A Complete Guide to Squeezing Every Drop of Creativity Out of Twitter

At its simplest, Twitter gives you a box to fill in. A window to send a message out to the world. What you put in this box is entirely up to you. But if you find the right combination of words, it might be seen by millions and millions of people. It’s a magic box of possibility.

But you only have so much space. That used to be 140 characters (now 280). That limitation might seem like a restriction, but it’s incredibly liberating.

Constraints are rocket fuel for creativity. Ask someone to write a description of a town, and they might struggle to know where to even begin, but ask them to describe a single brick on a single building, and they’ll find loads to say.

Good social marketers understand their magic boxes very well. And they find exciting ways to use them. Like hiding secret messages in a photo, using polls to run ‘Twitter world cups’, or creating ‘choose your own adventures’ with quote tweets. By understanding all the formats to their fullest, we can discover ways to use them beyond their original intention.

So, I’m going to try and list all the ‘formats’ available on Twitter. Not just post types, but other ways you can stretch the platforms to their limit.

Note: This is probably already out-of-date. As I write, Twitter already seems to be killing off threads. RIP threads.

What you can edit on your Twitter profile

Username

Yes, you can be creative with your username! Probably best to stick to something you’ll be happy with for a while since it’s hardest to change and will break anywhere you’ve linked to it.

Display name

This can be a lot more flexible! Brands don’t change their display names much, but they should! Not just to get involved with Twitter trends like spooky Halloween or festive usernames, but for all sorts of reasons. Got a new product to promote? Why not shove it in there too?

Why Pret has not currently changed its display name to Away in a Pret a Manger is beyond me.

Display picture

Ok, this is usually just going to be your brand logo. It’s a space to be creative too! Right now I’ve changed the Monzo pic to a subtly metallic one to support the launch of Monzo Premium, for example. Don’t worry; it’s brand approved!

So it’s a fun spot to use for creative campaign support. Or just a one-off joke.

Cover photo

This is a weird space but under-utilised. It’s not a visible part of the way most people will view your tweets (their feed). But this makes it ideal for a surprise gag, like saying ‘check our cover photo for a surprise.’

Most brands tend to use it for whatever campaign they’re currently running, and that’s perfectly fine. It’s an ideal space to support other stuff, but tricky to make sing on its own.

Bio

The best bit. The temptation here is to use the space as intended: to describe yourself. And yes, that’s good and safe advice. But it’s also incredibly BORING.

Thanks, Nandos for telling me your opening hours in your Twitter bio. But what a missed opportunity to show off your tone of voice or make me laugh. I much prefer seeing this space used for humour. Take BBC Four, for example:

That’s a quote from Bros singer Matt Goss in the infamous Bros documentary. They could have gone with “The home of BBC UK arts and music television, available on Freeview Channel 9 / Sky 116 / Virgin 107”. But that’s boring. If people are learning the basic facts about your brand in this space, that’s way too late. Give your audience some credit!

Until recently, we had Tweets you can bank on as the Monzo Twitter bio (get it?). I won’t ruin the surprise of what we have currently.

Location

There’s probably a creative angle here, but I’m not sure about it!

Website

Probably best used for directing people to whatever the most useful landing page is for you. Or rickrolling.

Date of birth

Yeah, don’t mess with this or you might get kicked off Twitter for being underage.

Following/Followers

Just a functional report of how many people you follow or have following you, right? WRONG. KFC made social marketing history when they only followed 11 people on Twitter, with names like Herb and Spice — to reflect their secret recipe. I can’t get over how clever that was.

Types of Twitter post

Text only

These are your bread and butter — just some words, with an upper limit of 280 characters. And don’t underestimate how powerful this can be. It’s tempting to want to put a flashy asset in every post. But that’s a crutch you don’t need.

It’s the bulk of what Innocent do.

I could write a whole post about how to think about writing ‘copy tweets’ like this (and I will!). But give it a go. Tweeting is free, and you can always delete a joke that falls flat.

Just be wary of keeping it accessible, yeah? There’s a trend of copy tweets using fancy fonts or ASCII (using punctuation to make little images). But these are a nightmare for folks using screen readers, and you don’t need them! Be creative with your words.

Image posts

Fine, you can add an image to your tweet if you must. My go-to for specs is socialsizes.io which recommends wide pictures in your Twitter feed — 1040 x 584. And I agree! Twitter crops square images down to these, so bear that in mind!

I don’t need to explain how you can use images to be creative. Just remember to use alt text to keep it accessible.

GIFs

Twitter has a built-in .gif keyboard that you can use to attach .gifs to your tweets. This is… fine. Using gifs that someone else made to convey emotion is a bit lazy, and I wouldn’t want to use it for proactive tweets. (How many times have you seen brands tweeting about their feelings about it being Monday or Friday with the same old gifs? Yawn!)

