How to Increase Twitter Engagement with Anita Kirkbride

NOTE: This podcast was transcribed by an AI tool. Please forgive any typos or errors. SUMMARY KEYWORDS twitter, content, evergreen content, business, blue checkmark, tweet, editorial calendar, social media, how to increase Twitter engagement SPEAKERS Anita Kirkbride, Erin Ollila Erin Ollila 00:00 Hello friends, today we are kicking off our platform specific episodes about social media. And first up is Twitter. I purposefully chose to have Twitter be our first episode for the very reason that when we recorded in end of November 2022, Twitter itself was like the wild wild west of social media platforms. You know, there was a takeover. There were immediate changes firings, layoffs after the takeover. And it just became a very confusing place where users, especially users who have been on Twitter for a long time really thought to themselves, do I want to stay on this platform? How will this platform evolve? And what’s in it for me in the present and farther future, and I have this coming up first, because who knows how much will actually have changed in the past month or two. But the first person I want to call up to talk about how they use Twitter, and what they’ve learned from Twitter can be beneficial to you is needed Kirkbride. And Anita and I were so fortunate to be able to work together, I worked on a website relaunch that she did probably two years ago now maybe a year or two ago. It’s been Yeah, yeah. And it was such a fun project. Now, you know, I always start with a, what you may not know about this person fact. And what you may not know about Anita Kirkbride is that she loves cilantro, when we talked about your about page, one thing that we really wanted to do was add a punch of personality in a way that felt very true to you. And so many of my clients, and I think we even mentioned this on the about page episode, so many people are like, how do I do that? Right? Like, how do I share a fun fact that someone could relate to that’s not off the wall, or it’s not? It’s really true to me, and I just loved that when we talked. You were just like, yeah, no, I do. Like this isn’t a fun fact. This is like a truth to Anita. Anita Kirkbride 02:04 Oh my gosh, listen, I haven’t had lunch yet today. So I sit in here, and you’re talking about cilantro and my stomach is rumbling because mellott i Yeah, I love cilantro. And I think it’s a fun fact to use because it’s so polarizing. People love it or hate Erin Ollila 02:22 it. If you love cilantro, then you’re going to always remember that Anita loves Alondra as well. Let’s jump into Twitter, though. Where did you find your way to Twitter? Like, how was your evolution to get to be a Twitter user? Anita Kirkbride 02:36 Well, I joined Twitter way back in 2000, and Nanos 2019. But no, it’s 2009. I am that Twitter old. I didn’t understand it at first, because I wasn’t in a business at the time, I was in a job. And it was new, and people didn’t know how to use it. And so I didn’t get it. So I kind of let it sit for a couple of years. And when I built my business, when I started my business in 2011. I said, Okay, well, Twitter is social media. So I’m gonna have to learn how to use this. And that’s when I discovered a local community, a local business community was there on Twitter. And in the beginning, it was a place where you could really network and meet other people, and build relationships, and find out all kinds of you could just learn so much on Twitter if you wanted to. So I was able to build up a community back then that people who shared the same interests as me people, I was learning from the companies that I was trying to use and their software’s. And so it just evolved into my favorite platform, because you could go on there, and I could have conversations with the authors of books that I was reading, I could have conversations with experts in all different areas, because all of these people were on Twitter, and were willing to talk to other people on Twitter. So you really had the exposure to pretty much anybody that you wanted to talk to back then. Erin Ollila 04:12 I agree. I think it has changed a lot since the early days, and the access may be a lot more limited. You know, where do you think the change has come? And how are you using it now? Anita Kirkbride 04:23 It’s become so big and so busy and so important that a lot of businesses have no delegated Twitter, a lot of people have delegated Twitter to somebody else to manage on a daily basis. So you’re not always talking to the business owner anymore. Whereas it used to be if you were talking to the local coffee shop on Twitter, you were talking to the owner. Now, it may be one of their staff or they might have a social media person doing that stuff. So you’re not always accessing, who you think you are accessing. And you have to be careful about making those assumptions. but it’s still a place to have conversations. We always said way back in the beginning. And one of the things that that we always said was Twitter is a conversation. And it is different from other platforms. So I still use it to have conversations with that community of people that I’ve built up, sometimes it’s conversations about what the heck is happening on Twitter. And other times it’s conversations around what’s happening in my city, or about a book that I’ve just read, or just how I’m feeling today. So there are all kinds of