In 2009, Brian Solis wrote an article titled “Is Twitter the new CNN?”, which took note of a news-consumption trend that has since become even more wide-spread. Instead of watching the news, people often turned to Twitter– and they were doing so not only to get real-time coverage of important stories, but also to express their opinions and share information. Suddenly, traditional media no longer seemed fast enough, leaving room for tools that managed to keep pace with the global, real-time unfolding of events.

Over the next few years, the increasing use of social media networks by both individuals and organizations has democratized content distribution to the point where anyone can publish and share his view on nearly any topic. You don’t have to be a major news organization to get heard anymore, because any institution has the tools to become a media entity. Take the case of Elon Musk, who dismissed The New York Times’ review of Tesla’s Superchargers by publishing a blog post to refute the author’s assertions, and took to Twitter to increase the distribution of the message–proving that every company is now a media company.

While giving more power to smaller players, social networks have also changed the way traditional news outlets do their work. Almost every newspaper or news channel maintains a social presence in 2013–they listen to online chatter and have adapted to the new ways that news is consumed by communicating with readers through Facebook, Twitter, or Google+ in real-time. Reuters, for example, has turned its century-plus old news service into a modern newswire by employing a team of social media editors to factcheck tweets in real time, but also allowing its reporters to tweet first file a story second. (Josh Sternberg, Digiday)

Caltrain is delayed. Conductor: “If you have any additional information from Twitter, please let us know.”The world is changing.

— sean rose (@sean_a_rose) May 7, 2013

Journalists and media organizations have to work hand in hand with social media, because modern technology can help them get better results and increased exposure. To achieve these goals, they have to understand social channels as tools, and use them to create powerful personal brands.

Social Media as a Modern Journalism Tool

Can you feel that? Summer is coming. With Memorial Day right around the corner and summer travel plans on the brain, this week’s Social Media Face Off is a battle between two of the largest travel websites—Expedia and Priceline.

In order to compare the brands on social, we set up search streams for each brand in the uberVU platform and compared the results from the past two weeks to determine our winner.

Fasten your seat belt and secure your tray tables. Let’s find out which travel booking site is first class in social.

Round One: Mentions

Expedia takes off first with 13,362 mentions, easily topping Priceline’s 7,016 mentions.

Winner: Expedia

Round Two: Engagement

We wanted to know which travel site is successfully engaging with its social audience so we compared the number of RTs, Likes and Shares. Expedia keeps its lead when it comes to Twitter, having 75% of the RTs. But Priceline turns things around on Facebook, outperforming Expedia with a higher percentage of both Likes and Shares.

Winner: Priceline

Round Three: Conversation Mapping

Using uberVU’s conversation maps we are able to take a closer look at what exactly is being discussed about each brand in social conversations. Expedia and Priceline have pretty similar maps. Clearly the social web recognizes what the sites are known for with words like “travel” and “hotel” trending for both brands. Praising words like “love” and “great” also appear on both maps as do competitor names like Orbitz and Kayak.

Priceline’s stock has been making news lately so related terms have turned up in its map, but the majority of the terms are on par with Expedia’s map so we consider these maps to be even.

Winner: It’s a tie

Round Four: Sentiment

Praising words appeared in both Expedia and Priceline’s conversation maps so we were curious to see how all of their mentions measured up. Expedia does have a fewer amount of negative mentions—7% compared with Priceline’s 12%—but the brand hits some turbulence with positive mentions, only racking up 32%, coming in behind Priceline’s 38%.

Winner: Priceline

Overall Winner: Priceline

This race was close, but only one brand can be signaled for social media takeoff. With wins in sentiment and engagement, we declare the winner of this battle to be Priceline. Expedia fought hard in all three rounds but was ultimately left on the tarmac.

The conversation maps in the uberVU platform show the most-talked about topics for a particular keyword or company name. Brands can find helpful insights from the maps by identifying hot topics amongst their audience. It would be easy for a brand to brush off words or phrases in the maps that seemingly don’t belong, but sometimes the insights behind them tell a real story that could be helpful to the brand’s marketing efforts. And sometimes they’re just funny.

We’ve been keeping tabs on some of the top brands for awhile now, so we decided to take a look at their social conversations for the past three months to see if anything out of the ordinary popped up. Here’s what we found.

