Twitter: what and how to publish

Elements of a great tweet and best practices

# Hashtags

In every country, if an issue is trending, there is always a hashtag.

We can gain more visibility by placing the hashtags on relevant stories: 1...2 hashtags per tweet are OK! 

What we are looking for are the hashtags that have some use, but are not overly generic. Example: hashtags that relate to our news report and to a trend, but aren’t tied to a product or an emotion, for instance. #love #rain would look really weird for a news publisher.

Use popular ones. Check what Twitter suggests. In trends, or in related searches:

Open

Hashtags on Twitter are best if they are pretty short and compact, or much longer, with 18 characters.

Mention specific users

Whenever you are sharing a post written by someone else, or a news based on info / opinion by somebody else get into the habit of mentioning the author to entice them to engage.

Example … opinion by @abati1990 

Please note that it’s good to mention organizations, parties, government bodies too, especially when we report something positive about them.

Experiment with your tweets

Try different methods of tagging people, different hashtags, different levels of formality, uses of emojis and symbols, different topics, and anything else you can think of to test. Sooner or later something has to work, right?!

Encourage engagement, particularly retweets 

This can be as simple as just asking “please retweet” or as complex as running a user engagement contest. However, you need to make sure when we ask for engagement, we are asking for retweets where appropriate. 

Example: we share a photo as a part of our ‘find missing person’ initiative.

We cannot just post a moderately funny video, or a joke and ask for retweets; 

Blogging on Twitter

Dropping links to Twitter endlessly will not help us build the brand. However, communication, polls, interesting and informative pictures (infographics),  expression of opinions, and sometimes emotions will! 

The Chief Editors must oversee the process, assign people responsible for making smart comments / replies / conclusions.

The general idea is that we should be more active in Twitter, in terms of not only posting links, photos, or videos, but:

• making statements;

• running opinion polls;

• responding to public people’s tweets.

In other words, more blogging / opinion-making publications is required. 

Surely, we can @ (tag) and reply when doing all this.

We may start by contributing to trending issues, especially ‘light’ matters: economy, education, power / water supply, sports, entertainment. 

It is better to avoid political topics that may be associate us with any political force at all costs.