Favorites are a much underused Twitter feature. And if you get creative, they can provide you with much more than a way to store your favorite tweets.
The technique that I’m about to describe provides a great way to make sure that your followers pay close attention to your future tweets.
Post a message to your followers asking them to send you their favorite tweets. But put a limit on the submissions, such as the first 20, within 24 hours or before a certain date and time. For example;
Send your top tweets. The best will appear on my FAVs page. First 20 only. Post: @powersystem Fav tweet + Static Twitter Page URL
Only accept tweets for consideration if they are submitted within the timeframe that you stipulate. This creates an element of scarcity or urgency.
If you want to provide your followers with more instructions and outline the benefits of participating, you could create a page on your website/blog with all the instructions, then link to the page whenever you request more favorites.
For example;
Send your top tweets. Best will appear on my FAVs page. Rules http://is.gd/xxxxx Post: @powersystem Fav tweet + Static Twitter Page URL
After the time limit has passed, select the best posts and add them to your favorites (click the start icon to the right of the messages that you want to select).
To obtain the maximum benefit, you should repeat these steps every week or month, but don’t make it too predictable. The aim is to make your followers read your posts waiting for another opportunity to submit their favorite tweets.
Then it’s just a case of promoting your Twitter favorites page as much as possible. All the normal promotion methods are available, however, it’s also possible to increase the reach of your favorites page by linking the RSS feed to your other sites and social media pages.
The RSS feed for your Twitter favorites takes the following format; http://twitter.com/favorites/USERNAME.rss for example, the RSS feed for the Twitter Power Team can be found at; http://twitter.com/favorites/powersystem.rss
Ultimately, the more popular your favorites page, the more eager your followers will be to win one of your contests. To make your offer ever more attractive, you could also offer to Retweet the best messages to your followers.
Let us know whether you use the favorites feature on Twitter, and if you do, how do you use it? Is there a better way to use the favorites list?
9 comments ↓
Good one; this can help with blogging too. Thanks for the idea TPS team!
Nimbly,
Jennifer
@nimbleassistant
Hi Jennifer, thanks for your comment. Great idea about using this technique for blog posts. In addition to making your readers pay more attention to your posts, it will help to position your blog as a hub for all the best information related to your niche.
StuartLaing
Twitter Power Team
Now I have an idea how to use Favorite page. I’m breathing and taking it in ..slowly. Will have to revisit this blog. I was on my way to comment on the #followfriday post.
Heather Greaves’s last blog post..Video - What is Yoga Therapy, Can I Become a Yoga Therapist
Lots of good ideas in your article, thanks.
Twitter Favorites are public content, meaning Favorites can be viewed by visitors to your Twitter page who are not logged into Twitter. For that reason, I’ve tried to Favorite tweets that I believe would be meaningful to visitors, to help them understand something about my background or about the subjects or information that I find useful.
Some other ideas for using Twitter Favorites can be found on my blog post at the following tinyurl:
http://tinyurl.com/cyj4z6
Regards,
Sal.
—
Salvatore Saieva
http://www.twitter.com/saieva
Salvatore Saieva’s last blog post..The Most Overlooked Feature of Twitter
Good point Sal. Using the Twitter favorites feature in this way provides plenty of scope to let people discover more about who you are beyond the 160 characters allowed in your bio.
It’s certainly an aspect of the Twitter service that’s underused.
Successful Tweeting,
StuartLaing
Twitter Power Team
I agree that “Favorites are a much underused Twitter feature. And if you get creative, they can provide you with much more than a way to store your favorite tweets.”
However, I think there are other ways to use them to gain traffic as well as use others to find creative and interesting people to follow.
Have you ever used FAVRD?
http://www.sagerock.com/blog/favrd/
I just started using it this last week and it has changed the way I think about Favorites on Twitter altogether. I’d love to hear what you think about this.
greg’s last blog post..BizCamp - Spring 2009
Great idea and this will be good for blogging too.
steve
Resource Management Alliance
i use my favorites to collect links to Twitter tools
(already 1500 by now)
iam using the one touch horizon &ultra
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