Applebee’s

The conversation map for Applebee’s highlights the social web’s sentiment about the brand with phrases like “you are amazing” and “ILYSM” (translation: I love you so much. Don’t worry, we had to look it up) trending. But the word that was used the most was “Liam.” Why? Well if you’re 13 years old that name should ring a bell. One Direction’s Liam Payne tweeted about how he would love to go to Applebee’s in December and it continues to trend for the brand today. Sign that kid up for an endorsement deal.

Olay

Olay’s conversation map mostly contains phrases that you would expect for the skincare line, but the phrase that was the most out of place—“25 Walmart”—was also the one that ranked the highest. We did some digging into the mentions and found the trending story responsible. Mommy blog, Blessed Beyond Words, was giving away a $25 Walmart gift card, courtesy of Olay. Mommy blogs and giveaways: true rulers of the internet.

Poland Spring

“Water,” “bottle”…… “Rubio?” Marco Rubio has dominated the Poland Spring’s conversation map for the past few months thanks to his now infamous #WaterGate moment during his State of the Union rebuttal. The internet went crazy and Poland Spring got some free exposure. No word on if Poland Spring is in fact a Republican.

American Airlines

A few phrases seemed out of place on the American Airlines map, most centering around the NBA finals being played at the American Airlines arena in Miami. The term that stuck out the most to us —being the social media nerds we are—was “Klout.” Turns out American Airlines has a new partnership with Klout that allows influencers with a Klout score over 55 to access the airline’s Admirals Clubs, regardless of whether or not they’re flying on the airline. Does that include free peanuts?

Hyundai

Hyundai’s map looks pretty standard for a car company….until you get to the end. Does that say “suicide?” Hyundai Europe recently released an advertisement depicting a man attempting to commit suicide via carbon monoxide. The ad was quickly pulled, but unfortunately for Hyundai, it looks like the negative press has gained enough traction to trend for the company.

Proactiv

A lot of celebrities endorse Proactiv, but only one has the power to trend on Proactiv’s conversation map. “Justin” would be for none other than the Biebs himself, Justin Bieber, who is a spokesperson for the brand. The singer has actually been promoting Proactiv for a few years now so we thought it was pretty interesting his name was still trending for the company. It seems as though the social web has enough jokes to keep the story going. One being how can Bieber promote an acne product when he hasn’t even hit puberty yet? I guess we’re not the only ones who think that’s funny—“puberty” is on the map too.

We hope you enjoyed a lovely Mother’s Day and treated Mom to something nice. More importantly, we hope you took the time to sit back and reflect on just how much you’ve learned from Mom. She taught you your ABCs, your manners…and how to be a successful social media manager.

That’s right: the lessons Mom has been teaching you all along can help you be a better community manager. Who knew Mom knew so much about social media marketing?

Here are 6 Mom lessons you should remember when managing your community (because she said so).

1. Just Be Yourself

…..and everyone will love you. (Or in the case of my mom, “and if they don’t like you, then screw ‘em.”) This advice was practically written for social media. Some brands think they have to be funny, witty or plain outrageous to earn traction in the social web. But that approach won’t work for every brand. Nothing sticks out more than a social strategy that’s forced (like say a pharmaceutical company posting cat pictures). Stay on brand and your fans will like you for you.

2. Do Your Homework

Mom never let us slide when it came to our responsibilities. We always had to be prepared by doing our homework and studying for our exams. Imagine how Mom would feel if she knew you were winging it when it came to your brand’s social media marketing. (We already harped on this one but perhaps you’ll listen to Mom). Know your audience. Do your research. Have a strategy.

3. If You Can’t Say Something Nice, Don’t Say Anything at All

It’s easy to get caught up in the heat of the moment. Just remember that what happens in social media will live on forever. Once it’s out there, you can’t take it back. Take the time to think through your posts and make sure that the content is something that your brand can stand behind.

4. Call Your Grandparents

You forget and put it off, but when you finally do reach out, Grandpa and Grandma are always so excited to hear from you. It’s always easier to engage with the people who reach out to you, but we shouldn’t neglect those who need to hear from us. Remember your lurkers (the people who view your content and follow conversations but never participate). They need your attention too. So how do you reach out to them? Offer low-risk ways for them to participate in your community like polls or contests. Track successful content and use it to figure out what they’re responding to.