different communities that I’m part of, and I can put my thoughts out there, get responses, if you’re willing to have conversations with people. Twitter is a place you can go and have conversations and get immediate responses. You can’t do that by putting out a post on Instagram, or especially on Facebook, as a business. So I can go as a business owner, just yesterday, I posted a question on Twitter, and had responses within a few minutes. And responses are still coming in today. You know, Twitter is a conversation. And that’s probably the biggest problem and misconception that people have about the platform. I don’t know that that’s ever going to change. Even with all the chaos that’s happening in Twitter right now. It’s a place for conversations, Erin Ollila 06:25 I think the key is the regardless of how it evolves, I think it will still always come down to Twitter being a conversation versus either a a performative, social media platform. B A, obviously is not a visual only platform or any of these things, it is a you have to look at it if you are going to use it as I am entering this to have a conversation, that conversation might be with the people who purchased from you. It might be with your local community, like you said, there are a vast many ways to spend your time on Twitter. But if you want to be successful on it, I think Kara, can you hit the nail on the head right away there is that you have to enter it thinking you’re having a conversation. Anita Kirkbride 07:05 Yeah, if you enter it thinking, this is a way to blast out my sales, promotions, messages, whatever, it’s not going to work for you. Nobody. Nobody wakes up in the morning and says, ooh, I can’t wait to see what the next sale is from the coffee shop on Twitter, right? That’s not how we work. Erin Ollila 07:25 And it moves so fast. That’s the other thing I think people maybe are frightened by Twitter is because it is so fast moving that you aren’t seeing the things like the sale. And if you do want to enter enter Twitter, from a business like perspective, you have to be willing to share an immense amount of content, meaning you’re going to be talking about that sale multiple times throughout the day, preferably with other content that’s not just sales driven, as well. So it’s like the conversation and not you know someone on a used car lot just shouting at you as you look at each and every car, right. But if I log on to Twitter, I very well may see a local business, one tweet mixed with like the 20 on the screen, and then not see it again for days. So obviously, algorithm wise, if you’re communicating with the same types of people, you’re going to see them more often. But it it’s a conversation that moves so quickly that you either have to be proactive with, how you use it and who you choose to look at also how you choose to look at their content to be successful. Anita Kirkbride 08:29 Yeah, and there’s a lot of ways there are a lot of ways you can filter that firehose of content that’s coming at you, I have lists set up in Twitter and lists are for viewing. They are for your viewing pleasure and filtering that Firehose so that you can you know, I have a list for my local city restaurants. If I’m in the downtown area and looking for somewhere to go eat, I will pull up that list and look at just the recent posts from the restaurants so that I can see okay, who’s got something cool on special on tap in music that I can plan to do this week or today because that will show me everything from that really niche group of people but you can set those lists up for anything, there are many ways to sort of filter what you’re seeing on there and find the stuff that you want to engage with as opposed to all that negative crap that is there. You can really avoid a lot of that if you want to. Erin Ollila 09:33 I always tell people that we talk about this thing and I think a lot of business owners don’t still kind of don’t get they get it but there’s this like a percentage off of what they don’t understand. And that’s the personal brand. You know, some people say well I like for me for example, I’m my business is pretty much my name. I am a copywriter and I show up extremely close to who I am as a human because that’s important to me. Transparency is a big value of my business. But yeah, I still have a personal brand, right? So Twitter, I always say is the one place where you are the absolute realest version of your personal brand, because of the vast amount of communities. So for example, I don’t really I mean, occasionally, when world events come up, I will be very vocal about my beliefs on other platforms like Instagram, Facebook, things like that. But if you find me on Twitter, you’ll also see a lot of political Aaron, which I don’t do anywhere else, for the most part, because I’ll be like tweeting about debates, especially if there’s no bigger election or something like that, sharing content that like drives me bananas. And again, that’s not showing up and other types of business platforms. So I think I always tell people, this is a two part advice, when it comes to list, you can be the, you know, the local business list, the local government lists, like you talked about the kids school Twitter list, if you have happen to have children in school, things like this. So you can spend your time on there the way that you choose. But similarly, on the flip side, if you are scoping out a business to try