What we learned from 10,000 tweets in 12-months

It was the great Malcolm Gladwell who described the mastery from 10,000 hours of practice. Here is our experience on how to get the most from Twitter in building online authority.

Here we explore what we learned from posting 10,000 tweets in 12-months. This was done with original tweets, not retweets and without automated scheduling. Practice makes perfect as a level of proficiency comes with repeated and intense practice. We grew the number of followers on Twitter for the International Canoe Federation by 20,000 during 2016.

15 advanced tips for building online authority with Twitter

Success invariably comes down to strong planning. Our use of Twitter is no exception. In many instances, we visited the venues in advance or arranged for there to be a strong dedicated Wifi connection to facilitate live tweeting. Ironically, we have found ourselves in seminars on the use of social media to find that there is no Wifi or cellular reception available!
In advance of events, we map a list of all the Twitter accounts both to attribute to tweets, as well as the names of participating organisations.
We meet in advance and daily as a social media team. We ensure everyone is introduced and connected on social media.

4. Prepare a bank of images. – We stored images of key people or the venue locally on a device to use as. We also took photos at an event a day ahead of when we thought we would use them. You can use the same image more than once.5. There are some shortcuts. We make extensive use of copy/paste. We have created standard conventions that we know work within 140 characters.
6. We use multiple devices simultaneously so we can be tweeting on one while drafting the next on a second device.
7. Use single hashtags consistently. We used #ICFslalom more than any other hashtag during 2016 on behalf of the International Canoe Federation. We advise against using more than one hashtag within a message. We use a single hashtag in each tweet through an entire event or series.
8. Searching for a particular hashtag and then creating a tweet from inside the search automatically adds the hashtag to that tweet, saving time in writing it.
9. We have trained ourselves to remember snippets of interviews (phrases or whole sentences) and to tweet them as quotes attributed to the Twitter account name of the individual.10. Use web links such as Wikipedia where people can learn more about a phrase or individual. While it may not be recognised as the authority on a subject, it helps readers learn more about keywords or people. Alternatively, you can connect to a book recommendation.

11. We retweet key tweets for high profile individuals or organisations that are using the same hashtag at an event.
12. The ability to delete tweets is highly valuable. We use it routinely. We all make mistakes especially when speed is of the essence during a live event. There is nothing wrong with deleting a tweet as soon as it is posted and then correcting it and reposting.
13. Ripl was our best app find in 2016 and added an added dimension to key social posts. Ripl provides an animation that enables key tweets to stand out. We have seen a higher engagement rate.
14. We have warmly embraced the changes to the character count introduced by Twitter in 2016. They allowed us to attach images to more tweets and to make greater use of quoted tweet.
15. We recommend the use of Hootsuite or other social platforms, that assist with advanced scheduling and sophisticated analytics.

Building online authority for business

We have been able to use Twitter to very good effect in contributing to building online authority. Mastering a skill in the confines of international sport has provided experiential learning highly applicable to the business environment. In fact, the International Canoe Federation has also become one of our clients. Read here to learn how I came to be tweeting at the Rio Olympics.

We grew the number of followers on Twitter for the International Canoe Federation by 20,000 during 2016, for which I was invited on stage at the #INBOUND16 conference in Boston.