How to use Twitter threads for brand building and engagement

Happy Anniversary to the Twitter thread!

That’s right. It has been a whole year since Twitter officially rolled out a feature that’s used across the board, by millions of users. Businesses. Professionals. Everyday people. Everyone’s using it! Whether it’s supplementing an old Tweet with extra information, or breaking a story into bite-sized pieces, the Tweet thread is a feature that everyone is grateful for. Considering that the network only extended the 280 characters per-tweet in 2017, it was understandable that users found a work-around to say more, by creating strings of connected tweets. Now it’s gotten a lot easier, with Twitter letting users plan and structure a tweet thread simultaneously, thanks to which creating a Tweet-storm is simplified into a single click.

The tweet thread has unofficially existed for a long time. Nevertheless, this week marks a year since it was officially recognized as a feature and announced to the world—giving its followers the flexibility to do more using the format.

Some conversations need context – and the more words, the more context and a tweet thread is a fine way to stitch them together so you’ve more context. This has so much marketing potential for brands who want to strike an impression on social media. Here are just some uses of a tweet-thread that brands can utilize.

1. Tell a story

Threads are one of the simplest way to tell a story on Twitter, without breaking the flow. The feature has become so widespread among individuals and brands alike—Twitter even allows for every single reply on a tweet thread, to fold out into individual tweet threads, thereby nesting threads within threads. Talk about a thread-ception!

2. Break news quicker

Information on the internet moves at warp-speed. With the immediacy and ease that social media commands, sometimes netizens are quicker to break a piece of news, even before news organizations who once traditionally the sole news-bearer. So it should come as no surprise that even the most traditional news organizations have broken into innovative news-telling formats to keep up with the times, and the sheer pace in which information moves online.

Sometimes this means, just not enough time to write out a news story. This is where a feature like Tweet thread is proving useful. BBC utilized threads to update a single news story as and when the news flies in. Take a look.

3. Recall older Tweets

With how quick Twitter as a social network moves, information can get lost and buried very quickly. Your tweet that was right up there on someone’s feed can disappear in a matter of seconds. If you want to call back attention to a tweet, the simplest way is to make a thread out of it. Now you can keep all the engagement in one place, instead of letting it get scattered across the network.

4. Live tweeting is a thing and its fun

You’re at a seminar, a conclave, a corporate summit and you’re tasked with the noble job of handling Twitter. What can you do? Get strapped and ready to start a tweet-storm.

But, that’s not the only way live-tweeting works. You can literally live-tweet from almost anywhere (as long as the context makes room for it). A store opening, a *cough* boring *cough* seminar, a brand event. Teamed-up with the right hashtags, you’ll find that people are interested in jumping on the conversation, provided you keep it interesting! And a live-tweeting session is the best place to bring out the informal and chatty side of your brand’s Twitter.

And what’s the most efficient way to have a full-scale live tweeting sessh? With a Twitter thread, of course. Not only do threads help bring the entire narrative together into one cohesive unit, it’s always easy for a follower to jump back on the conversation and pick up where they left

5. Have conversations

Besides being a marketing strategy and all that heavyweight stuff—Twitter threads are simply just a great way to have conversations with your followers. If you want to fire up a chat with the internet, it can be as easy as starting a Twitter convo that devolves into a thread.

Look at how Oreo manages this almost effortlessly. They’ve so many conversations with their followers on a regular basis that it no longer even sounds like a corporate entity and its business targets having a conversation, anymore.

6. Tweet threads as repositories

Twitter can be a treasure-trove of so many resources, ideas and valuable insight on a topic. Finding them can be a struggle, with all the information that keeps pouring in every other second on the platform. That’s why Tweet threads can be a great way to keep a lot of information on a topic in one place and grow as a repository of sorts.

Take a look at this user who has turned a thread into a makeshift listicle of movie recommendations, that got over 15k retweets and over 31k likes.

What do you use tweet threads for? Share with us over a comment, let’s compare notes!