to figure out who you want to work with, and you find out that they’re on Twitter, that’s a great way to kind of see like, what it is that they stand for. Because I think it’s there’s a lot less of those onion peels that they can hide behind. Because there’s all the likes, there’s the list, and you can really gain a lot of knowledge from people about who they are based on how they communicate on Twitter. Anita Kirkbride 11:29 I wouldn’t recommend that a restaurant account. Sure talk political, but you and I on our names, we we can do that. That’s part of our personal brand. And a restaurant is less about a personal brand, right? Yeah, do people. Erin Ollila 11:44 Yeah, business wise, I don’t think they have that freedom to do that, right. Because business wise, as a different type of business than a personal brand, you’re representing a bigger thing than you, you have a separate brand. But I also don’t think you have to be political on Twitter. That’s not my suggestion, I just mean, you get to make the decisions on how you’re going to show up. And I think what you’ll find for the solopreneurs, for the very tiny businesses that might have a person as the face of their brand, that that’s where you’ll see people and you’ll really see what it is that’s important to them, because it is so quickly moving because it is so news based, that you’ll see the likes and the post and the retweets and things that they might be a little bit more passionate about. So that’s kind of what more what I mean, but I am glad you mentioned that, because you’re right, businesses, I think, have a very tricky line on what they can do, when it comes to what they share what they share from other people and how they talk to their clients. But we haven’t really talked yet about content on Twitter. Do you do any planning of your content on Twitter? And if you do or do not? How do you suggest other users think about that when they approach their Twitter usage? Anita Kirkbride 12:55 Well, I do, but I tell most small businesses now that you can post pretty much the same content on all your platforms, you have to tweak it for each platform. So you’re going to use hashtags differently on Instagram and Twitter. But if you’re making a video, you can post that same video pretty much everywhere, right? So reuse your content. So whatever planning you’re doing for Facebook, or Instagram, or tick tock or LinkedIn, a lot of that content, especially as a solopreneur, or very small business can be used everywhere. So the planning is kind of the same everywhere. And kind of not. Twitter is more about having conversations. So yes, post your video that you’ve made. But be prepared to respond to comments. Because if people reply to your video, reply to your thread reply to your post, they expect you to reply back. And that’s really important. If all you ever do is push out your content on Twitter, and you don’t comment back, then people will very quickly stop following you because they want to have that kind of conversation. So yes, plan your content around your pillars around the things that you want to share. plan to put things out on a regular basis, but also plan for time to actually spend having conversations on there. That’s the bigger part of of Twitter. But for my clients, we we do things in recurring bits. So if you’ve got a promotion that’s lasting for two weeks, we use evergreen posting programs to repeat that content, and to put out multiple messages of that promotion so that you don’t have to remember to go in and do that once a day or twice a day. It just happens and that opens you up to be able to have the time to do the conversation part. So it’s really important to find that scheduling system that works for you. Erin Ollila 15:02 I love that you said that one because I really wanted to encourage people. And this being the first of the like platform specific episodes. The point that I’m doing this is also to encourage people that there’s no one right way to show up and be successful. That, quote unquote, one right way changes by industry, by person, by effort by everything right, like platform, right. So if, for example, like you just mentioned, you’re in the middle of a break, cool, that’s fine. Like, sometimes we do need to pull back from our social media usage suddenly, and one of the Actually, I’ll tag this in the show notes, but one of the podcasts I love so much is mega case, bolts, social media slowdown, I’m pretty sure that’s the name. It’s just trying to showcase that. I think we’re taught this lie as business owners that we have to rely on social media for business marketing, whereas that’s not what it’s for, it is a tool to help our business marketing. So if you get to a point where maybe it’s a slow season, and in the slow season, you’re slowing down your content, maybe you’re burnt out, and you’re like, I need a bigger break, whatever it is, right? You just do what’s right for your business, or for your personal self again, because you know, maybe it is like, you know that this is a completely hypothetical example, you know that you’re doing well on social, but mentally, you just need a break, then you just you guys, you are way more important than the way that you show up on social. We are here to try to show you our best tips, our best tricks, things that have worked for us things that we enjoy. But the key here really is you have to do whatever is right for your business. Right. And