5. You Can’t Have Dessert Unless You Eat Your Vegetables

She was really strict on this one too, wasn’t she? Well, so is your community. If you spend the majority of your time promoting your brand—a marketer’s sweet indulgence—you’ll ruin your community’s meal. Remember the 70/20/10 rule. 70% of your posts should be interesting, beneficial content, 20% should be shared content and only 10% should be promotional. You can’t have your cake until you earn the trust of your community by providing value.

6. Stop Hitting Your Brother

But he hit you first! That excuse never worked with Mom and it’s not going to fly with your social audience either. While it’s tempting to respond to nasty comments or troll-like behavior, you have to be the bigger person (more Mom wisdom). Respond to any controversy quickly and with facts—leave emotions out of it. Be empathetic, but don’t let yourself get drawn into a fight. Always remember that you are representing your brand and company.

Facebook can’t be that hard, right? Your mom certainly seems to be figuring it out. Mom might even make an excellent community manager—if her brand’s community wanted to see pictures from your fifth birthday party. Thankfully, your brand’s audience wants more than your embarrassment. So, what exactly do they want? Well, as the social media manager managing your brand’s Facebook account, you’ll have to experiment to figure that out. But we can tell you what they don’t want.

Avoid these 8 Facebook mistakes to ensure your brand’s likability:

1. Winging It

That’s right: You need a plan. And no, your plan can’t be just to have a Facebook page for the sake of having one. Your page needs to serve a purpose and you need to have a real goal in mind. Are you going to use your page to build brand awareness? Will you use it for an extension of customer service? Are you using it to connect with fans? You must decide on your direction and then tailor your posts for that reason.

2. Making Facebook Mad

One way to definitely fail at managing a Facebook community would be to have your content deleted by Facebook itself. You have to play by the rules.

Facebook has strict rules regarding brand pages and it is your responsibility to know them. One recent update that we’ve seen become a problem for brands is the 20% rule. Profile images, cover images and promoted image content cannot contain more than 20% text. If you violate this rule, your image is sure to be rejected or taken down.

Not sure if your cover photo has too much text? Check out this handy tool to test whether your image adheres to the 20% text rule.

3. You. Never. Stop. Talking

Have you ever had a conversation with someone where you couldn’t get a word in? You learned all about their life but they didn’t ask you one question about yours. Annoying, isn’t it? One-sided conversations are the worst—online and off. There is a big difference between talking to your fans and talking at them. Interact with your community by asking and replying to questions. Listening and reacting is the only way to step out from the noise and be part of the conversation.

Engaging is now easier with Facebook’s new reply feature, which allows you to reply directly to comments left on your page and start conversation threads. Plus, the most active conversations among your audience now appear at the top of the posts ensuring that people who visit your page will see the best conversations. This also makes your replies stand out more, which is helpful in showing just how much your brand is engaging with its audience.

4. Being Shady or Lazy

In addition to interacting with your community you also have to monitor them. And by monitoring we don’t mean deleting every post you don’t like. Negative feedback will happen whether you like it or not. Acknowledge the negative rather than cover it up. Deleting negative comments will only further enrage the angry posters and will make you look sneaky.

What you are allowed to delete is spam or anything that you find inappropriate. It is important to establish a moderation policy that makes it clear to your audience what is acceptable on your page and what is not. uberVU’s page points out what types of posts we would remove from our page—things like “hateful remarks or threats against countries, ethnicities or other groups of people.”

Make sure to check your page and comments regularly so spam or inappropriate posts don’t get out of control. An overload of spam on a company page shows just how little the brand is using it. And who wants to follow a company who is not present and actively engaged?

5. Looking Like a Dictionary

So. Much. Text. Facebook is visual so don’t bore your audience with text-heavy posts. Trust us, no one goes on Facebook for a nice, long read. Add some fun to your content with bright, vivid images. They will be sure to catch people’s eyes and draw them into your page.

