With over 140 million active users and over 340 million tweets daily, it’s no wonder Twitter’s become a crucial tool for marketing campaigns.
Below are 18 simple tips, tricks and tools I’ve compiled to help you rock your future Twitter campaigns. Enjoy!
Twitter Campaign Tips
1. Choose a Unique Hashtag
Choose a unique hashtag as it relates to your event. Make sure it’s short, easy to remember, and one your consumers will relate to. (A perfect example is Nike’s #MakeItCount hashtag.) And of course, search Twitter to make sure it’s not already in use.
2. Set Specific Campaign Goals
The more specific your goals, the easier it will be to steer your campaign in the right direction. Are you using the campaign to build your mailing list? Encourage donations? Raise awareness for your cause?
Choose one primary goal and use it as your campaign’s compass.
3. Promote Your Hashtag In Advance
Count down to the launch of your campaign by using the hashtag in all updates relating to it. It’s a great way to build excitement and dialogue with your followers.
4. Ask For Retweets
When it comes to important campaign messages, simply ask for retweets! Asking can generate four times more retweets.
5. Leave Room For Retweets
Many people like including a comment with their retweet, so make sure your campaign tweets leave room for participants to do so. Otherwise, they may not bother sharing your content.
Recommended length? Shoot for around 100 characters.
6. Use No More Than Two Hashtags Per Tweet
Not only will using more than two make your tweet look spammy, studies have shown that when tweets show up to two hashtags there’s a 21% higher engagement rate (and a 17% decrease in engagement if a tweet includes three or more).
Use the hashtag of your campaign, along with a hashtag that targets the audience you’re looking to reach.
Twitter Campaign Tricks
7. Take Note of the Least ReTweetable Words
A study by Dan Zarrella revealed the 20 least retweetable words. Avoid using the words below in your campaign tweets:
- game
- going
- haha
- lol
- but
- watching
- work
- home
- night
- bed
- well
- sleep
- gonna
- hey
- tomorrow
- tired
- some
- back
- bored
- listening
And use the words/phrases known as the most retweetable instead:
- you
- please
- retweet
- post
- blog
- social
- free
- media
- help
- please retweet
- great
- social media
- 10
- follow
- how to
- top
- blog post
- check out
- new blog post
8. Compile User-Generated Content
According to Hubspot, approximately 8 out of 10 Generation Yers say user-generated content influences their purchases.
Boost engagement by encouraging your fans to post photos, videos, and other content as it relates to your campaign. It’s a great way to boost engagement and spread the word about your campaign, brand, and products/services.
9. Have a Plan In Case Your Hashtag Goes Viral… For The Wrong Reasons
If there’s one thing we can all learn from the disaster that was #McDStories, make sure you have a strategy in place for if there’s a campaign backlash, and your campaign’s trending for negative reasons.
10. Rock Your Headlines
Tweets are like magazine and newspaper headlines. Rock your headlines to catch people’s attention, and a creative campaign to keep them engaged.
11. Use Targeted Keywords In Your Tweets
Make a list of keywords that best describe your business, industry, and campaign. Do your best to incorporate these keywords organically into each of your tweets. This will help your audience find you faster.
12. Use Your Twitter Background to Its Fullest
Each time you have a Twitter campaign going on, customize the background of your Twitter account to promote it.
Twitter Campaign Tools
13. bit.ly
Use an URL shortener to not only use less characters per tweet, but to keep track of which tweets are more popular than others.
www.bitly.com
14. Buffer
Pre-schedule campaign tweets as a way to connect with followers in various time zones.
www.bufferapp.com
15. The Most ReTweetable Words Finder Tool
Find out what the 20 most retweeted words are on a particular topic and incorporate them into your tweets.
http://danzarrella.com/the-most-retweetable-words-finder-tool.html
16. Tweepi
Research Twitter users whose followers would also be interested in following your account (for example, influencers in your industry). Use Tweepi to follow and interact with them to build your list for future campaigns.
www.tweepi.com
17. TweetReach
Want to know how a specific tweet is doing? Simply paste the URL of the tweet in TweetReach, and it will tell you how many people saw it, who saw it, and if/when they shared it.
www.tweetreach.com
18. Tweriod
Tweriod will keep track of how well your tweets perform, and when your followers are most active. This will help you make sure your campaign tweets go out at times where they’ll reach the most people.
www.tweriod.com
Have you hosted or participated in a Twitter campaign? Feel free to share your insights below!
If you’re ready to take your non-profit’s Twitter account to the next level, pick up the Social Caffeine ebook, 10 Commandments for Raising Money for Non-Profits on Twitter. Download your copy from Amazon here. Amazon UK users: get your copy here.

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Hi Krissy, your article was referenced in webhostingmadness blog It referred to your list of top retweeted words, I had to check it out and find out where you cited it from.
Hi there Juliana – thanks for stopping by! I found the study on http://danzarrella.com, and he has a ton of posts related to most successful and least successful words on various social networks – his site’s awesome! *Krissy
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