If you’re a marketer looking to venture into social media marketing — like Twitter, it’ll help you a lot if you know the popular social media platforms and their use. The right use of these platforms allows you to maximize your brand reach on social media, help engage with the right audience, and support your digital marketing goals.
Social Media Marketing (SMM) isn’t only about using every social platform but to see which one is the right fit for your niche. Which of them fits your brand image? Is your target audience using a specific social media platform or not? How many of these platforms can be run for your business at one time?
What’s important is to understand and decide wisely which of the existing social media platforms can improve your brand awareness and gauge more traffic.
Twitter is amongst the most popular and influential social networking tools and a search engine where people can easily access the latest information. Today, almost every brand is making use of this platform to not just engage better with their target audience, but rather also to increase brand awareness, boost conversions, and much more.
Over 330 million people are using Twitter every month, and 500+ million tweets are published daily. But it requires something out of the box to stand out and go viral. Before we get started, let’s iron out why to consider Twitter for marketing and how to formulate effective marketing strategies through it?
Twitter stands out as the third-best social platform for generating leads by a slight margin. When you tweet, the followers get to see it immediately. This is something that even Facebook is not able to achieve; effective reach of posts.
Businesses have found that 17% of their overall website traffic comes from Twitter. The marketers are driving hard to create strategies that drive Twitter traffic, ready to convert visitors into customers. Many tools like SproutSocial and HubSpot have robust Twitter features to plan a content strategy that drives goals and success reports.
Often also used as a customer service channel, around 80% of social customer service requests happen on Twitter, making it worthy of a business owner’s attention. Using Twitter effectively is a powerful way to expand your business as its focus is on public conversation and exposure.
However, you can’t launch a profile on Twitter and expect customers to come to you themselves. Smart strategies are required to bring value to the business through Twitter, particularly in revenue.
But what is it that you need to do to make Twitter work for your business? Let’s find out!
READ: Twitter removes more than 182,000 accounts for spreading wrong information
1 – Create a Brand-Centric Twitter Profile
A Twitter profile mainly consists of a bio, avatar, and cover. The visual elements like profile and cover picture are the first thing people see when they land on your profile. They should represent your business in the best way.
“What happens in Vegas stays in Vegas; what happens on Twitter stays on Google forever!” – Jure Klepac
Search engines index your profile making it an obvious first point of contact for potential followers and customers.
The bio should include the business’s name, Twitter username, your business’s physical location, and a link to your business website. Another addition to your Twitter bio can be the link of your blog and other social accounts if you want to redirect your audience there as well.
One thing that needs emphasis here is that your bio should be clear, concise, and descriptive within 160 characters.
The logo you’re using for your business account can function as the avatar. The avatar adds personality to your Twitter account and its tweets. So, it should be prominent and well-designed.
You can use Canva to design a professional logo, cover for your Twitter account, and get creative with your business visibility on the platform.
Other things that you can add to your bio (but be sure to choose wisely) are the company’s tagline, targeted keywords, a call to action like ‘Signup for free’, a link other than the website, or Hashtags. All of them can help filter out the profile or rank it according to user interests.
2 – Be Creative With Your Tweets
It’s imperative to keep up your account’s creative element as this would help to get followers, engagements, and potential customers. Each Tweet allows only 280 characters to create great content. So the content must be value-adding, brand-focused, and easy to read.
Write concise content
Writing concise content is more complicated than writing a lengthy one. So a single Tweet must integrate your brand without making it spammy and overdone.
Trending hashtags
You can consider adding hashtags that are trending (but not too many), tag someone – relevant to the content, and use multimedia like images, videos, or GIFs.
The key to using hashtags is ONLY using the ones that are popular and have maximum reach. To check the hashtag popularity score, you can use Hashtagify.
Visual content
The popularity of GIFs and short videos continues to rise, and people are always attracted to content with visual engagements.
GIF X, Giphy Cam, or GIF Maker can create GIFs that quickly grasp the attention and make your tweets trendy.
3 – Host Twitter Chats
A Twitter chat is a public Twitter conversation around one unique hashtag. The hashtag allows the followers to follow the discussion and participate in it. Twitter chats are recurring and attract the attention of people on particular topics. They also help to connect people with similar interests.
Allow followers to ask questions
A chat should allow customers or followers to ask questions about your brand or its products and services. It may also discuss something that’s trending. Think about Reddit’s AMA (Ask Me Anything). It follows the same format.
There are thousands of Twitter chats organized by social groups, industries, and niches. The chat allows gaining the right audience’s attention and shows them what you’re up to.
Benefits of using Twitter chats
Hosting a Twitter chat allows you to meet valuable new connections and develop relationships.
Twitter chats can be a bit tricky, but tools like TweetChat or Twubs can make chats easier to manage.
A successful Twitter chat can get trendy and gives you more leads. For this, you can also ask influencers from your industry to participate in hosting the chat making it more engaging.
4 – Find Micro-Influencers
“People share, read, and generally engage more with any type of content when it’s surfaced through friends and people they know and trust.” – Malorie Lucich
Influencers have the power to rapidly increase your brand awareness as they have an established and engaged audience. A great way to use influencers for your business is to send them relevant content that includes an eye-catching video or GIF to promote it.
But the main question is, where can you find influencers of your interest?
