One of the biggest hurdles people have when trying to get past the Twitter follow limit is actually knowing how to unfollow the number they need to unfollow so they can follow more people.
If you aren’t familiar with the follow limits you cannot follow more than 5000 people without having near to that number following you back. There isn’t an exact number as it is different for each account.
The other follow limit is that you can’t follow more than 1000 accounts per day. This is a limit from Twitter but if you don’t have a large account I wouldn’t be following more than 50 to 100 people each day as you don’t want Twitter to suspend your account for following too many people at once.
I use the Manage Flitter app to:
Clean up and manage who I follow – to make sure I am following people that are active, have profile images and speak English.
Find out who isn't following me back.
Find out which inactive accounts I follow.
In this video I teach you how to use Manage Flitter to help you get past the Twitter limit. It is one of the main Twitter tools I use to manage Twitter followers.
What other tools are you using to manage your social media? I would love to hear about them.
Twitter widgets are great for social engagement, as your visitors can engage with your Twitter content without ever leaving your website. This is really great for added visibility. They can reply, retweet and favorite tweets live on your blog. How cool is that?
Adding a Twitter widget on WordPress is actually pretty simple. Here’s how to do it:
Go to ‘Settings’ in your Twitter account by clicking on the small profile image on the top right hand side. In the drop down menu click settings and then click widget. You will end up with something that looks like this.
Click on Create new. In here it doesn’t matter which of the top 4 you choose as they all take you to the same page.
We'll go through each of them, learn how to create them and what they're going to look like on your website.
Click on Profile and a new window will open.
Now you will see:
Types of Twitter Widgets:
– A collection
– A Tweet
– A profile
– A list
– A likes timeline
– A handle, like @staceylmyers
– A hashtag, like #WhattoTweet
Embedding a Tweet
This is what an embedded tweet looks like. Notice that you can interact live with the tweet inside the blog post. You can like, retweet, share and reply directly through the tweet. As mentioned earlier this is great for social engagement right on your blog.
To embed the tweet, find the tweet on Twitter. Click on the tweet, not the image. It will open out in a pop up window and you will see the unique link for that tweet.
Copy that link and go back to the ‘What would you like to embed?’ page and paste it in there.
Please note that there are other ways to embed a tweet – I am only showing you how to do it using the widget tool in this post.
It will give you a preview of what the tweet will look like and the embed code. We will cover what to do with the embed code once we have covered all the options.
Embedding a Profile
Either copy and paste or type in your username. It is the Twitter website with your username. Mine is www.twitter.com/staceylmyers. Once you put it in you will get three options.
1. Embed Timeline – this is my timeline embedded into the sidebar or my website.
You will want to customise the length of your Twitter feed or it will go down the entire length of your blog. Just above where you get the code you can ‘set customization option’. Set the height of your feed there. I have mine set at 700.
2. Follow Button – Visitors to your website can follow you with one click.
3. Tweet to Button – When this button is clicked on it opens a tweet with your username already in it.
A List
This will show the tweets of all the people you have on a list. If you don’t know how to create lists on Twitter I show you how in this video. Once you have created the list, copy and paste the list web address – just like we did for the tweet – embed it, and away you go.
A Likes Timeline
This will be a list of everything you have liked (used to be favourited). To find this, go to your profile and click on likes. Copy and paste the web address like we have done before. It will look like this www.twitter.com/staceylmyers/likes.
A Twitter Handle
This one will give you the same options as the profile one.
A Hashtag
Add in a hashtag for your industry, or one you use yourself, and it will bring up a timeline of all the tweets using that hashtag.Embedd
Embedding the Code
Now that you know how to create all of the widgets we are now going to look at how to embed them into your WordPress website.
Every time you create a widget you get a distinct code for it. To add it to your WordPress website is pretty much a copy and paste job.
We are going to cover adding the embed code into a blog post or page (the procedure is the same) and into the sidebar of your site.
Putting the embed code into a blog post or page
Open up the blog post you would like to embed the tweet or timeline into.
You do need to add the code to the html part of your post. To get there will depend on what editor you are using. Either click on the HTML tab or the Source button – you may have one or both of them. If you have both it doesn’t matter which one you click.
The HTML code might look a bit like gobbledygook but you can still read what is there. Scroll down until you find the section in your post that you want to embed the code.
I scrolled until I saw the words ‘seconds to tweet’ as I knew I wanted to posted it directly under that. You then paste it in.
One thing to note is that when you click back to view it as normal text it will not show you the tweet. It will show you something like this…
It will show the actual tweet in the post once you publish it.
In your WordPress dashboard click on Appearance and then Widgets.
The right hand side of your widget area will look different depending on what theme you are using. For me, I put everything in the Blog sidebar section.
To add the code you want to drag over the widget that says ‘Text’ and add it to the sidebar you want to use. You can use this for text or HTML. Paste in the code and press save.
Here is the tweet in my sidebar.
If you look on the sidebar of my website you will see how I use the timeline and follow widgets. You won’t see the lizard – I just thought it was beautiful and used it as an example.
Congratulations! Now you know how to embed a Twitter widget in your WordPress website. I would love to see how it turned out – share your website in the comments and I will go have a look!
Here is the video of how to embed all of the widget types (including the collection).
Are you asking yourself, “What can I post on Twitter?” Don’t worry. Even if you don’t have your own content (like a blog posts or videos), you have a number of other options.
Here are a few content ideas you can share on Twitter to gain more followers and increase engagement, even if you don’t have content of your own. Even if you do, these ideas will be helpful and can help round out your social media posting schedule.
If you are really stuck for ideas you can always retweet other people's content. You don't want your Twitter stream to be filled with only content you have retweeted. You want people to be retweeting your content.
