All businesses, organizations, media, and creatives are on Twitter to promote something.

Products, podcasts, services, restaurants, websites, collectives, opinions, humor, poetry, articles, books, and music are all items we're flocking to Twitter to promote. This can be a good and bad thing. The good is that there are roughly 600 million users on Twitter right now. That’s nearly 9% of the world’s human population.

The number of active Twitter users is growing daily. The people who use Twitter seem to be a powerful bunch and this makes the social media platform enviable to launch your world-changing new project. But how to promote on Twitter with skill?

After all, there's a lot of noise on Twitter. If you follow more than 50 users, your feed is flooded and overwhelming. It is hard to stand out from all of that noise. But you have the best project ever right? How do you get it to stand out? Below I am going to outline principles of tweeting that we have successfully employed at the MakingComics.com Twitter feed, @Making_Comics, that have allowed us to grow our user base exponentially during the past nine months.

Narrative Loyalty vs. Virality

The natural inclination when it comes to social media promotion of anything is to try and create a campaign that succeeds. The virality of a hashtag you create, a meme, or an image seems like it would be the easiest and fastest way to have your project seen the world over.

Right? From personal experience I tell you that this is a mixed bag of results. In the fall of 2013, I was the subject of a viral news story related to a tattoo of a comic I have on my forearm that I change any time I want. I was covered on CNET, Huffington Post, and even Fox News. (Recently, I was even featured in the 2015 edition of Ripley’s Believe It or Not.) For a few days I had thousands of visitors to my comic website dedicated to the project. Within a month, I was back down to 20 visitors daily, if that.

What happened? With all the press, Tweets, shares, and buzz from this story, why didn’t that translate into a following? Before the story went viral, I never took time to create a brand around what I was doing. I never worked on a story to go along with the project that people could buy into when interacting with the project. When planning the brand behind MakingComics.com, I knew the kind of flash-and-sizzle attention received by “My Arm: The Comic” was not an option for this long form project. Instead, we focused on creating quality, predictable, and reliable content that was meant directly for a niche group. When/if something we do goes viral, like Mark Luetke’s “Get Started Already," we have a branded infrastructure of items ready for people to become invested in on the site. This results in higher user interaction and retention.

Images

Learn and practice how to design graphics to go along with your promotions/Tweets. A good place to start is looking into the elements and principles of design and familiarizing yourself. Or even hiring a quality designer to work on creating graphics for your posts. Since Twitter is saturated with short sentences, great looking graphics can go a long way toward attracting audience members to your content base.

Create Content That Can Tag Others

Whenever possible, we try to connect content to actual people and organizations operating within Twitter. This allows their followers to connect to your new content, and it also allows you to break out of the isolation of your solo Twitter feed. If MakingComics.com can tag Ira Glass in a Tweet, we're going to do so. Don’t be annoying though. Try and make sure you are tagging others with good reason.

Great Hashtags

As covered in our article on hashtags, finding the right hashtag for your content can be vital. Even if you don’t have one that fits, create a new one and be consistent with it. Whenever I'm promoting my twice weekly comic “Head Comics,” I consistently use the hashtag #headcomics so that users can, theoretically, use that search term to find all of my comic posts on Twitter.

Copy

As you're taking up room in your 140 characters box with images, hashtags, author tags, and links to content elsewhere on the web, you're left with very little room to provide copy for your Tweets. Make sure whatever you put down is clear and concise, and that your content is straightforward.