The answer to this is simple. If you know any influencers that use your products or services, start from there. In case you want to double-check about influencers related to your industry, Klear, Influence.co, or Commun.it can help find you the exact match you need with a higher degree of authority.
Once you find the influencers you need, ask them to share your content and even pin it for a day. Pinned content on their accounts can help generate a lot of traffic and conversions as well.
You can quantify your overall brand reach and impression using specific keywords and hashtags from the campaign and then track the overall performance. Use TweetDeck for real-time tracking, organizing, and engagement.
5 – Tweet Frequently
Twitter encourages frequently tweeting, unlike other social media platforms. The reason for this is because of their half-life; the maximum engagement that a tweet can get is within 24 minutes of it being posted. After this, the engagement mostly drops.
But, if this is the case, wouldn’t it be better to post timely as well? This is where scheduling your tweets can come in handy. Schedule them, and any campaigns for the peak times, so that you don’t miss out on any ounce of engagement. It would help in reaching out to your audience better and also improve the business’s performance.
Tweeting 5 to 30 times daily, helps to enhance your business performance on Twitter.
Twitter is a fast-moving social media site and requires frequent tweets to get seen and drive more leads. It’s a great opportunity to enhance leads.
With infrequency, your audience will forget that you exist and your brands fade away into the dark recesses of your people’s minds.
Contrarily, tweeting too often is also a complete nuisance, and people will dread seeing your tweets bursting their feeds.
If your tweet frequency starts to drop your engagement, it’s alarming. It means that you’re annoying your followers.
Tweet Binder and Union Metrics are the best social intelligence tools that generate a lot of data for marketers and help them find trendy ideas for tweets.
6 – Engage Beyond Brand Messages
Brands usually think that Twitter is just for content distribution. Instead, it’s more than that.
“The brands that only focus on spreading awareness about their product and services can have a chance to lose their fan following.”
It’s important to have engagement, which is more than just broadcasting messages all day. If you want to build your audience and keep them forever, you have to engage in more than one way.
Asking questions, polling, or hopping in on public conversations can help a lot.
The engagements don’t have to be serious all the time. They can be fun too.
Charmin, a toilet paper company, is one of the best inspirations for other brands who know how to entertain people through humor aligned with its products.
Use them to know about your audience’s interests and pain points for optimizing your content accordingly.
After a specific time, you can have the results and notify everyone who participated, leading to even more conversation.
READ: Twitter confirms hackers accessed DMs of 36 accounts in Bitcoin scam
7 – Engage with Replies, Retweets, and Tags
“Build it, and they will come” only works in the movies. Social media is a “build it, nurture it, engage them, and they may come and stay.” – Seth Godin
1 in 4 people get annoyed when you don’t respond to them. The behavior is likely to tick off a lot of fans. Over 25% of people follow you to have a two-way dialogue with your brand.
Ensure that you’re all set for success in social care. Anything that may interest or incentivize the audience may bring the traffic to your account, but it won’t keep them there if you’re not adequately responding to the audience’s queries.
Respond to maximum trending tweets with prominent figures, values, perspective, insights, or a link – if it makes sense.
The insightful responses are more likely to get likes and reply-backs, pushing them to the thread’s top and boosting your visibility.
Engage with followers by retweeting their content. The retweets can help strengthen your relationship with people.
“The art of Twitter is in the retweet. You must be interesting” – Peter Shankman
One of the biggest pet peeves on social media is when brands ignore their people. It’s impossible to respond to all tweets if you receive hundreds and thousands of responses every day.
But you must prioritize the ones in which you’ve been mentioned. The quicker you respond, the better it is for your brand to get visible.
A good example can be that if you did a tweet and the audience is interacting by mentioning you in that thread and are looking for a response. What should you do now? It would be next to impossible to reply to every person who mentioned you, amongst the hundreds of comments.
One useful tool for keeping an eye on social media mentions is Hootsuite. This tool helps in monitoring social media mentions in real-time, which means you can respond faster.
The best responses come within a time frame of 4 hours. Since the successful brands have higher customer engagements, it might take 10 hours on average.
8 – Twitter At Best Times
The best time frames to tweet are between 8 – 10 AM and 6 – 9 PM, depending on the day. People usually check Twitter before getting ready for work and when they get free from work. It is because of this that the suggested time frames are best to tweet.
However, Hubspot notes that if your goals include retweets and click-throughs, the best time to tweet is between 5 – 6 PM.
Following the time frame can help focus on quality tweets strategically scattered throughout the day and avoids the sheer volume.
Use your stats that determine the best time to tweet when the maximum number of your followers are online. Twitter analytics can be useful over here, or you can use HubSpot or SproutSocial to calculate the best time to tweet.
The best time to tweet may vary from brand to brand as per their needs. Most of the studies have found that users engage on Twitter during the mid-afternoon coffee breaks i.e. 3 PM.
Similarly, the best days to tweet about important information varies from brand to brand. For B2B and B2C businesses including shoe and clothing brands, cosmetics, furniture manufacturers, etc, it is good to tweet until Thursday.
By Friday, several people are out of their zone, and Saturday Sundays are even worse in terms of Twitter interactions.
Entertainment based businesses like Netflix and HBOMax can tweet on weekends to market their shows.
For businesses like grocery marts, Friday engagements are at the peak at 3 PM.
