It’s not always easy to come up with great creative tweet ideas on Twitter. Many accounts repeatedly share the same format of tweets, the same content and the same keywords. It had us thinking, perhaps we all need a little more inspiration on how to refresh our tweets and get more creative on Twitter? In this post, we’ve pulled together 10 creative Twitter ideas that you can use to raise engagement and freshen up your feed.
Create a Twitter moments collection
When Twitter first bought in an algorithm for its home feed, many people weren’t happy. Twitter works best when we have conversations and we all like to share our expertise on a topic or two. How to do that in a logical way when everything’s out of sync? Enter Moments. Twitter Moments allow you to capture and collate the ‘best’ tweets around a topic in one page.
Here’s one we created earlier!
This allows the user to follow a story with the most entertaining or informative commentary, without having to redirect back and forth between pages. Any user can create their own Moments group, adding tweets from their own feed or the feed of anyone else.
Just click on your profile icon, select ‘Moments’ and ‘Create new Moment’ to setup your title, description and cover image. You can then filter through, adding tweets that you’ve liked, by search or by entering the link of the tweet. What’s more, is that if you see a great Moment-worthy tweet while scanning through your feed you can simply click the ‘more’ icon and you’ll see an option ‘Add to the name of your Moments collection’.
The Moments feature is brilliant for sporting events, political debates, or any other popcorn-worthy, riveting moment for which the world comes to a standstill. It can also be used for a multitude of other reasons from sharing expertise, to rounding up experts in your industry. Mark Shaw, in typical social media expert fashion, typifies how ‘Moments’ can be used to inspire social media trends in this one.
Try it for yourself!
Use GIFs in tweets
Did you know that Twitter has a feature allowing you to create animated GIFs? Simply put, a GIF is a moving picture that is not a video. This at first may sound needless, as one could easily use a video instead right? Wrong. Some of the advantages of GIFs over videos are:
- Being in an image format it saves space;
- Quick to create and watch- no buffering or viewing time needed;
- Being on a loop it’s a form of hypnosis that offers you the powers of persuasion;
- It gives you room to be as creative as you can. Just ask the marketers at Wendy’s.
GIFs are a great way to promote your brand, product or company, and to do so using engaging, impactful visual content. And 95% of marketers say that visual content for online marketing is very important. As brilliantly worded by Joe Puglisi, Buzzfeed’s Senior Creative Strategist: “If a picture is worth a thousand words, a GIF is worth 10,000.”
To create your own GIFs, use a free GIF tool like GIFmaker. This allows you to upload images, create them as a GIF, speed up or slow down the timing and export them ready to be added to your tweet.
Of course, if you want to add a little pizzazz to your tweets without creating your own GIF, you can add one of the many already supplied to Twitter. Just click ‘GIF’ in the tweet creator field and search by keyword or popular category until you find that tweet-worthy clip.
Brainstorm creative tweet intros
We’re all drowning in content and often, Twitter doesn’t help. So many accounts are curating links to articles that it’s difficult to tell what’s worth reading and what isn’t. Queue the quote tweet. The quote tweet also shares content; either your own or curated, but it ignores the traditional Headline > Article link > Hashtag format.
Here’s an example of the standard tweet format we see often:
How and Why Sentiment Analysis on Twitter is Still Usefulhttps://t.co/tccqAQrWpapic.twitter.com/SbYC7knHte
— Twilert (@Twilert) December 16, 2016
And here’s exactly the same blogpost, but with a statistic pulled out as a quote instead of the headline:
“86% of marketers highly value sentiment analysis” here’s why >https://t.co/qyDvJwIdV8
— Twilert (@Twilert) December 14, 2016
By testing different tweet formats you can find the best way of engaging with your audience. Perhaps with a catchy quote, a statistic or even a question that intrigues your audience to read more:
Did #sentiment on Twitter predict the presidential election outcome?https://t.co/JLUm8Y8KaY #twitter #news pic.twitter.com/ETTrpPTXVV
— Twilert (@Twilert) December 19, 2016
Why not do a speed round where you (or your entire team) come up with as many different tweet intros to a specific blogpost as you can. This is much more likely to get the creative ideas flowing rather than continually sharing the same tweet each time.
Share glimpses from behind the scenes
The Mannequin Challenge is a great example of a current trend that almost anyone can do on Twitter. Regardless of your brand or business, the Mannequin Challenge is fun, easy-to-create and it lets your audience in on a little behind the scenes action. You can use this to have some fun or even to communicate something more serious. Oxfordshire’s firefighters created this great version to warn people of the perils of texting and driving:
As well as using current trends to get your team involved you could also create video clips or quote tweets from your team on current trends. For example, if you’re a social media agency why not give the Twitter reins to your team so they can comment on Instagram’s new update? If you’re a Police department, use Twitter to broadcast tips on how to stay safe over the Christmas period/bank holiday weekend/Halloween and so on.
