By Ashley Cassidy Seale, Founder and Creative Director, Ruby Social Co.
While it may seem like Instagram is getting all of the attention these days, Twitter is still a very important place to be in today’s political and economic climateーespecially for publishers. Although the platform is struggling to innovate, it remains not only a powerful traffic driver but also a popular place for breaking news.
Here are 3 tips to improve your Twitter game in 2018:
1. Tweet for Twitter’s sake
It can feel like a waste to not be constantly directing your community to the long-form content on your site, but constantly sharing links is the Twitter equivalent to a brand selling to followers at every turn. The most important thing to recognize (and remind ourselves of) is that social media is meant to be social.
While you want to hit your KPIs and convert traffic to your hero content, you will quickly lose the attention of your community if you fail to balance this with added value, conversation and a more human element. Get involved in the conversation as an outlet, rather than not responding to the reactions of your readers. Try using the poll tool to expand the views expressed in your content or gauge the reaction of your community.
2. Use unique visuals to attract more attention to your content
While Twitter is not an inherently visual platform, that’s the perfect reason to incorporate more images and video into your strategy. Spark curiosity, build excitement, or illustrate a narrative to increase your chances of having your content clicked on, engaged with and, better yetーshared.
You may dismiss GIFs and feel they are limited to juvenile memes shared with friends; however, they can be created in an elevated way that reflects your brand as a publisher. Using GIFs provides the opportunity to allow your followers to engage with your content and expand beyond the character limit.
Twitter is investing in video for 2018, so this should be part of your strategy as you move into the year. Posting accompanying short clips will help attract attention in your feed and will encourage more retweets.
3. Leverage the voice of your staff writers
When you look at many top media outlets on Twitter, the majority of them are focusing their strategy on driving traffic to their website. Rather than simply looking at your Twitter feed as a sort of RSS feed, look at what makes your publication unique.
A surefire way to differentiate from this tiresome model is to showcase the diversity of your assets—the talent and perspective of your staff writers. It’s likely, as we continue to move within a global news cycle, your competitors are covering similar stories.
As the concept of a Twitter chat has mostly come and gone, the idea of discussion between an account and its community has fallen to the wayside. Bring back this thinking by using your feed as a forum again. By scheduling takeovers or Twitter chats with your writers and reporters, you can build on and borrow the equity of their individual accounts and link it back to your publication’s main account. 
Ashley Cassidy Seale is a communications professional with more than a decade of public relations and marketing experience. Between her time in the agency world, helming teams and leading award-winning, national campaigns for lifestyle, fashion and beauty brands to working in-house for design houses and luxury retail, Ashley has fine-tuned a truly holistic expertise. An early adopter of social media, she harnessed her digital know-how to build an online presence under the moniker Quaintrelle, which has since evolved from a lifestyle blog to a bona fide, internationally recognized brand with workshops and events. An influencer in her own right, she launched Ruby Social Co.—a communications and content studio for clever brands—to bring this unique perspective to thoughtfully navigate her clients into the spotlight.
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