A New Twitter Is Coming!

This Tuesday, Twitter will be rolling out a new design for profile pages. If you are a Twitter addict like me, you may agree that the additions seem to be quite useful. Among the new features are the following:

Best Tweets: Tweets that have received more engagement will appear slightly larger, so your best content is easy to find.

Pinned Tweet: Pin one of your tweets to the top of your page, so it’s easy for your followers to see what you’re all about. Most of your followers won’t visit your personal page often, but when they do it’s nice to be able to control what they see first. Maybe that means pinning your top story at the time if you’re a newspaper, or pinning a feature you’re particularly proud of if you’re an individual journalist. It’s a new way to make sure visitors to your page see something useful right away. 

Filtered Tweets: Now you can choose which timeline to view when checking out other profiles. Select from these options: tweets, tweets with photos/videos, or tweets and replies.

How will you use the new Twitter features? We want to know! 

Top Five Twitter Etiquette Tips

Twitter has quickly become the most relevant social media websites, and is especially important in the public relations world. Twitter can be used for a wide variety of things, such as furthering one’s personal brands, connecting with other professionals and organizations and staying connected with what’s going on both in and out of the United States. In the fast-paced world of 140 characters, here a few tips to keep in mind when tweeting:

• Don’t overuse hashtags: While hashtags are both fun and can be helpful with connecting with others during events and conferences, use too many and the tweet begins to look a little messy. A good rule of thumb is to stick to three or less.

• No automatic DMs: To put it quite simply, they aren’t needed. The “thank you for the follow” and “feeling excited to connect with you” message isn’t personal. If looking to say something right away to a new follower, a personal tweet to the user tends to work much better!

• Try not to only tweet headlines and links: While it may be easier to just hit that “Retweet” button, if you do have the character room and want to add value to your tweet, go ahead and pull out an interesting line or two, or even a quote. While this may not apply to all types of articles you may see on Twitter, try and keep this one in the back of your mind next time you want to tweet out that really interesting article you just read.

• Don’t forget to add the MT: While just recently learning of this myself, the “MT” stands for “modified tweet.” As public relations students, we all know the thought and care that can go into crafting the perfect tweet. If you do have to slightly change another’s words in order to fit into the 140 requirement, don’t forget to MT to make others aware that wording was changed!

• If you are forced to write “spoiler alert,” don’t tweet it: Writing “spoiler alert” in your tweet pretty much ensures that something will be spoiled for somebody. In the age of Netflix and HBO GO, we all don’t watch our television programs at the same time when they air and if any of you are like me out there, Twitter has ruined many an episode of my favorite television programs. (particularly Game of Thrones last spring.) 

Are there any other tips that came to your mind while reading this? Is there anything that personally bothers you on Twitter? Share below!

This guest blog post was written by PRowl Staff Member Rachel Draghi.

Live-Tweeting Tips

With a few national and regional conferences under my belt, I have truly embraced live-tweeting. It is a really easy way to generate meaningful content for your Twitter account - if it is done well.

Be sure to keep the following tips in mind, provided by this PR Daily article, to ensure you are adding value to the conversation and remember to have a charger handy because live-tweeting definitely drains a smartphone's battery!

1. Use the event hashtag

If there isn’t an event hashtag, make one up. Just keep it short, because every character counts. Using a hashtag will group all your tweets, enabling people searching for the event hashtag (or the hashtag you think up) to find them. It also makes it clear to your followers that you are tweeting about a certain event , not just spouting off random sound bites.

2. Tag speakers and companies in your tweets

This will not only make your presence known to those participating, but will also increase your chances of being retweeted.

3. Engage with other live-tweeters

Use the hashtag to search for others who are tweeting and start a conversation. From there, you can always ask to take the conversation offline.

4. Don’t tweet too much

You will overwhelm your regular followers who will not appreciate a barrage of out-of-context tweets. Though there is no ideal number of tweets, you should decide where the balance lies between over-dominating the conversation and not contributing enough.

5. Take pictures, and incorporate them into your tweets

Tweets with pictures are 94 percent more likely to be retweeted, according to Social News Daily, so use that camera.