I think that’s just a very important thing that you shared right there. Anita Kirkbride 16:49 And Twitter is not the right platform for every business. I used to say it was. But it definitely isn’t like if you don’t have the time to go have conversations, Twitter’s probably not going to work for you. Erin Ollila 17:02 All right, that is such great advice. And it’s true, I would even say it’s industry specific to right, you know, me being a copywriter and a marketer, I find such value on Twitter and news related type of things, I find such value on Twitter. But you are right, there are certain businesses that could be screaming into the void. And like, just like any other platform, it could be the same on Facebook, or Instagram or Tiktok. It’s figuring out where you belong best. And I really hope that these episodes, hearing different voices and experts in these particular platforms will help the listeners kind of make that decision for their own. There’s a couple quick things I wanted to talk about that I heard you say that I really thought was so important. So one of them was that you had said that the evergreen content. And I personally think that is the number one best place for evergreen content. If Twitter is the right place for you. Do you have any tips for people who understand the idea of repurposing, but maybe they don’t have a lot of content about how they could approach that on social media? Anita Kirkbride 18:08 Oh, my gosh, I have so much information about how to repurpose things. It’s, it’s, it’s so much better to repurpose cut up, remix the content that you have created. Rather than starting from scratch with a new piece of content, right, you can get so much more out of a blog post that works year round, then going and trying to create a new blog post that will is only relevant for a week or a month. Look at that blog post and think okay, if it’s got 10 points, well, very easily if there are, if it’s a list of 10 things, you’ve got 10 different tweets, at least tweet out each one of those points. And for more information. Here’s the link to read the other nine things, right, that’s 10 different graphics 10 different points to bring people to your blog post. And yes, if that’s something that doesn’t change very often, like how to build a social media plan and strategy. The steps of doing that doesn’t don’t change very often, right? What you do, the tactics might change. So I can put out blog posts, and I can retweet those blog posts. I’ve got blog posts from 10 years ago that I could still be posting on Twitter now because the information is still good. So once you’ve built that blog post, you’ve created those 10 tweets with 10 graphics, then put that into an evergreen content scheduler. And there are all kinds of different ones out there. Some of my favorites are smarter cue social be I use Cloud campaign. What’s the other one social jukebox, those ones all have systems where it We’ll automatically put something in a queue, it goes through the queue. And when it gets to the bottom, it just starts over at the top again. And that can really save you, it just saves you so much time, saves you time for actually scheduling the posting, because you’re telling that system when to post the content once and it just keeps going and going and going. But it also saves you time when you’re planning. Because you can sit down and write 10 tweets for that blog a lot faster when you’re in when you’re focusing on one thing versus okay, this week, I need to tweet Well, what where did I end? Where did I tweet last week, I tweeted number three. Now I need to tweet number four. And so if you’re going back and forth every week trying to figure that out, it’s taking you way more time. So evergreen content really just it saves you time in planning, production, and scheduling. And that opens you up for more of the fun stuff that you like to do in your business. And for having conversations on Twitter, bulk tasking is probably my biggest tip for that. Do it all at once, get it into a system and let the system send it out. You do need to look at your evergreen content regularly to make sure that it’s still relevant. You don’t want to be posting stuff about Christmas at Easter time, you don’t want to be posting something from 10 years ago, when it’s talking about how to how to set up your Facebook page because it’s changed 15 times in the last 10 years. So you’ve got to make sure that whatever is going out that you’re still conscious of it, it’s still relevant, and it’s still worth posting. Erin Ollila 21:39 Yeah, and on that two things very quickly. That’s the beauty of having an editorial calendar. And I think where people don’t, I think when they hear calendar, they think it’s just a list of one things published. But really a calendar is an organizational tool that will tell you specific things about the articles. For example, if it is a tech specific like the the Facebook, you know how to set up a Facebook account, you would just have a little column on an editorial calendar that said like, this is something you have to keep your eye on. So you know, year or two years later, if you happen to be like auditing your own content, you see that flag and you say, Oh yes, it has changed. Let’s pop back into the arc article, make a couple of quick like changes, then I can start sharing it again and say, Guess what this has changed. Here are the new tips, right. Secondarily, another