5 Under-Used Twitter Features That Help Your Business Stand Out Online

Twitter can be a very useful tool when it comes to building a foundation for your business’ online presence. The network is focused on real time engagement and conversations – which are priceless when it comes to targeting the right people. Now, we’ve already reviewed how to improve the performance of your tweets and how to get more organic reach but there are a few more tricks to gaining even more reach and exposure from Twitter – while you surprise and delight your audience and stand out online.

We’ve already discussed how to improve the performance of your tweets, and how to get more organic reach from your social media posts – but there are a few less known Twitter features that will help you breathe life into older posts, drive more interaction and reach, plus help your Twitter profile stand out with interesting content presentations.

Here are some of the best features to make your Twitter profile stand out while increasing the reach of your Twitter posts – organically.

1. Twitter Lists

Twitter lists are used for grouping Twitter users. They are a simple way to “curate your own timelines”, cutting through general timeline chatter. Twitter lists can help you organize the people you follow, and are a great tool to build your Twitter following and social media relationships as well.

You can create private, or public Twitter lists based on whatever topic you want, add people or brands (even ones that you don’t follow), and look at only the tweets from users you have added to your list. You also have the ability to subscribe to other users’ lists, and others can subscribe to yours. Besides helping you keep you up to date with tweets from your favorite accounts, there are many benefits for growing your following, building relationships and creating more value for your fans.

Here are a few tactics that use Twitter lists to build your following and their benefits:

• Curate lists by topic: Create lists of employees, event attendees etc. They will get a notification they they have been added to your list – letting them know you’re account exists, and that you think they’re special. All that with out having to follow them (essential for those who really watch the following to follower ratio).
• Never miss a tweet: Because Twitter lists only show you the tweets from the members you’ve added to it, they make looking at the feed and finding the tweets from people you care about way easier. This can be so handy for curating the content for you to share.
• Create resource lists: Have a favorite brand related blog? Maybe there are some influencers you’d like to get the attention of? Resource lists not only give your followers added value, but they can also help you capture the attention of some influencers.
• Thank you lists: Yet another way to engage with customers – if someone mentions you, checks into your restaurant or event, or shares your content add them to a list and let them know you appreciate them!

Each Twitter list has a unique link – which gives you some versatility when it comes to sharing the list with others. Again, Lists are all about added value.

2. Twitter Collections

Twitter Collections are yet another way to curate content to share with your followers – but this method is more about individual tweets as oppose to all tweets from specific accounts. The Collections feature not only lets you highlight specific tweets, but they are displayed on a clean list. Twitter Collections, like lists, all have their own URL and are embedable which makes them very easy to share. Collection embeds come in a lovely collage format (although I am on WordPress and my embed looks like the Twitter version of the collection – you’ll see what I mean)

Tweets don’t have to be your own to be included in a collection. Imagine all the great things you can curate with this tool? You can feature influencers, resources, or even samples of your work!

Click on the image below to see my Twitter Collection in action! It features my posts published in Social Media Today :

You’ll have to use Tweetdeck to set up your collections. Here’s a quick run through:

• Log onto Tweetdeck and click the “Add a Column” option on the right side of your dashboard.
• A lightbox will pop up where you can choose a previous collection or create a new collection.
• Click “create a new collection” – a new column will appear in the Tweetdeck dashboard. Here you can name and add a description to your Collection, as well as add your tweets and share the Collection.
• Next, add tweets to fill your collection. You can drag your tweets in from other parts of your Tweetdeck dashboard or get the link to each tweet and add them to your collection that way.
• New tweets will go to the top of your collection stream and you can reorder them as you please.
• When you’re ready to share your collection click on the toggle icon at the top of the Collection column. Here you will see options to share your collection either on Twitter, via embed, or link to the collection

3. Photo Collages

Twitter allows for a multi image post of up to 4 photos. Unlike Facebook, Twitter doesn’t let you play around with the organization of the photos before you post them, so you have to plan the order you upload the photos a little more. 1 tweet will have to tie all 4 photos together as you can’t individually caption them. One more thing to keep in mind is image size. You can “hide” text in the areas of the photo that Twitter cuts off in the preview of your tweet image – I’ll show you an example below.

Here is how Twitter organizes 4 square photos:

Some examples of how brands are using the multiple image post method on Twitter:

My favorite use of Twitter Photo Collages: Tropicana made a 4 image quiz! Clicking each image revealed and answer as the full photo is a square.

And this classic General Electric tweet I’m sure you’ve seen before used 4 images to create one complete message

Last but not least: The new kids on the block – Gallery and Featured Tweets

4. Gallery

Twitter Dashboard allows you to set up a gallery of media tweets (photos, videos etc.) which sits at the top of your profile. You can choose tweets you’ve sent out as well as tweets you’ve been mentioned in. Here is a chance to tell visitors about you in 5 tweets! I chose a mix of my social media tips and lifestyle tweets to show you what I blog and care about. Set up is easy as you choose from a list of tweets you’ve sent out or mention your profile. I can foresee people getting super creative with presentation.

5. Featured Tweets

We always talk about using social media to establish leadership and trust. Featured tweets are a perfect tool to do just that. Unlike the gallery, you can feature tweets without media. Again choose from tweets you’ve sent or that mention you to be featured. For this section I chose a mix of my own tweets but I also included tweets from Social Media Today, and Hootsuite which share links to my posts on Social Media Today.

Bonus: Twitter Events

A bonus feature for those of you who already run Twitter ads or are thinking of getting started is Twitter Events. In the Twitter Analytics Dashboard you’ll find section called “Events” in the navigation. This will take you to a dashboard with major trending topics, and information about the reach, impressions, demographics and more related to each conversation. The best part? You can create ads that target users having these conversations right from this dashboard. If you click on “create new campaign” you’ll be redirected to the ad creation page where the audience is already pre-loaded. Go with what you’ve got or adjust and tweak who you want to reach from there. Talk about an opportunity to capitalize on current conversations and popular events!

I hope this post has jolted your creative mind and given you ideas on how to not only present content in a new way, but also breathe life into older posts, and drive more traffic to current posts by taking advantage of embedding and Twitter’s less used features. Which of the features on this list is your favorite?

This article was originally published here.