One Essential Habit Of Successful Tweeters: Marking Milestones

Keeping up a consistent Twitter presence is all about building good habits. Whether your goal is to get more customers, generate ebook downloads, network with potential employers or just follow the latest news, there are a few habits that you can learn from the most successful tweeters out there – and marking milestones is a big one.

Milestones are happening all the time

Think about your personal life for a minute. How many milestones can you list? Of course there’s your birthday, and holidays. But what about romantic anniversaries, unforgettable trips or when you bought your first car? And expanding outward to your family and friends, how about all of their birthdays, graduations, promotions?

And businesses have just as many milestones to celebrate, too. Not only can they mark the important moments in their employees’ lives – like birthdays, employee parties, etc. – but they can also mark milestones like the anniversary of when the business was founded, when new products are released, or charity and community-based initiatives.

Important days crop up all the time, so why not celebrate them on Twitter?

If you know that one of your co-workers is participating in a charity bike event, help support their fundraising via Twitter. And don’t forget to snap a picture of them crossing the finish line! Or mark national holidays with your own personal spin.

Benefits of marking milestones

By marking milestones, you’ll accomplish things:

1. You will show your followers that you’re human. You’re not a robot tweeting headlines and articles – you experience important life and business events, and you’re not shy about sharing.
2. You will connect with your followers on an emotional level.
3. Your tweet may enjoy a further reach, if you include the appropriate hashtags (like #WorldCup or #NewYear2014).

Tips for making this a habit

Here are some tips for marking milestones on Twitter:

• Don’t tweet every little milestone. The word “milestone” should give you some indications of the type of dates you want to mark on Twitter. Your first sale? That’s a big one. But the anniversary of that one time you think you saw Bill Murray across the hall at your local mall? Not so much.
• Tweet about the milestones that matter to your audience. If you love the World Cup and so does your audience, go ahead and cheer when your team wins a game – this is a great milestone that will help connect you to your followers. But if you are tweeting on behalf of a diaper brand, there might not be much crossover between your audience and World Cup fanatics.
• Create a content calendar, and add all future milestones you can think of off the bat. It’s great if you can create weekly, monthly or yearly events marking repeat milestones to remind yourself to tweet about them when they reoccur.
• Ask your team for their input. If you are part of a large team, you may be unaware of relevant milestones that seem like common knowledge to someone else.

(Calendar image via Shutterstock)