thing that you can do is, you know, I always tell people, especially at this time of year, it’s great to write semi evergreen content for the year ahead. So for us, that would be like in the fall of 2022. I would be writing like what to expect from marketing and 2023, what to expect from email in 2023. Or like the best email tips for this year. If you have this goes to point number two, a tool like you mentioned, like sendible, I mean, excuse me, that’s what I use, but Smarter Queue any of those things, you can change the parameters to not just be like republish all the time, but republish regularly throughout January 1 to December 31 of that year, back to the editorial calendar, you’re going to want to put a flag on that post to say, How can I update this so that at the end of 2023, I can change it to potentially keep some of the same content, but update it for what I see for 2024. Right? And then you do that same thing. So I I think people hate to do the upfront effort. I see this all the time, it seems overwhelming to create this editorial calendar that has flags and things. But if you have it, or like you said if you batch that content, where you write the blog post, and inside of that draft, you put 10 tweets, it exists for you. So doing the work upfront, I think it’s helpful for content as a whole for social media as a whole. But boy, does it play out with how many things you can share on Twitter, because you have so many tiny, tiny things to share to bring up the same conversation on things that are important to your business. Anita Kirkbride 24:07 Yeah. And I want to make one more quick point about the whole sharing old content. If it’s evergreen, in 11 years of doing this, I have had one person click on a link on Twitter, go to the article and say this article is three years old. Why are you promoting it? One in 11 years? And I responded to that person and said, because the content is still relevant. Doesn’t matter what I wrote it, the content is still relevant. Did you find it useful? Yes, well, then that’s why I’m still sharing it. Right. So that’s the important thing about evergreen and repeating and repurposing is making sure that it’s useful content. Obviously you’re not going to put into an evergreen system. Your lunch special for Tuesday’s Erin Ollila 24:59 unless you or lunch special for Tuesday’s is a very evergreen thing that never changes and knowing your love of cilantro it very well could be, but you are absolutely, I make a joke that you’re very right. To end our conversation. There’s one thing I wanted to bring up again. And I think you said it so well before you said, the change of how we communicated from Twitter early days to Twitter now, part of which specifically for businesses is that while you might have been talking to the owner of a local coffee shop back in the day, now, you may be talking to a staff member or a social media specialist, things like that. And you said, you’re not always accessing who you think you are? Well, the is it the blue checkmarks? The some kind of like pain marks that are happening on Twitter right now is a firestorm because people are getting, they’re paying for like a valid validation of sorts that they can pretend to be a different type of person. It’s very interesting to see how that plays out. But putting that slightly aside, considering that over the next two months until this episode goes live, there is going to be a lot of am I talking to the right people on Twitter? Are these people who they say they are and while we can’t we don’t have a magic crystal ball to give you the listeners the exact answer. What do you say to that? Anita? How can people determine if and how they can trust the people they’re talking to on Twitter? Anita Kirkbride 26:30 Well, if you’re talking to somebody that’s well known, okay, not necessarily even a celebrity, but somebody that’s well known. The blue checkmark, currently, as we’re recording, this does not mean you’re talking to the person, the account says you’re talking to. Right? The currently today, the blue checkmark means they have $8 to pay for that blue checkmark, which is the opposite of what it has meant for the last eight or nine years that we’ve had verified accounts. So that’s really difficult for long term Twitter users to sort of grasp. The blue checkmark does not mean verified anymore. It means paid for. And now they’ve introduced this official badge that says verified. So if if it’s really important information, if it’s a celebrity, if it’s a government account, if it’s a a media account, look for the badge underneath their name that says official, that’s new for a lot of us, but currently today, that’s what we have to do. And it’s also really important that if you see something coming across your Twitter feed, and it looks like it’s from I’m going to use Elon Musk because he just bought Twitter. It looks like it’s from Elon Musk, you need to understand, it’s I could change my account to look like it’s Elon Musk, I can grab his profile photo, I can change my name, my handle is still going to say I need a Kirkbride. But I can make it say Elon Musk as my name and his photo. Other people might have a secondary account, where it’s E zero, E L zero, O N or whatever. And it looks like it’s Elon Musk, but there’s no official badge. And when you look at it really quickly, you think, Oh, this is Elon Musk saying this, but it’s not it’s some