Posting images is now even more important with regards to Facebook’s recent changes to the news feed. After realizing that 50% of news feed content was images, Facebook’s new feed now focuses on making those images stand out even more. This means that long text posts will be easily lost in the shuffle.

Start to think about new ways to tell your stories. Add images where appropriate, but do not add an image for the sake of adding an image. It should be relevant to the content and ideally add value.

6. Tweet Assault

Your tweets aren’t invited to the Facebook party. Why? Because Twitter and Facebook are two very different networks. Twitter is fast paced and high-volume which means you can tweet twenty times a day and no one will blink. Facebook is much more personal and relaxed. Fans do not expect (or want) to read your daily posts plus twenty tweets every day.

Because the networks are so different, the content you provide on each should differ as well. Your fans on Facebook expect different things from you than your followers on Twitter. So please, do NOT auto-publish your tweets onto Facebook. If your fans wanted to read each and every one of your tweets, they would follow you on Twitter.

7. “Like” Abuse

“Like this if you don’t kick puppies.” We’ve all seen these kinds of posts (and probably “Liked” them out of sheer guilt). But did these “Likes” result in any real worth for the original posters?

Likes and Shares are important. The more people that “Like” or share your posts, the more people the message is reaching. But is that message enhancing your brand? The amount of “Likes” won’t matter if the message has no value. Emotionally manipulating your fans into sharing or liking a post will not gain you meaningful exposure or engagement.

If you’re posting interesting content that’s right for your brand, the right fans will share it, which means it is more likely to reach your intended audience. Fans who genuinely like your content will promote it because they want to, not because you’re guilting them into sharing it.

8. Being Boring or Annoying

Forget your paycheck for a moment. Would you like your page?

Think of your Facebook page as an extension of your brand. The page is not there just to reiterate everything on your website but rather to provide additional, exclusive content. This means offering your fans something they won’t be able to get anywhere else. Perhaps it’s a behind-the-scenes look at your company or tips for using your product. Mix it up and keep it fun.

What this exclusive content shouldn’t be is a constant sales pitch. Using your page to only repurpose sales messages is more likely to annoy than actually work. Try to keep promotional messages to a 10% minimum. The remaining 90% should be valuable content that your audience wants—both original content and other’s content you choose to share.

Need help with Twitter, too? Check out our 7 Common Twitter Mistakes & How to Avoid Them

In this week’s Social Media Face Off we decided to put two of the world’s top fashion magazines head-to-head. ELLE and Vogue are both staples in the fashion industry— and hair salons— across the globe, but which magazine is the supreme social fashionista?

In order to compare the brands on social, we set up search streams for each brand in the uberVU platform. Deciding to judge the magazines based on the brand names themselves, we searched in all languages and included mentions for all international and US editions. We also isolated out ELLE magazine mentions from the common usage of the word “elle” which means ‘she’ and ‘her’ in French. We’ve compared the results from the past two weeks to determine our winner.

The stilettos are on. Let’s see which magazine is working the social media runway best.

Round One: Mentions

In round one, we have a clear winner. With 20,105 total mentions, ELLE more than doubles Vogue’s 9,522 mentions.

Winner: ELLE

Round Two: Sentiment

The sentiment of both brands’ mentions were pretty similar. Vogue wins in positivity with 26%, compared with ELLE’s 24%. ELLE did have slightly fewer negative mentions with 5%, edging out Vogue’s 7%.

We were pretty surprised to see how many neutral mentions both brands had— 71% for ELLE and for 67% for Vogue. We thought fashion would be a topic to elicit more opinions so we did a little digging into the mentions. We found that most mentions— particularly retweets— were simply announcing which celebrity was on the cover of the magazines. Since these types of posts don’t specifically display a sentiment they ranked as neutral.

Winner: Vogue

Round Three: Exposure

So we now know how many mentions each magazine brand had, but how far did these mentions reach? The uberVU platform calculates exposure, which is the total possible number of views, based on how many followers are in the networks of those that generated the mentions. So, which magazine’s fans have the bigger reach? Both brands posted impressive numbers, but ELLE wins this round with 26,635,190 impressions, topping Vogue’s 16,897,168 impressions.

As you can see, ELLE hit a significant spike on April 26. We examined the mentions to find out that was the day that ELLE UK announced its new May issue with Miley Cyrus on the cover. The tweet was retweeted and retweeted showing the Twittersphere is a big fan of Miley.