We use ’em at Monzo in replies because it’s a quick way to have a bit of fun at scale. This might be the best way to use the gifs, I reckon.

Video posts

It’s weird how the more inherently creative a format is, the less I have to say about it — right? Yeah, you can add videos to your tweets. Keep ’em wide again — 1044 x 588 is recommended. Why’s that different to images? No idea!

Direct messages

Worth thinking about but not really a marketing channel! Best used if you want to send a message to someone directly, as the name suggests.

Polls

Polls are great. You can choose lots of options about how many choices to offer, and how long to leave it running. You can either do it straight (Tea/Coffee?) or subverted (Who are the bestest boys? Option 1: Dogs, Option 2: Dogs).

Very popular on British Twitter for league-style posts to find the most popular thing in a category, usually crisps or biscuits. British Twitter is achingly twee at all times.

Conversation settings

You can choose who can reply to your tweets, and even this is a creative choice. Your options are:

1. Everyone — the default, everyone is free to reply
2. People you follow — useful for a closer conversation with just your fans (or other brand accounts)
3. Only people you mention — useful in a few ways, maybe just for speaking to one person, or yourself when you don’t want to invite any replies.

Of course, the funniest case is asking an open question and then turning off public replies so nobody can disagree. As always, KFC got there first:

Other organic features

Lists

Underused but situational. Lists let you curate a list of other Twitter users, such as “Social Media Experts”. There was a trend of brands creating a list of their staff as a cute way of recognising people that worked there. But this is an absolute pain to scale and maintain. Plus it’s an open invitation for folks who want to harass members of your team. So I’d recommend against that these days.

Moments

I don’t understand why Twitter hates moments. Over the years they’ve removed them more and more from the UI, without ever removing them entirely. Moments let you curate multiple tweets into a collection to tell a story, which is something they do themselves daily for trending topics.

I loved using this to collect user reactions to news, and things like that. But Twitter has ruined the experience of creating these — you can’t even add a tweet directly to a moment from the tweet itself. So more trouble than they’re worth right now.

Fleets

You know Snapchat or Instagram stories? It’s that. I haven’t seen anyone who’s cracked a super creative use for these (that could only be done on Twitter). And Twitter’s fleets are made worse by the fact that they’re less feature-rich than what they’ve ripped off. No stickers, filters, or music to play with… yet.

Twitter ads

Promoted tweets

Simple — pay money to show a tweet to lots of people. But it doesn’t have to be one of your own. KFC (sorry I know!) made history by promoting other people’s complaints about their fries, as part of a campaign for relaunching their fries. I’d recommend promoting user tweets over your own anyway (because user-generated content is the best, remember?).

You can promote text, images, videos, gifs, polls, or an entire account. Within this, there are all kinds of other things Twitter can sell you like ‘first view’ within the timeline. I don’t do much of any of this.

Carousel cards

A paid-only format, you can create ads with multiple cards that link out to a website.

Okay, I guess but looks incredibly ad-like. And do people swipe on carousels as much as we think?

Conversation cards

A promoted card that prompts the user to tweet something out.

Clicking on the link pre-generates a tweet for the user. Does anyone use these? I get it’s cool because it has the same hook as a poll AND gets your hashtag in an organic tweet. But… meh.

Tweet to unlock

Never used this! Locking something behind a tweet feels a little off to me.

Branded emoji

This is the real killer paid stuff. Branded emoji lets you automatically append an emoji of your choice to any use of a hashtag. Like if we made #Monzo automatically change to #Monzo💳

It’s pretty neat and feels like a ‘magical experience’ the first few times you see it. It’s nice and creative too, so I don’t hate it. But I do hate this: “Purchase subject to a minimum investment”. So no, your little local coffee shop won’t be using this format, not unless they’re spending Apple money on their marketing.

Brand reminders

This is the ‘Like to remind’ stuff. I quite like this, it’s a non-annoying way to build hype about something and then cash in that excitement with some direct marketing later. It’s just expensive again and nowhere seems to be openly transparent about what this costs. To find out I had to get halfway to signing off with an agency who could do it. Hey Twitter, just say that this will cost a couple of grand per pop!

There’s a vibe I get from some of these paid formats that they’re selling a ready-made creative idea rather than letting you be creative yourself. Like to remind, for instance, is something you could do manually if you kept track of everyone who liked a tweet. It’d just be annoying to do.

You can also promote all kinds of things like Moments and Trends if you are desperate and rich enough.

Ok! I think that’s everything. Like I said, expect this to be incomplete and out of date. I’m not going to try and maintain it, sorry!

The main takeaway is that the creativity was inside you all along!