other person pretending to be. So it’s it’s, it always has been imperative. But it’s even more imperative now that we don’t just look for that blue checkmark that we really look at the handles, and the names and the history of the account before we assume that this is Elon Musk, or Joe Biden, or Erin Ollila, or a Nita or whoever talking, it’s really important that you check out the account before you assume that something outrageous is really coming from them. Erin Ollila 29:00 Yeah, and definitely don’t create that secondary account with that. Pretend Elon Musk name because Dojo cat did that. And now her name is far on Twitter. So you definitely if you haven’t read the read that yeah, go check that out in need of agreed? Yeah, really, it is for anything, do the research. Don’t assume it is so hard from human nature, especially when we get used to using a platform in a certain way. It’s hard to have to pull that back and then train ourselves to really actually dig a little bit more. But in the world of social media in 2023, that’s the that’s what we have to do on any platform. Do a little digging, make sure that what you’re seeing is truthful. Correct, even if you have to fact check elsewhere. And Anita, thank you so much for being here today. Before I let you go I have two quick questions for you. One if you could meet anyone in the online business world, who would it be and why? Anita Kirkbride 29:55 There are so many people I would like to meet in person. I’ve had the experience of meeting some of them in person at big marketing, social media marketing conferences. So, you know, I even recently got to meet a local tick tock superstar Alicia McCarville, because she came and spoke at my conference. So right now, I think meeting somebody like her meeting. You know, I’ve met Madalyn Sklar, who’s a Twitter expert. I’ve met Jen Herman, who’s an Instagram Expert. Those are the kinds of people that I look to meet. And I’ve actually already had that experience of talking to them and meeting with them. So I can’t think of anybody else right now that I would. Yeah, I mean, maybe, Tara McMullen. I don’t have her book right here. But I love her book. She might be somebody that I would like to meet and sit down and have a conversation with because I’m really, her book is really resonating with me. So Erin Ollila 30:53 she’s probably in my top two or three favorite online business people that I follow as well. People are listening. They like everything that we had to say. And they’re thinking, Well, what do I do next? Do you have a quick and easy homework assignment you would share with the listeners, quick and easy Anita Kirkbride 31:08 I would say would be I have on my website, I have a place where you can download social media audit sheets. And I think a quick and easy assignment would be to take that sheet and go through whichever platform you’re planning to use, and look at the items and make sure everything is optimized. Because if you’ve been using a platform for a long time, you may not have noticed some of the new pieces that are added, or things that have been taken away, or things that are just changed, or maybe you forgotten to update your about and bio and mission statement and that kind of thing as you’ve changed your brands over the years. So I have these audit checklists. And they’re really quick and easy to go through and just sort of check, check, check and get everything up to date. Erin Ollila 31:57 Oh, thank you so much. And I this is I think this is the hardest one you and the few other people on this episode are going to have the hardest question, but what do you expect from Twitter in 2023? Anita Kirkbride 32:09 Chaos. That is what I expect from Twitter right now for the next for the foreseeable future is is chaos. I you know, I love Twitter for many reasons for the networking, the local news, the international news, the creative ways that people use tweet threads and tweet storms and all the different features. I don’t know it, there is no plan for Twitter right now. And it if it pops into his head, it seems to be put it into place, or in queue to be done with very little thought for how it affects the whole infrastructure of Twitter. So that scares me, I think we’re going to see a lot of people leave Twitter, I think we’re going to see a lot of change to features, maybe things that some people love and other people don’t use. We’re going to see things shuttered. We’re going to see new things that maybe make sense or maybe don’t make sense. So chaos is my answer. Erin Ollila 33:12 Yeah, I think that’s the most truthful thing you can really say, though, because it’s so unknown that and we I think you said with changes, we’re having to figure out how those changes affect us. And people are leaving. So I agree, I think the best that we can really say is it’s going to be a chaotic time in this social media platform. And we’re all going to just have to decide, do we stay for the ride and what is the ride going to be like and we’ll figure that out as we go on. Anita, thank you so much for your time today. I sincerely appreciate everything that you have to say we will put all of the info for how people can get in touch with you in the show notes. And it’s just been so wonderful talking with you today. Anita Kirkbride 33:50 Thanks for having me. I I love to talk about Twitter, obviously. So it’s it’s great to have a chance to talk about it specifically