Get noticed

• Follow other people. Use hashtag searches or scroll through the followers of your colleagues’ accounts to get ideas on who to follow. You’ll alert more people to your account and often get a follow back too.
• Don’t be afraid to be a suck up. When you tweet a link to one of your stories, try to include the twitter handles of your sources or the companies they represent. They’ll be more likely to respond or retweet if they know about the tweet. Send out #FF (follow Friday) tweets at the end of the week with a list of interesting industry people.
• Use hashtags in your tweets. Make it easy for people interested in the topics you tweet about to find your content. (I tend to use #apparel, #embroidery and #promoproducts a lot.)
• Know Twitter conventions. If you’re Tweeting directly at someone with their @name as the beginning of the tweet, that tweet only comes up in the feeds of users who follow both you and the person you are directly tweeting. I’ll put a period at the beginning of the name to make sure everyone can see the tweet. (example: .@yourname is xxxxxx xxxx.)

Create conversations.

• Respond to comments. Try always to respond when someone mentions you on Twitter, even if it’s just to say thanks. (If it’s a weirdo or troll, then feel free to ignore or block).
• Retweet and react. Try to take a few minutes of your week to retweet or comment on interesting stuff you find on your feed or in industry-related searches.
• Be consistent. Post at least once a day. The more you use Twitter, the more engagement you’ll build.

Share quality content.

• Use photos. I know I’m more likely to click on the link if there’s a picture to entice me.
• Be real. People want to know there’s a real person behind your account. That doesn’t mean you have to tweet about your breakfast or a bunch of personal stuff, but it’s good to show some personality and have a conversational tone.
• Link to your stories. (and other interesting stuff you see on the web.) You want to draw people back to your site, but don’t want them to see you as always just “selling” your own content. Also it’s OK to tweet the same link more than once, as long as you’re not constantly spamming people. I like to change the intro to experiment with what will pique the interest of more followers.
• Live tweet from events.