Winner: ELLE

Overall Winner: ELLE

With wins in overall mentions and exposure, we declare the winner of this Social Media Facebook Walk Face Off to be ELLE. While the sentiment of both magazines were pretty similar, ELLE takes the win over Vogue by generating the most social conversations. Strut your stuff, ELLE.

You love managing your brand’s social media efforts and you are proud of your work. You are passionate about what you do and that’s great. It’s one of the reasons you are a quality community manager. But there is a difference between being passionate and being…well…annoying.

When you begin managing a brand’s community you have to decide how you’re going to represent the company. We’ve recently covered the different options in our latest white paper, The 3 Social Brand Personas, And How to Manage Each of Them. You also have to decide how to manage your existing personal accounts. If you are excited about your work, you’re likely to want to share news, but you have to have limits.

Know Your Audience

Managing your personal accounts is not much different from managing professional accounts. You have to think about your audience. Is it relevant to them?

The answer will likely depend on the platform. If you typically use Facebook for personal updates, chances are your friends aren’t going to want to hear all about your company’s latest social media campaign. That new ad doesn’t quite fit in amongst your vacation pictures. However, if you regularly talk about your work on Twitter and your followers consist of other social media managers, than sharing some professional content is okay.

Make sure to consider all content on an individual basis before posting. Is it in line with things you would normally share? Will your followers care about what you are posting? Spoiler alert—the answer will not always be yes. Do NOT retweet or share everything your company posts.

Who’s Doing it Right

Two examples of social media professionals who successfully promote their brand by understanding their personal audience are Nick Gosselin (@ngoss), the community manager for The Boston Beer Company / Samuel Adams and Jessica Gioglio (@savvybostonian), the social media manager for Dunkin’ Donuts.

Gosselin is clearly a beer fan. Yes, he tweets about @SamualAdamsBeer, but also several other beer brands and just beer in general. He gives love to his company with a few RTs here and there but does not bombard his followers with corporate tweets, instead choosing to share content that fits in with the rest of his feed. Plus, he has fun with it.

Gioglio’s personal Twitter account displays her passion for the city of Boston, healthy living, fitness and social media. She does a great job bridging the content divide of her personal interests and @DunkinDonuts by choosing to share news on the brand’s social media efforts and community outreach, topics she is clearly passionate about.

Sharing vs. Selling

There is a big difference between sharing to share and sharing to promote. If you are proud of something your team or company has done and you want to share, that’s okay. Promoting a sweepstakes that’s hurting for entries is not.

If you over-promote your company, you run the risk of not appearing genuine. Are you tweeting about work because you love it or because you’re getting paid for it? Your followers might also feel taken advantage of. They’re not following you to be sold on your company.

When you do decide to share your company’s content, make sure the posts are tactful and not “spammy.” The way you address your personal followers should be very different from the way you address your company’s audience. And make sure to keep the amount of posts to a minimum. If you take the time to carefully consider what you post, your personal social following will be more likely to appreciate your content rather than feel inundated by it.

The bottom line is promoting some of your professional work with your personal accounts can succeed if you take the time to make sure that both the content and audience are appropriate. It is okay to be proud of your company and the work you that you do—just don’t be annoying about it.

This past weekend was full of brands (and people) celebrating two early May holidays: Star Wars Day (“May the 4th be with you”) and Cinco de Mayo. These festive couple of days were celebrated by individuals, sports teams, retailers, and more. Now, see which brands made the grade with this weekend’s celebrations.

Oreo (of course!)

A long time ago in a kitchen, far, far away… twitter.com/Oreo/status/33…

— Oreo Cookie (@Oreo) May 4, 2013

With a clever Star Wars reference and on-brand messaging, Oreo continued its streak of creative marketing efforts in this tweet.

The White House 

Happy Star Wars Day! flic.kr/p/75XWNy #maythefourthbewithyou (We’re still not building a Death Star: wh.gov/Ptti)

— The White House (@whitehouse) May 4, 2013

With all of its recent social media activity (including a recent foray into Tumblr), we do consider the White House a brand these days. This fun photo shows the President engaging in a lightsaber “battle” – furthering his brand as a president who’s in touch with US citizens and pop culture. A lighthearted, shareable moment for the White House.