Quotes
One of the easiest things to post on Twitter is quotes. You can easily find hundreds, if not thousands, of quotes by doing a simple Google search. You can get leadership quotes, funny quotes, inspirational quotes… the list is endless.
Simply copy and paste some of the quotes into your feed. Quotes are so easy for other people to retweet.
Here are a few you can use (Click on the ‘click to tweet' link and it will post straight out into your feed):
Let us be grateful to people who make us happy, they are the charming gardeners who make our souls blossom. – Marcel Proust <<Click to Tweet>>
The key is to keep company only with people who uplift you, whose presence calls forth your best. – Epictetus <<Click to Tweet>>
The two most important days in your life are the day you are born and the day you find out why. – Mark Twain <<Click to Tweet>>
Images with quotes are also very popular. According to Buffer, visual content is 40 times more likely to be shared than other types of content. You can easily create a graphic with a quote or interesting statistic on it using a free, easy-to-use program like Canva or PicMonkey. (Watch this video to learn how to use PicMonkey.)
Here is one I created using Canva:
If you want to live a more fulfilling life, you need to be totally honest with yourself about what you want. pic.twitter.com/m9QOCw0frS
Sharing the blog posts of other people in your industry is also a great idea.
You can share the entire post with a link. If there is room you can also add a comment about what you thought of the post.
Another option is to pull key ideas from their post and turn those into tweets. Add to the tweet the name of the person that wrote the post. Even better, for both of these options, is to find their username on Twitter and add that to the post. That way they will know you are sharing their content. It is a great way to build relationships.
If you are retweeting posts you can use the ‘Retweet with Quote' feature to add your own thoughts.
Industry Tips
Share tips and information for the industry or niche you are in. If you are in beauty, you could be sharing skin care tips or how to put on makeup. If you can’t think of anything yourself to do you can always do what we already talked about – share other people’s information on the topic.
If you are sharing other people's tweets, make it easy on yourself and add people to a Twitter list. That way you can find all the people that tweet about similar topics in one place. Adding people to a list is another way to start building relationships with them.
GIFs
I haven’t really used them in my marketing but I see a lot of people use GIFs. This one here only took me a few seconds to tweet.
You can find GIFs easily when you tweet from the Twitter platform. Click to send a tweet, write in what you want to say and then click on the GIF icon. Here you can search for anything you want. Click on the one you like, it will upload and then click tweet to send.
Lifestyle Posts
I'm a Twitter strategist and I support online entrepreneurs to create twitter strategies to gain more leads and exposure for their business. It is easy for me to talk about Twitter but we don’t want to be talking business all the time.
We all have interests outside of our business. What do you think your community might be interested in? Is it beauty, fashion, travel or maybe keeping fit?
You can also post content around some of those topics – photos or information that would be of interest.
Here is an example of a post you could tweet (see how I added in my own comment as well as the link to the blog post):
Heading to Australia? Here are a few places to visit: https://t.co/pHVqxbF0Vy Snorkeling on the reef was a highlight for me!
You can post random facts, questions or funny snippets. Any of those kinds of things, they are going to be well received. Google is such a wealth of information – you can find content on any topic you can think of.
Here are a few you can use (just click on the link beside it and it will post out onto your Twitter):
What's the wisest thing anyone has ever told you? <<Click to Tweet>>
What is something you have always wanted to try? <<Click to Tweet>>
The average person falls asleep in seven minutes. What about you? <<Click to Tweet>>
Your Turn
What I'd really love for you to do, is take on posting some of your own tweets, if you aren’t already. How often should you post on Twitter? It depends. You should post at least once a day. You could post a tweet of your own, using some of the ideas from this post, and then retweet other people's tweets until you feel more confident or have more content of your own. You don't want your followers to forget about you.
Consistency is key!
Don't forget to thank the people that retweet you. You can find that information by clicking on the ‘Notifications' tab in the top toolbar of Twitter.
I would love to connect with you on Twitter – you can find me @staceylmyers.
Let me know how you get on. Have other ideas about what to tweet? We’d love to hear them!
Every time you log into a website with your Twitter username you allow that site to access, not only your Twitter account, but also some of the information you hold there.
If there is an option I will always log in using Twitter over Facebook as Facebook holds so much more information about us.
I happily use Twitter as a log in option, but just know that it does leave your account slightly vulnerable. If anything happens to the site – it gets hacked for instance – that does leave you open to someone being able to access your account through there.
I have never had any trouble with that but just wanted to let you know.
It is partly why I go in and revoke access every now and then to all the places that I had authorised my Twitter account as a log in or access option.
It is really quick and easy to revoke access. I take you through it in a couple of minutes on this video.
Zip on over to Twitter and unhook all those sites you never use anymore.
Have you heard of Paper.li? You may have seen it and not known what it was. Have you seen these posts on Twitter? This is an automatically generated tweet that goes out notifitying me that someone has included my in one of their editions.
When I click on the link and go to see what it is that he shared, it looks like this. This is what a tweet shared looks like. If it was a blog post then you would see an image or an image with a summary.
So, what is Paper.li?
Paper.li is a content curation service that let's you turn socially shared content into beautiful online newspapers and newsletters. But more than that it's an easy to use, powerful tool that helps you save time by surfacing content (blogs, articles, sites, video,images) and people who are interested in the same topics that you are!
It is a really great content creation tool. You can pull content from anywhere you want and have it appear in your paper.
This is a Google hangout that I did with Carol Bremner who has been having some good success with publishing Paper.li papers.
This video is longer than my usual short ones. I watch a lot of videos and find it handy to use the video speed setting options in YouTube. Click on the little cog wheel to the right on the video toolbar and find ‘speed'. Click on that and you can watch the video up to two times faster. I have definitely found this handy when watching videos.
What topic could you do a Paper.li paper about? Comment below.
