The hidden tricks of Twitter that all brands should know

Twitter may have announced new features for businesses, but do you know how to access them?

There are also a whole host of other Twitter features that you may not know about either. This isn’t because Twitter is trying to hide them from you, Twitter just wants to show you the ones that are relevant to you and your business.

Admittedly, Twitter can be a little fiddly for those new to it – and is one of the big problems the social network needs to overcome to attract new users!

Here’s a master list of Twitter features and how you can use them for your business:

Create Twitter Lists to segment audiences

They’ve been around forever but not a lot of businesses know about them or how to use them. Twitter Lists allow you to only view tweets by Twitter users that you’ve assigned to those lists.

With 500m tweets posted worldwide everyday, your Twitter feed will quickly clog up with your fair share as you follow more people. By creating lists in Twitter, you can easily filter out all of the noise and only show tweets from your specific lists.

For example – you may create a list of clients, movers & shakers in your industry, media contacts or anything!

By default these lists are public, so anyone can view them by going to your profile. When creating a list, you can opt to make them private, so only you and the people that you’ve added know they exist. One top tip though, don’t go and call your clients list “Clients”, it’s a bit of a giveaway to your competitors.

Create your own Twitter lists >

Filter out noise with “Mute”

Twitter recently introduced Mute to help filter out spam and abusive tweets.

This allows you to add a “quality filter” to the tweets that you see in your timeline. You can add anything you want and it’s particular useful for filtering out profanity (amongst other things).

As a business, DO NOT filter out noisy customers as their tweets will still exist and still need dealing with. Use this feature to filter out spam words if your timeline is overly clogged up.

Access the quality filter here >

Get insights with Twitter Analytics

As soon as you start using Twitter for your business, make sure you’ve turned analytics on.

Twitter Analytics gives you lots of useful stats on who your followers are, and what content they’re viewing and interacting with.

As a business, you’ll want to know all of those things so that you can save time and prioritise the activities that are working well.

Access Twitter Analytics here >

Allow photo tagging

As you may already know, you can now tag up to 10 Twitter @users in your images.

This is especially good as it allows you to tag people or organisations in your photos, which in turn alerts those users to your content and gives you a greater chance of your content being retweeted. However, did you know that you can turn this off in your settings?

I always recommend that you keep this switched on to allow others to tag your business, but it’s entirely up to you.

One for the night-owls

Do you view Twitter late at night or first thing in the morning? We all do it!

If you’re scrolling through your timeline at night, you can now turn on ‘night mode’ that inverts colours and darkens colours shown to you. It’s pretty cool for those up late (or early!)

Get yourself a blue tick 

Once reserved for the Twitter elite, you can now send in a request to verify your Twitter account.

Why verify? It adds a blue tick to your account to show that you’ve been verified. This is especially useful for brands that are targeted by trolls and spoof accounts. Your customers will know that your account is the official account when engaging with you.

Verified users can also unlock special features, such as additional filters on their notifications etc.

Request to verify your Twitter account here >

Add link previews to your tweets

How to optimise your press release for online media https://t.co/SgSJ7V9VnX

— Rhys (@rhysgregory) November 21, 2016

Link previews or Twitter cards (as they are officially known) add previews to your tweets. You often see this with Facebook and Linkedin posts. If you add a link to your post it automatically generates a preview of the page, along with an image. This is exactly the same, but in order for it to work on Twitter, you need to add some HTML code to your website.

Personally I’m a huge fan of this, as tweets with link previews typically see engagement rates double compared to that of a standard tweet.

Leave this one to your web developer to implement, but you can find more information and a guide to add the code below:

Find out how to add link previews to tweets here >

Make your tweets accessible by everyone

The visually impaired use social media too, so one thing that you should do is make sure you have image descriptions turned on.

You can turn this feature on by updating your accessibility settings.

This allows you to describe what the image is about. It’s a bit like ALT text on a web page (if you know what I’m talking about).

This means that people using screen readers or braille displays will have access to this information. These descriptions will only be available to users using this technology.

Make your content go even further with Twitter Ads

Twitter Ads allow brands to reach even more people, not just those limited to their current network of followers.

It can be highly targeted and I dare say, you can even promote content and get it in front of your competitors’ audiences.

There are far too many options to list here, but you should check out Twitter Ads if you haven’t already.

Unlock Twitter dashboard for businesses

Back in September, Twitter announced it was opening up its dashboard to businesses.

The Twitter Dashboard is designed for businesses, but you don’t need to be a business to use it (technically).

Twitter Dashboard features include:

• Add a “Message” call to action box to your Twitter profile
• Add response / opening times for support
• Send automatically welcome direct messages (DM) to those that DM you
• Set-up additional search and brand mention “lists” within the dashboard

This is great for businesses looking to use Twitter for their customer services support

Access Twitter’s dashboard for businesses here >

Last but not least, third-party integration

Don’t forget, you can save even more time with third party integration with services such as Hootsuite and Sendible.

These tools allow you manage multiple social networks all in one place. You can schedule content in advance, set-up Twitter lists and searches to monitor all of your product mentions and more. Check them out!