The SETI Institute

May the 4th be with you! A flashback on Kepler-16, a Tatooine-like system found by SETI scientist L. Doyle in 2011 buff.ly/13Uyg0k

— The SETI Institute (@SETIInstitute) May 4, 2013

What better holiday for an institute for the search for extra-terrestrial life than Star Wars Day? SETI definitely gets our nerdy approval with this post!

Harrods

A subtle-but-smart Star Wars reference on the Harrods’s Facebook Page, accompanied by the caption, “the Force is strong with the Harrods Green Men. But we feel the ‘shadow’ of the dark side… May the fourth be with you.” The UK retailer had great engagement on this post, with almost 300 Shares and almost 3,000 Likes as of May 7th.

The Boston Red Sox

From all of us at the @redsox#Maythefourthbewithyoutwitter.com/RedSox/status/…

— Boston Red Sox (@RedSox) May 4, 2013

Near and dear to our hearts here at uberVU HQ in Cambridge, MA, we loved this feel-good Star Wars Day post from the Boston Red Sox.

Zico Coconut Water

If you celebrated Cinco de Mayo just a little too hard, let us suggest leaving 1 of these on your nightstand. #Oomph twitter.com/ZICO/status/33…

— ZICO (@ZICO) May 6, 2013

While this tweet is definitely more advertisement than conversation, Zico gets points for knowing their audience on May 6th. A few months back, we suggested that Poland Spring try a similar marketing campaign, but this “recovery beverage” branding has been part of Zico’s strategy for quite a bit longer. A timely post and spot-on for their branding.

Did you see any other great brand posts from Star Wars Day or Cindo de Mayo? Share your favorites in the comments!

To better prepare for the upcoming drinking day holiday of Cinco de Mayo we’ve decided to match up two of the most recognizable brands of tequila, Jose Cuervo and Patrón to see which brand is mixing the better social media cocktail.

In order to compare the brands on social, we set up search streams for each brand in the uberVU platform, including variations in spelling (e.g. “Patron” and “Patrón”) and removed any obvious unrelated terms (e.g “Saint” as in Patron Saint). We’ve compared the results from the past two weeks to determine our winner.

Get your blenders ready. Let’s find out which tequila brand is most potent on social.

Round One: Mentions

When it comes to the number of mentions, the tequilas are extremely close. With 15,551 mentions, Patrón manages to top Jose Cuervo’s 15,431mentions.

Winner: Patrón

Round Two: Sentiment

The mentions were very close, but what about the sentiment of those mentions? Jose Cuervo had 19% positive mentions and 9% negative. Patrón tops both of those numbers with 28% positive mentions and 20% negative. While Jose Cuervo did have fewer negative mentions, a large quantity of its overall mentions (72%) didn’t lean one way or the other, while a little less than half of Patrón’s did. So, not only did Patrón have more positive mentions, but the brand appears to be eliciting more opinions in general, which could be helpful information for its marketing team.

Winner: Patrón

Round Three: Engagement

Patrón has pulled ahead, but let’s see how the brands measure up when it comes to engaging with their social media audience. We compared the number of Likes, Shares and RTs to see which brand is driving more engagement across Facebook and Twitter.

Jose Cuervo finally gets a win, beating Patrón easily in Facebook Likes with 66% and RTs with 61%. Patrón does a little better with Facebook Shares, managing 45% but it’s still beaten by Jose Cuervo’s 55%.

Winner: Jose Cuervo

Interesting Insights

While researching both brands we did find some interesting insights. And while they may not have helped us determine a winner they would be helpful for the brands’ market research.

A majority of Jose Cuervo’s mentions were in Spanish, leading us to dig deeper into the metrics. We found that 59% of the brand’s mentions came from Mexico. This would be useful data for the brand to target the correct locations for marketing.

Another interesting metric we found was that when Jose Cuervo was being discussed it was usually mentioned along with other liquor brands. Why? Our research done in the bar the uberVU platform showed when people were talking about Jose Cuervo, they were referencing a “Four Wise Men” or “Four Horsemen” shot, featuring Jose Cuervo, Jack Daniels, Johnnie Walker and Jim Beam. We can only assume people will be tweeting about their resulting hangovers tomorrow.

