was being revealed, and noticed that the mistake had been made by @RecruiterAwards. In all honesty, most of the time that I see this mistake being made is during an event or activity where time is of the essence – if you’re sending out a lot of tweets out-and-about or on-the-go then it can be easy to tweet it without noticing it or realising. Heck, I’ve probably done it myself at least once during my tweeting history. So it’s just something to watch out for and to try to avoid if you can help it.

Here’s a screenshot of @RecruiterAwards’ timeline with replies:

@RecruiterAwards screenshot (with replies)
And here’s their timeline on their main profile page (without replies):

@RecruiterAwards screenshot (without replies)
Notice how the tweets starting “@Empiric_UK, …” and “@Coreatlanticltd, …” appear in the first screenshot but not the second. This is because the @mention is right at the start of the tweet and therefore they’re being treated as replies, not standalone tweets. If you were following the #recruitershortlist hashtag (as I was on the day) then you would’ve seen those tweets (like in the first screenshot above), but if you weren’t and you were following @RecruiterAwards normally and only browsing your main timeline, then those two tweets wouldn’t have appeared (like in the second screenshot above).

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