Roadblock

Twitter has gained a lot of momentum recently, and has replaced Facebook as the leading organic social media marketing platform.

Organic reach is a marketer's best friend. You want to know that when you send a Tweet or post an article on LinkedIn that your followers will at least have an opportunity to see the content. For Facebook, that was asking too much.

LinkedIn is also beginning to pull back on organic reach now that it is generating revenue from its new Ads Manager product.

Facebook shot themselves in the foot by luring people into their ice cream truck and then making them pay for even the tiniest little sample.

Wounded (but not fatally), Facebook conceals its limp with numbers generated by a miraculous Instagram boot, the likes of which the world has never seen.

But even miracles have a time limit. And with recent organic reach estimates of a Facebook post at about 3%, marketers have given up on Facebook when it comes to organic reach. Paid ads are a whole other story.

Even worse, the Instagram booties are getting worn.

This is a long way of saying that the difference between Twitter and Facebook is fast becoming a critical distinction and one that has become much more important. Savvy brands are now turning to Twitter to reach consumers the "old fashioned way": without paying for it.

Twitter's emphasis on organic reach offers all sorts of marketing possibilities. Some of our favourites include the "roadblock," the "tap dance" and the "love trap."

Let's look at one popular Twitter marketing strategy.

The Roadblock: a proven Twitter strategy

The roadblock is one of the most popular and effective Twitter marketing strategies because, as the name implies, it allows you to block off a substantial period of time which can then be used to goose the algorithm.

This is another way of saying that as more people engage and react to the string of connected tweets (the roadblock), the thread is more likely to achieve desired network effects.

Disney recently used roadblocking to great effect when it announced the launch of its new streaming service Disney +.

We often use roadblocking for conferences, earnings releases or when we have slides or press releases that can be re-purposed for a roadblock.

If you want to create a Twittter roadblock for your own brand, here's how to do it: 

First, create up to 250 tweets.

This means creating the Twitter card graphic (1600x800), the link (if any) and the text. Don't forget hashtags!

Be sure not to use too many in a roadblock because it will look spammy. Twitter isn't like Instagram; so use two hashtags max.

Once you have all the tweets you want to include in the roadblock, you'll want to make sure that they are in the correct order so that the story you want to tell is told in a linear fashion. 

Then, decide the interval at which you want to send the tweets. Research shows that Tweets last about 15 minutes, but tweeting once every fifteen minutes is probably not a great idea because it may turn your followers off.

Try Tweeting every couple of hours, replying to your previous tweet.

So the first tweet would happen at noon, the second at 2 pm and so on. 

When you reply to your own previous tweet, Twitter will recognize that you are creating a "thread" so it will be treated by Twitter as connected content.

All this means is that if people discover just one of the tweets, they can move their way up or down the thread.

This is actually a very cool experience and one feature that makes Twitter so addictive: people often start Twitter to find some piece of news and then end up reading subject matter written by experts.

This is made possible because Twitter users can explore all branches of the thread, which is another way of saying they can peruse the replies and comments to any tweet in the roadblock. 

You can master the art of roadblocking by creating separate content for the branches that are created when people reply.

To see the example we've highlighted here, check out the launch that Disney executed for its new streaming service Disney +

Have fun!

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