Social Media Guide for Wattpad

Practice (Twitter) (answers)

Last time, I presented five separate tweets about a blog post. I asked you to order them from best to worst. 

To refresh your memory, here are the five sample tweets.

1.       Find out what makes Jonathan Archer tick #StarTrek

2.        Who IS Jonathan Archer? #StarTrek

3.       #Archer #StarTrek

4.       Portrait of a Character – Jonathan Archer

5.       Get to know Jonathan Archer #StarTrek

Now let’s judge them. 

1.   Find out what makes Jonathan Archer tick #StarTrek – this one’s not bad. My only real objective is that’s kind of bland. It doesn’t really make a case for anyone except a fan (of me, the show or the character) to click on it. I’d rank it as #3.

2.   Who IS Jonathan Archer? #StarTrek – now that’s what I’m talking about. This one has interesting phrasing that might compel someone to click.  It’s also short and sweet, getting right to the point. #1.

3.     #Archer #StarTrek  - abysmal. This is a textbook example of what NOT to do. Why? It’s all hashtags and no real substance. Plus Archer is a television show unrelated to Star Trek. That hashtag will probably take the reader to a bunch of tweets about the wholly unrelated other show. It also doesn’t tell you what you’re clicking on. Is it a photo? A blog post? A virus? Really, you have few clues here. While none of the sample tweets really says what it is, at least the other four give the reader an idea of their substance. Finally, try not to have more than 3 clickable things in a tweet, and 2 or fewer is better (the only exception is for #FF, AKA ‘Follow Friday’). With this tweet, you have 3 clickable things: the two hashtags and the link. That’s a lot of chances to click away from your content. #5.

4.   Portrait of a Character – Jonathan Archer – this is the tweet that most social spreading widgets will do on WordPress. It takes the blog post’s title in its entirety and it just copies it and slaps a shortened link on the end. If the title is very long, it will be truncated with these kinds of widgets, in favor of fitting the link into 140 characters. Here, at least, the title is presented in its entirety. But you should also notice that it doesn’t have the #StarTrek hashtag. How the heck can a nonfan know what any of this really means? While it’s a decent blog post title, it’s not that great a tweet. #4.

5.   Get to know Jonathan Archer #StarTrek – here’s another compelling tweet, which tells the reader what’s behind the link without giving away too much. About the only reason this one is not #1 is because it’s longer than the tweet I ranked at the top. But this one is a perfectly reasonable alternative tweet. You could try both of them at various times, and see which one attracts more clicks. Because I write both canon and original fan fic characters (and this one is canon), this kind of tweet will probably work better for canon characters. For original ones, unless someone already knows me, their response might be something like, why should I? #2. 

All of the added media are the same ones from last time, in order to refresh your memory. The link is of course our practice link. The image is completely related to the link. The YouTube video is also completely related to the link. 

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