Share bitesize tips and useful information
Another way to share useful tweets with your audience is to turn a tweet into a bitesize tip. The benefit? Your followers get to take away something that may be genuinely useful to their business that only takes a few seconds to read. Even better if this is something that they can action immediately, or that helps them solve one of their real business problems.
Consider what may be most useful to your audience. If you’re in B2B, share tips on how your customers can save time or gain new business leads. If you’re in B2C think of genuinely useful information. For example, perhaps a beauty brand could help its customers to find ‘kitchen cupboard’ alternatives for beauty products if they run out. This is useful and fun, showing that you care about your audience’s needs and not just about the hard sell.
Give away assets
As well as using creative tweets to give away tips and information, is there any virtual swag you could offer your users? Beauty brand Benefit created this ‘pink fireplace’ for its audience, inviting them to pop it on in the background of a festive party or occasion.
We all love a giveaway and the great thing about the online world is that it doesn’t even have to be physical! Is your audience primarily located in a specific City? Perhaps you could collate some of the best offer codes of the week for cheap lunches around the area. You could also give away templates for email campaigns, businesscard designs or something fun such as a countdown for activities your audience can get involved in during the run up to Christmas or another occasion.
SPIRIT DAYS FOR THIS WEEK:
M: Ugly Sweater🎁
TUE: Holiday Color🎄
WED: Winter Wonderland☃️
THU: Elf Yourself🎁
FRI: PJ 🎄— LeBo (@amanda_labeau) December 19, 2016
Use beautiful imagery
Often, the blocker to more creative tweet ideas is companies feeling like they have to stick within the parameters of their field. Of course your information has to be relevant, but this doesn’t mean you can’t be human and appeal to the human nature of your audience.
During the recent super moon, many brand accounts shared exquisite images of the super moon that were taken in space or across the US.
This type of imagery stands out in the feed and is ‘neutral’ content that almost anyone could share. This makes it great for breaking up business information, curated content or customer support tweets.
According to studies, brands report seeing a 22% increase in engagement when they employ the use of beautiful imagery. Great imagery is a key source of inspiration and appears to our visceral nature. Try and use it, then see what happens with your audience.
Answer questions
Want to hear a secret? Twitter was once a place where people came to ask questions, have conversations and directly speak to other users. These are great sources for creative tweet ideas. We often forget Twitter’s core purpose as a marketplace of conversation, due to just how noisy it’s become as a channel. Yet if you look closely enough, your audience are still turning to Twitter as a channel where they can quickly uncover the service or product that will make their lives easier.
A creative idea for tweets is to find your audience and answer their questions. By doing so, you’ll show that you’re listening (and not just tweeting into a black hole), you’ll help your audience and likely help others too!
Use Twitter search to find the questions your audience are asking. You can even setup a Twilert, so that you get the tweets sent as one digest to your inbox, making it easier for you to respond in a timely manner.
Ask your audience for inspiration
It’s all very well telling your audience how great you are but why not get your community to do the work for you? Have them provide creative tweet ideas. When singer Emeli Sandé was working on a song as part of her new collaboration with Jaguar XE, she turned to her Twitter audience to come up with the inspiration to help.
This encourages your Twitter audience to join the journey and gives them creative license, which they’ll often be happy to take. Why not use the same idea and ask your audience to come up with a slogan for your new product, a jingle for your radio ad or even a character for your mascot?
This gives them a fun challenge where they can be an active participant on Twitter and it’s likely you’ll receive a ton of inspiration that could be useful for your brand! It also places your brand story in the hands of the customer and when they share how they feel about it, the words will be much more authentic to the rest of your audience than if you said them alone.
Use the power of storytelling
One of the most powerful brand abilities we have at our disposal is the ability to tell stories. Think tweets are too short or fragmented to tell stories? Think again.
The longest poem in the world has 3,816 verses – all made up of tweets. Accounts such as Very Short Story create mini stories in less than 140-characters – quite a feat! This is a fun way to use Twitter to introduce a new product, tell a story about your customers or share something inspirational or humorous.
Stories stick in the mind much more when used in advertising or content marketing and creating stories as a tweet is undoubtedly ‘sticky’ and more likely to be shared.
Many social media experts and agencies are professing stories as the ‘new news feed’. This is because stories are the easiest and most fundamentally human way to consume content. With stories popping up over Instagram, Snapchat and potentially Twitter and Facebook too in the year ahead, why not begin creating your own?
If you liked these creative ideas we’d love for you to share them on Twitter.
Thanks for reading 🙂
