Mini-Post (March 2021) - Making a Great Pinned Twitter Thread
Pinned posts can help make an easy impression with curious editors
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“Who the heck needs to worry about a pinned Twitter post,” you may ask. Well, it’s YOU. With Twitter being the main social media platform to promote yourself on, it’s important to make a good impression on editors looking at your page. That means you need to make it easy to find your work and what you’re about, because… well, Twitter doesn’t make that easy for you.
While you can try to fit the information you want to in your profile, it’s extremely difficult and tends to become a mess of @’s. Save the profile for your pronouns and other basic information!
Instead, the best way to promote yourself is with the pinned tweet. Pinned Tweets will be the second thing people see on your Twitter account (after your profile), and more importantly, the first thing most people will focus on. So that’s where you want to make your impression, and I’m going to show you how to do it.
One Tweet or Tweet Thread?
You might be wondering, if you’re going to make a pinned Tweet, should you make it just one tweet, or a tweet thread? If you can actually include everything you need to in one tweet, then that’s great! However, if you want to advertise personal projects or multiple links, then you’ll want to go with a thread. At the end of the day, how much you wish to promote in your Pinned Tweet is up to you, and you can adapt the advice below to your needs.
For myself, I tend to use a thread, as I want to promote not only myself but this newsletter and my website. For plenty of other freelance writers, just one tweet is enough.
Creating Your Pin
In your first pinned tweet, whether it’s your only tweet or part of a thread, you’ll want to relay a few key points of information to the reader:
Who you are
What you do
How to contact you
If you’re only using one tweet, you’ll also want to include this in the tweet itself. In a thread, these will usually be disbursed throughout:
Link to portfolio/relevant work
Links to various social media
So, now that you know the basics, how do you get all of this to fit within Twitter’s character limits? Here are some tips.
Emojis are your friend.
Instead of typing out some words and taking up character space, proper emoji usage can convey the information you need it to while not only taking up less space but making your Tweet overall more eye-catching.
Ironically, my Pinned thread at the time of this writing does not do this appropriately, so instead, please see this call to action Tweet from 100 Word Gaming for a similar effect:
In this tweet, you can see where emojis were used to save characters, and where they were used to catch the reader’s eye. While a Pinned Tweet is not a call to action, the usage of emotes is more or less the same.
If you’re making a thread, make it one project per tweet.
I use a Twitter thread for my pins because I have multiple, separate projects I want to promote and show off. If you’re doing the same, make sure to use one tweet per project! That way, it’s easier to see the divide and encourages people to click on them.
My current tweet thread looks like the below. It does need a little updating but still, you can see what I’m talking about:
For each tweet in my thread, I feature one link and some words about that link. I can’t screenshot my entire thread, but I continue that format throughout the thread.
By following some of this basic advice and adding your own personal flair, your Twitter pins can convey what you’re looking for and signal to editors that you’re not only ready for work, but you’re proud of what you do!
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