Twitter Chats for PR Pros

In public relations, it is essential that you have a like-minded friend and colleague who truly understands what a PR person does. To many people, the obsessive email checking, our crazy attention to detail, and dedication to a profession that many people overlook is baffling. It’s great to have a group of supportive professionals who can have an appreciation and understanding for what you do. Other professionals also tend to be some of our greatest untapped resources.

One place I have been able to connect with other dedicated professionals has been on social media, more specifically Twitter Chats! Twitter Chats are a great time to make connections while gaining information about a specific topic of interest. Because Twitter Chats are virtual, you have access to professionals you may never have met otherwise. 

Here are some great Twitter Chats you should mark your calendars for:

Mondays:

#InternPro: an open discussion moderated by @YouTern, enables young professionals to successfully enter the workforce; topics typically include internships, job interview skills, networking, personal branding and entry-level career development. When: Mondays, 9pm to 10pm ET.

#JournChat: “Conversation between journalists, bloggers and public relations folks. Moderated by @PRsarahevans.” When: 7:00pm to 10pm CST.

Tuesdays:

#MeasurePr: Dedicated to discussing all things related to public relations measurement, including social media. Often features expert guests. Founded and curated by @shonali. See the WTHashtag page for more details; bi-weekly on Tuesdays, 12-1 pm ET.

Wednesdays: 

#PinChat: Pinterest Chat. Weekly Twitter chat Wed 9PM ET, founded by Kelly Lieberman@tribe2point0 to discuss best practices, new uses, highlight brand usage, personal/professional use and tools for Pinterest. Details athttp://kellylieberman.wordpress.com/what-is-pinchat/

Thursdays: 

#PrwebChat: Chat with influencers and learn about their PR techniques, online marketing strategies, social media strategies and similar topics. Topics include PR, SEO, social media and the like for individuals, agencies and small businesses. Moderated by @prweb#prweb When: Every other Thursday, 1:00pm to 1:30pm CST.

Fridays: 

#AgencyChat: Chat for those working or interested in ad agencies. Moderated by@craigritchie. Facebook page. When: Fridays, 1:00pm to 2:00pm CST.

For a full list of other great Twitter Chats, check out this post by San Francisco PR Girl.

Twitter Tips: #FollowFriday

#FF is short for #FollowFriday. It’s a Twitter trend created way back in 2009 and has become a customary Friday activity ever since.

An #FF is a shout out, a show of appreciation, a nice recommendation. Each Friday you suggest Twitter profiles to all of your followers that you appreciate and enjoy. The idea being that your #FF suggestion will encourage others to check out that profile, generating more followers for them. It’s a really nice thing to do within the Twitterverse.

The hashtag (#) is added to create a clickable link and group all the #FF messages on Twitter together making them easily searchable.

Here is an example:

Do you partake in #FF? Make sure to follow us! @PRowlPR

Tools To Organize Your Twitter Feed

Twitter can be a great way to stay up to date and interact with a wide variety of people. However, if your Twitter feed is full of spam and inactive accounts, it defeats the purpose. Taking the time to clean up your account makes using the social networking site much more enjoyable. Here are some tools you can use to help ease the hassle of organizing your Twitter feed.

Twitter list: Twitter allows you to organize your followers and the people you follow into groups called lists. Organizing your followers this way makes it easy to find contacts. It's also helpful to have organized lists when people, such as potential employers, are looking to see who you follow.

Twit Cleaner: Twit Cleaner is a service that helps remove bots and spam accounts from your followers list. Many of these accounts contain malicious links, and since it's impossible to track and report them all, Twit Cleaner does the job for you.

Tweepi: Tweepi is a service that is great at managing people you follow who don't follow you back. If you are trying to gain a more balanced following to follower ratio, this is a great service to use.Tweepi also deletes accounts you are following which aren't active on Twitter anymore.

Social Omph: Social Omph can be used for many things, but is popular for its ability to automatically follow back.

All of the above services are easy to use and completely free. How do you keep your social networks organized?