4 Ways to Optimize Your Tweets for Mobile

60% of twitter’s 200 million users use twitter on their mobile device at least once a month. If you’re not creating at least some content, that’s a potential 120 million person market that you’re missing out on. In other words, this is not very smart. According to twitter, mobile users are 79% more likely to be on twitter several times per day, and are 47% less likely to access twitter on a desktop. That means that your desktop optimized content is flying by these mobile users unnoticed (actually it’s probably annoying them). So how do we make mobile specific content on twitter? Check out these tips!

1. Target a Younger Audience

Mobile twitter users tend to be younger. 18-34 year olds are 21% more likely to use twitter primarily on mobile. That means you may have to adjust parts of your message and media. Millennials want catchy headlines and appreciate humor (for instance memes) – after all social media to them is primarily a place to be social. Images and GIFs are also a great way to pull them in. If you ever need inspiration just read a few headlines on Buzzfeed and Elite Daily – these sites are run by and for Gen Y. Be careful, because this digital generation is extremely critical, so screw one thing up and you could have all of Reddit laughing at your technological incompetence. Check out our guide for marketing to millennials to learn more

2. Smaller, Smoother Look and Feel

Twitter’s 140 character limit is even more restricting on a small mobile screen. You need to be very sleek with your body and hashtags, as according to Dazeinfo mobile users scroll 4x faster than desktop users. If your tweet looks too long or too clunky, users will scroll right past it. Social media guru @brentertainer advises putting hashtags into the text body, instead of tacking them on at the end like a purely promotional afterthought. Keeping your tweets under 140 characters also allows people to easily retweet you.

An example of a good tweet:

An example of a bad tweet:

Use twitter cards to create highly professional and media rich tweets. Twitter cards are also automatically resized for mobile, so you don’t need to worry about optimizing each image size. You’ve got two clicks (or taps) before a user is disinterested, so don’t waste any of them forcing a mobile user to zoom in and out on an image made for desktop.

3. Use Mobile Friendly links

No one likes a clunky link. Using a long link on twitter adds no value to your tweet, and shows that you don’t know what you’re doing (remember what I said about critical millennials?). A link shortener like bit.ly frees up characters in your tweet, and allows for useful analytics (not quite as useful as Crowdbabble’s analytics of course). Popular social media management platforms have their own shorteners – Ow.ly for Hootsuite and Buff.ly for Buffer are examples. You can even customize the links using bit.ly pro, or this guide.

4. Tweet from your phone

Tweeting from your phone allows you to view the tweet as it will appear on mobile. A quick acid test to use before you tweet is “would I read this tweet if I saw it?” Tweeting on mobile also allows you to take advantage of mobile specific features, such as the ability to embed tweets in other tweets, like this:

This also smooths out your look and feel.

Happy tweeting, and remember to measure!

Read more:

• Twitter Users Use Mobile