I read this great article studying the usability and design of Tweets. The article is written by the foremost expert in web design and usability, Jakob Nielsen. I thought it was worth sharing some highlights from the article to assist with the lawyer marketing efforts under way at your firm.
I had 2 big takeaways from the article:
The Design of Your Tweets Matters
“It’s a common mistake to think that only full-fledged graphical user interfaces count as interaction design and deserve usability attention. As our earlier research has shown, URLs and email both contribute strongly to the Internet user experience and thus require close attention to usability to enhance the profitability of a company’s Internet efforts.
In fact, the shorter it is, the more important it is to design text for usability.”
I don’t think that many of us would consider how the construction or wording of the tweet we send out will effect how many people click on a link, retweet the message, etc. However, we must take the time to test and investigate what works best for us.
Some things to consider:
- What words if any should be capitalized or in all caps
- The arrangement of the words in your tweet to highlight what’s most important
- Are you leaving enough characters for someone to retweet your message
- Is full punctuation and sentence structure necessary
When to Tweet
Nielsen recommends the following – It’s best to post a minute after the hour so you’ll be listed on top of anybody who sets their software to release postings at exactly 9:00 (or on the hour).
“One of the big downsides of stream-based communication compared to email newsletters is the highly ephemeral nature of the postings: Once they scroll off the first screen, they’re essentially 6 feet under.
A look at clickthrough statistics for links posted to Twitter vs. those circulated in email newsletters shows a drastically steeper decay function: lots of clicks the first few minutes, and then almost none. In contrast, email continues to generate clicks for days as people work their way through their inboxes.
Clickthrough decay: Twitter time passes 10 times faster than email time.”
When utilizing Twitter to enhance the lawyer marketing efforts of your firm, it’s important to take these things under consideration. Just because Tweets are short doesn’t mean they can’t be optimized and improved to better distribute your message.
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