Almost Everything But the Tweet – Conquering Twitter (verbal elements)
Verbal elements? Twitter is, of course, utterly verbal. It’s just about all text. But not all of that text is tweets.
One piece is the profile. There isn’t a lot of space here. The good news is that these verbal elements are searchable. If you want to make it clear that your company is green, you can put that here. Separate short messages with delimiters like pipes (|) or asterisks (*). Don’t use semicolons as they can end up being converted to code.
This is an easy section to change, so consider changing it as needed, perhaps as special events come up. Just keep track of the older wording so you can more readily recreate it if you ever need to.
Another area is the site URL. In order to be better able to track traffic coming in from Twitter, how about using a unique URL here, say, https://www.yoursite.com/twitter? That page could contain a customized welcome message to Twitter users. This is another readily editable area of Twitter, so why not switch it up as circumstances change?
This is also a useful way to help to better segment your audience. Anyone using the /twitter link is bound to have some sort of affinity with the microblogging service.
Your location is another verbal area. Of course it need not be a real place, but for a commercial Twitter account you can’t get too whimsical here.
However, if you’ve got a multi-state presence (and want to get that across but not create separate Twitter accounts for each state), there’s nothing wrong with making your location something like United States or New England or Great Lakes Region.
Verbiage: Names
Another area is the name behind the account. This is a searchable field. A company can add a tiny bit of additional information here, such as the general company location. Hence the user name could be Your Company but the name behind it could be Your Company, Cleveland.
Yet another area is the name(s) of list(s) that your company uses to follow others. Does a company need Twitter lists? Not necessarily, but you can still use them to make certain accounts stand out.
What about lists like customers or distributors? Perhaps not very imaginative, but these could prove useful in the future if Twitter ever makes it possible to send certain tweets only to certain lists.
Finally, although it is an issue to change it, the username is another nugget of non-tweet verbiage. Instead of changing it, what about creating a few accounts to cover different eventualities? Able2Know used to do this well (although some of these feeds are abandoned these days).
Years ago, Able2know used to split off a few feeds as follows:
A user was able to follow any or all of these and see a different slice of that site. The individual user names for the accounts make it abundantly clear which cut of the site you’re following.
But that was dropped, and I am not 100% certain as to why–although automatic tweeting meant we were tweeting spam and porn before the moderating team could zap it out of existence.
Takeaways
So, what do you want to get across? I mean, really. What image do you wish to project? Peripheral information can support or obfuscate your message.
Make certain that the content and social media people (if not the entire marketing department) get a say in the wording. They may find things that you missed. Or at least they should be able to help you spot typos.
Choose what you really want your verbal elements to say. And then, say them!