How To Draft The Perfect Tweets To Promote Your Events And Sales

This is a guest post by Vishal Gumber.

Planning an offline or a web event? Or perhaps you have an online sale on your Facebook or E-commerce store coming up. Either way, Twitter can prove to be an excellent marketing tool.

It’s a cost effective way to promote an event, attract customers, and accelerate sign ups or web visits. It also helps to build new audience and strengthen loyalty of the previous lot.

Having said that, it does make sense to draft those 140 characters in a way that draws maximum exposure! Here are a few simple tips that will help you compose the perfect tweet to promote your event:

• Think original

  There are a lot of people out there who are on their way to promote their event. What you need to consider here is to think, and think original. Try giving your tweet a new perspective and a clever heading.

  A good idea here is to not plainly talk about the event in general, but to draw attention by writing about ‘what’s happening inside’  in particular. For instance, let’s say you are slashing prices by 25%, a good idea would be to give people links to images of specific products and describe the said product in your tweet.

  If it’s a little black dress with a sexy criss cross back that’s on sale. Your tweet could be: “A classic LBD with sexy twist of a criss cross back! Pick it up now and you get 25% off!”

• Be short

  You think 140 is short? Well, not always! Deliver your tweet in 120 characters, and leave room for others to add and share the message and re-tweet. Works better! Remember whenever a tweet is retweeted, extra characters are added to it, your tweets must have space for that.  No one has the time to edit your tweets and then retweet.

• Sell the headline, not the event

  In a place like Twitter, everything moves fast- one or two refreshes, and you are long gone! If you tweet and tweet all day, and think your job is done, you are wrong. What you need to consider here is to compose a headline that sparks instant connect, and attention.

• Don’t make an obvious hard sell

  Another thing is to avoid using statements like “Click here to buy tickets”. Being sold to is something everyone dislikes on social media platforms. Instead use words that suggest ‘an opportunity’ for your audience. Phrases like, ‘pick up your tickets’, ‘grab your tickets’, ‘get your tickets’, etc, will most likely get you a better click through rate.

• Think beyond promotion

  A good tweet is the one that allows customer engagement. How you achieve this at the time of promoting your event is simple, and very relevant. Make the tweet personal, ask questions, tell things, and share statistics. Don’t streamline your tweet into something that talks only about promotional material and links.

  For example, let’s say you are organizing a webinar on mobile app development for e-commerce sites. You could tweet something like: Mobile payments will reach $630B in 2014- CMO Council Report. Get Your Share Of The Pie! <insert webinar registration link>

• Provoke thought

  If your tweets make people question, wonder and share to get more insight, you should give yourself a pat on the back. Rather than simply elaborating upon “We are hosting an Event”, or “Be a part of the biggest event”, you could say something like-- “Why is Pinterest a great traffic source for your website?”.

• Grammar and punctuation

  Always make sure to read your tweet out aloud once you have drafted it. If it’s free of grammatical errors and has its punctuation in place, you are ready to post it.

  Use full stops and commas whenever necessary. Avoid going overboard with exclamation marks. Also, see if the pauses are in their right places. Even with 140 characters at your disposal, we still need a breather, right?

A quick checklist

• Start with a capital letter.
• Begin a new sentence with a capital letter.
• Leave one space after the full stop.
• Know the difference between your and you’re, its and it’s and there, their and they’re.
• Don’t use capital letters elsewhere. It LOOKS LIKE YOU’RE SHOUTING.

Other things to consider

• Shorten all links with Bit.ly.
• Make sure there is a link. Tweets that contain links receive 86% more retweets.*
• Add hashtags. Tweets with hashtags receive twice more engagement. However, make sure they are no more than just two hashtags.
• Ask to re-tweet. It has been observed that specially spelled RETWEET draws 23 times more response.*

It has been about time Twitter has established itself as an ultimate platform for sharing, exchanging and promoting. How you use the same, lies entirely in your hands.

*Source: http://socialmediatoday.com/daniel-zeevi/1289016/twitter-increase-engagement

About the author
Vishal is the founder of Appsquare, an app development company in Australia that creates innovative apps, provides part funding for selected app ideas and also helps app developers get funding through its network of Venture Capitalists and Angel Investors.