Twitter Management Agency in Bangkok, Thailand
Twitter is one of the most important sites on the internet, and there is every reason to believe its influence will continue to grow around Bangkok and elsewhere in the AEC. It can be a great way for companies to connect with their customers, announce new products and deals, and keep themselves visible. But it can also go spectacularly wrong. The easiest way to stay ahead of the game is to outsource to our social media marketing agency in Bangkok where we can also help with your video production and creative agency needs.
Everyone on Twitter can tell if you know what you’re doing or not. If you don’t, then the results can be either mildly embarrassing, or much worse.
Our goal here is to get to know Twitter, and how best to use it. I’ll talk about how to become popular in my next posts, but let’s start here with a beginner’s introduction to the site. We need to first understand how Twitter works, and the language that it uses.
The message below is exactly 140 characters. The ‘(1 of 2)’ at the end means that you will finish your message in the second tweet, and you’ll add ‘(2 of 2)’ there to show you are doing so. You can also use higher numbers to write longer messages – but remember, the whole point of Twitter is that people like to keep things short. Make your messages as brief as possible, except in rare cases.
Now for a bit of vocabulary.
RT = Retweet. It means you are repeating a tweet that someone else has written. You can retweet it directly (without comment), or you can add a short message of your own at the beginning.
Let’s imagine that @LexiconThailand tweets the message you see here on the left. You can retweet that exactly to all of your followers with one click, like you see here.
Or, you can add something, like user @SteveInBangkok does in the bottom example.
The way Twitter culture works, everyone will understand that @LexiconThailand’s original message comes at the end, and @SteveInBangkok‘s reply/comment comes at the beginning.
The tricky part is that the entire message needs to be 140 characters or fewer. Sometimes you’ll need to modify someone else’s tweet in order to fit everything in. That’s why we have a special term, called a ‘Modified Tweet’.
MT = Modified tweet. It means you are quoting someone else’s tweet – but you’re changing (modifying) something in it. Often people do this to correct other people’s spelling mistakes, or to keep things under the 140-character limit. Like this question, submitted in July:
As you can see, this person writes “MT” because they cut some of the unnecessary text from @LexiconThailand’s tweet in order to reply.
It’s important to always use a person’s username, instead of their real name, when you are talking about them. Tweeting about somebody without using their username is called ‘subtweeting’, and is considered rude; subtweeting means that the person doesn’t receive a notification that they have been mentioned, and it’s a bit like talking behind someone’s back.
User @SteveInBangkok is actually making a separate mistake by not changing his profile picture. A ‘tweet’ is the sound of a bird singing, the Twitter logo is a bird, and everyone who joins Twitter begins as an egg. If you don’t change your profile picture to something else, everyone will see that you’re new to Twitter and you don’t really know what you’re doing.
(Confession: As you’ve guessed, I run the @SteveInBangkok Twitter account as well as the official @LexiconThailand account. The tweets you see above are fake, but, as a special reward for reading our blog, we’ll make the discount offer real — but only if you mention this blog post in your order.)
In the second part of this series, we’ll take a closer look at replying, both publicly and privately. Then we’ll show you how your company’s Twitter account can be something beautiful — or a nightmare — depending on how you use it.
About the Author
Steve Callerame has been a Twitter user since day one and has over 20 years experience telling stories on social media for clients.
Lexicon is an award-winning brand storytelling agency focusing on telling impactful stories for clients based in Thailand and South East Asia.
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