The number one phrase on Patrón’s conversation map was “shots of patron,” seemingly proving that when it comes to shots of tequila the social web prefers Patrón straight up and Jose Cuervo mixed. An interesting finding for both brands’ marketing research, which might be put to the test on Sunday’s holiday.

Overall Winner: Patrón

Insights aside, we must declare a winner. With wins in overall mentions and sentiment, we declare the winner of this Social Media Face Off to be Patrón. Jose Cuervo fought hard in all three rounds but was ultimately the weaker of the two tequilas.

Which will you be mixing your margaritas with on Cinco de Mayo?

With only 140 characters to work with you would think the possible mistakes you could make on Twitter would also be limited. But no such luck. Luckily, here at uberVU we’ve made you an easy checklist for every “tweeting” thought so you can avoid making simple (but cringe-worthy) Twitter mistakes.

Avoid these 7 mistakes to successfully Tweet for the Win!

1. Forgetting to Check Your Spelling or Grammar

Twitter moves fast and sometimes you’ll find yourself in a rush to get a tweet up. But no matter how important the tweet, it can wait the 10 seconds it takes to double-check your spelling and grammar. Paste the tweet into Word and use spell check. Read it out loud. Do whatever you have to do to avoid making simple—but grating—errors.

Are we wright? Tweet this tip

2. Tweeting from the Wrong Account

The upside of using a social media management tool is that you can handle all your different social accounts in one place. The downside is that mixing up your accounts is now that much easier. Do not rush posting tweets in these tools. Take the time to make sure you’ve selected the right account to tweet from.

Help your cat-obsessed friends. Tweet this tip

(If you’re looking for more tips on how to handle the divide between your personal and private social accounts, check out our white paper, The 3 Social Personas and How to Manage Each of Them).

3. Sending a Direct Message as a Tweet

Now that you’ve double-checked which account you’re tweeting from, we have another precaution for you. Don’t mix up your public tweets and your direct messages. (We’ll spare you a disastrous example of what can happen but let’s just say one involves a politician with a name perfect for punch lines).

Don’t let them go public with their privates. Tweet to help

4. Forgetting to Give Credit

Imagine if you came up with this great joke you told three friends. Then one of those friends told all of their friends the joke, without mentioning it was actually you who came up with it. Not cool, right? Don’t make the same mistake on Twitter. We know what sometimes just hitting the retweet button won’t work, as you may want to add more information. But if you’re going to retype the tweet or modify it DO NOT forget to give the original tweeter credit. The same rule applies even if you’re just passing along the information and not necessarily using the person’s tweet. You learned the information from that person so make sure you say so.

 End tweet plagiarism. Share this tip

Not sure what acronym to use to credit your source? Here’s a quick break down:

MT = Modified Tweet.
The original tweet is not your own, but you are adding value (or an opinion) to it and then reposting.

HT or h/t: Heard Through
The tweet is your own, but you are recognizing where the content came from originally.

5. Posting a Broken Link

If your follower is led to a dead end after clicking on a link, chances are they aren’t going to dig for the right page. You lost them at “I’m sorry, that page does not exist.” Always check your links before posting—even ones you make in a URL shortener service.

Beware of the 404. Tweet our tip

6. Diverging from Your Brand Voice

Your brand voice—whether personal or professional—should be consistent. You should choose a voice and strategy that matches your brand. Let’s say your brand has never taken a stand politically. Then one day you’re personally fired up about something and decide to tweet about it from the professional account. Not only will the tweet stick out dramatically, you also run the risk of alienating your audience. And you won’t be able to make up a believable excuse—the “We’ve been hacked” excuse is tired, trust us.

Breathe, then tweet. Now share

7. Putting Your Foot in Your Mouth

So, you’re fired up about something again? Do yourself a favor and think over that tweet for a minute before posting. Just think of that angry / lewd / rude tweet like that drink at last call. Are you going to regret it later?

Help them avoid a tweet hangover. Tweet our advice

Got any Twitter essentials to add? Share them (where else?) on Twitter using the hashtag #tweetftw