11 Things You Can Do Right Now to Perfect Your Twitter Profile
News outlets should be mortified by the way they describe themselves on Twitter. Learn from their mistakes, and from the companies that are doing it right.
News outlets should be mortified by the way they describe themselves on Twitter. Learn from their mistakes, and from the companies that are doing it right.
Every high-schooler knows that you can’t choose your nickname. Happily, social media offers a remedy for people of all ages: the chance to write your own bio.
This ability to self-brand is priceless. Yet many fumble it. In fact, major media outlets approach their Twitter bios as if they were students cramming to finish their homework on the school bus, rather than world-class wordsmiths. At a time when publishers are increasingly interested in driving social traffic to their sites, such box-checking results in a lost opportunity
Does this description hit close to home? Does your Twitter bio read like a homework assignment dashed off en route to class? Fear not: here are 11 ways to burnish your brand.
Social media rewards humor and punishes banality. So, infuse your tweets with personality).
For example, who isn’t curious what the “best f#@king news team,” i.e., The Daily Show, has to say? Surely, we’re intrigued when a seemingly staid organization like CNN assures us, “It’s our job to #GoThere.” Meanwhile, Slate pledges to help us “procrastinate better,” and The HuffPo affirms its love for “big fonts” and “Greek yogurt.”
Do this:
So who’s pumping out these tweets? Is it an army of algorithms, like Google News, which once boasted, “No humans were harmed or even used in the creation of this page”? Is it a bunch of interns in Alaska? Is it a single person at HQ?
Take a cue from ABC, The Atlantic, MSNBC, The Tonight Show, and the Journal, each of which reveals the tweeters behind these avatars. Extra credit to the AP, which publicizes a list of the journalists who manage its social media channels.
Do this:
Why in the world would Mashable, one of the most widely read and the savviest publications today, waste precious characters to tell you its tweets come from “Mashable staff”? Who else would they come from?
Similarly, TIME magazine should know better than to write that its Twitter account is “hosted by TIME staff.” As opposed to Newsweek staff?
The Los Angeles Times does slightly better, specifying that its Twitter team consists of editors from its website, yet even this disclosure is deficient.
Just as every magazine has a masthead and every article has a byline, so every Twitter account should have some sort of attribution.
Don’t do this:
Get specific, a la The New York Times: “Follow for breaking news, special reports, NYTimes.com homepage links and RTs of our journalists.”
Describe your unique value, a la TMZ: “TMZ has consistently been credited for breaking the biggest stories dominating the entertainment news.”
Identify your audience, a la New York: “Defining the news, culture, fashion, food, and personalities that drive New York.”
Do this:
This way, when the potential advertiser your sales guy just met subsequently checks your Twitter feed, he sees the same spin he got fed over lunch. Forbes erects this echo chamber expertly by repeating the claim, verbatim from its ads website, to be the “homepage for the world’s business leaders.”
Do this:
It’s particularly sad that Business Insider, which is loathed and loved for its click-baitish headlines, has put so little thought into its bio: “the latest business news and analysis.” (Ugh.) Likewise, does anyone really benefit from knowing that Politico covers “politics” and “political news”? (Yawn.)
A bronze medal of shame to Rolling Stone, that cradle of the counterculture, which apparently can’t muster anything more specific than “the latest news and more from Rolling Stone magazine and RollingStone.com.” And a dishonorable mention to TechCrunch for its hasty filler, “Breaking technology news and opinions from TechCrunch.”
Don’t do this:
Instead, petition Twitter for a blue badge that shows your account to be “verified,” and use your newfound space for something else – maybe #1, #2, #4, or #5?
Don’t do this:
Love the snark, Playboy, but do you need to seem so…desperate?
Don’t do this:
Twitter offers a separate field for that.
Don’t do this:
Like the BBC is doing with its new shows, BuzzFeed is doing with its app, Cosmo is doing with its current issue, and the FT is doing with its pay wall.
Extra credit to Fitness, which gives over its avatar to the current cover of its monthly magazine, and to Vanity Fair and Maxim, both of which use their wallpaper for same.
Do this:
You wouldn’t force your writers and editors to handle missed deliveries and subscription changes. So why expect them to deal with these issues when they arrive via social media? The solution: create separate channels for separate departments, as People and Sports Illustrated do, and use the bio in your mother ship to call attention to your help desk.
Do this:
Will a bad bio break your brand? Truth be told, it won’t. Business Insider, Politico, and TechCrunch have all amassed huge audiences (half a million, three quarters of a million, and 3.5 million respectively), even though their corporate bios are embarrassingly vapid.
But consider this: Every day, your customers face a fusillade of demands for their attention – tweets, texts, direct messages, Snapchats, Whispers, emails, voice mails, app notifications, calendar reminders, Fitbit alerts, friend requests, and so on. Spend an hour fine-tuning seemingly trivial tactics like your bio, and you’ll convert some of these drive-by visitors into avid followers.