What are the most effective twitter posts you can send to your followers? It’s a good question right? Everyone is still trying to measure social media efforts and its impact on their specific businesses. How do we know when we tweet that we are sending the most effective message to our followers? What are we using to measure this with? So after over a year of testing I have some answers to these questions that continue to prove themselves correct time and time again.

The # 1 Most Effective Tweet
The most effective tweet you can send is a twitpic.com or tweetphoto.com link. The click through rate (CTR) is five to ten times greater then any other link you can post to your followers. Sharing your life through photos with your followers creates more of a connection due to the voyeur in all of us. We want to see what you are talking about. It’s as close to real time as it gets, just like facebook life-stream updates tweet photos are addicting. It’s the same reason US Weekly is so popular. A company wanting to leverage this high CTR could build their own Tweet photo sharing location so that said company does not lose the value of the tweet by driving it to somewhere other then their own site.

The # 2 Most Effective Tweet
The next best type of post is one with an actually link to the site you are trying to drive people. Some might think the link shortening services such as bit.ly or tinyurl.com would be best to save room; not always true. By using the link shorteners you are not allowing your followers insight as to where you are driving them. Not only do you followers not know where your sending them but you get absolutely no SEO value due to the link not having your domain in it anymore. A good solution here would be for companies to build their own custom link shorteners, this would address both issues quite nicely.

Of course the next best choice is using bit.ly,  tinyurl.com or ow.ly tags to shorten your links. Not only does it give you the ability to track how many clicks are happening (instant gratification) it also gives you the ability to fit more verbiage into your tweet. Obviously explaining where your link is going to drive your followers is crucial to earn their trust so be as descriptive as possible. This is also your chance to get back that SEO value but mentioning the URL to your site (example: “Watch this on youtube.com).

Street Creds Tweet
The last tweet you can give your followers is a regular update with no links in it at all. In some cases this could be an epic tweet where your followers re-tweet your comment like crazy. Most of the time these tweets are just funny little quirky things you might come up with that are wicked clever (yeah I am from the East Coast). FML is a common topic along with trending topics you can then re-tweet with your own two cents to spice it up.

Over Tweet = Bad Times
Twitter etiquette is one of the most commonly miss-understood and abused problems we face in the constant chatter that is going on. Obviously the worst thing you can do is give everyone an update on everything you are doing at every moment of your day (Example: “brushing my teeth.” “I am hungry.”) don’t be that guy or girl. Engage in communication with your followers back and fourth, Twitter is not a one way communication ticker (although some use it as that). Most of all have fun and be social.