Twitter has been used largely by businesses for promoting their products and especially in US more than 2/3rd of companies prefer Twitter as their marketing tool. With more than 317 million monthly active users and 500 million tweets getting published every day, Twitter has several benefits over other social media websites like Facebook or Google Plus. It is comparatively easy to gain followers in your Twitter account and it allows you to engage with users before they become your friend. Here we present some useful tips and suggestions on how to setup your Twitter profile and to formulate an effective Twitter marketing strategy.
1. Post Valuable and Related Content:
Twitter is an excellent tool for content marketing and you can use it to post valuable content which is suitable for your target audience. You can use tools like bit.ly to shorten the URL of websites of blog posts which you like to share on Twitter. You should post content which will engage conversations among your target audience and help you drive more traffic to your business website. You can also use tools like Hootsuite and DrumUp.io to find new and interesting content to post on your Twitter feed. Another popular tool to discover relevant content by monitoring reputed domains for specific topics is BuzzSumo. You should add relevant images and videos in your Tweets to make them more attractive. A good example for a business which does content marketing using twitter is anyoption where you can find lot of relevant posts for investors and binary options traders.
2. Create a Stunning Twitter Profile:
First impression is considered to be the best impression and hence you should always make sure your Twitter profile is attractive and create a good impression among your target audience. You should ensure you have an engaging bio and nice profile picture which can be a custom art or your business logo. Also you should use a custom background design which will reflect your brand among your followers. Even your username and the links you share on your profile page are important and should represent your business in a positive manner. When it comes to social media marketing and branding, every small element of your social media profile is important as it decides your online reputation.
3. Finding and Following your Target Audience:
The next step is to find suitable target audience for your business. You should choose the demographics of your prospective customers and you can use various online tools to find targeted followers. Some of the popular tools are Listorious, Tweepi.com, CrowdFire, TwitterCounter Search, Twellow.com etc. You can also use tools like TwitterAdder to automate the following process. This tool will find new users based on your tailored search and automatically follow them. It will also unfollow users who don’t follow you back within certain time frame.
One example of a business which successfully increased the subscriber base for their Newsletters by prudently choosing their target audience is Greenhouse. Their twitter campaign was targeted towards corporate recruiters in US and Canada.
4. Plan ahead for various events:
Twitter is a great tool for branding, sharing valuable information and driving engagement to promote your business. You should design and schedule your tweets in advance for holidays and special events. Studies have shown that posting customized tweets during festive seasons and holidays can increase engagement among your target audience. For instance, you can tweet about seasonal deals or discounts during Christmas or Thanksgiving weekend. You can also make use of analytics tools like Tweriod for deciding the right time to tweet based on the online activity of your target audience. Another popular tool to schedule your tweets is Ritetag which enhances your tweets for better keywords.
5. Use Twitter Chats to Engage with your Prospective Customers:
Twitter chats is a very influential feature which helps you to engage with prospects and existing customers, build your online reputation and promote your brand among your twitter followers. You can make use of free tools like TweetChat, Twubs, Twitterfall, tchat.io and Tweetdeck etc. to discover trending hashtags and start relevant conversations in your twitter account. The people who participate regularly in your twitter chats will help in distributing your content and amplify your reach by retweeting your posts. You can also tweet out questions and organize competitions to make the conversations more interactive. You should reply to queries of your followers using twitter chats and @mention them such that they will be notified. This will help you earn the trust of your followers and increase your brand reputation.
For example, Honda increased their social media buzz by 1222% by announcing a Honda Tweet competition in which a lucky winner was selected from thousands of followers. Users were asked to retweet posts from Honda’s twitter profile and one user was chosen based on lucky draw.
6. Analyse your performance and revise your strategy:
You should keep track of your followers and constantly monitor how well your twitter account is performing. You can make use of tools like Socialbro or Twitter Analytics to figure out the performance of your Twitter account. You should keep track of various performance indicators such as,
- Demographics of your followers including language, age-groups, gender, location etc.
- Tweets published and direct traffic to your business website from twitter profile.
- Engagement statistics which includes @mentions, likes and retweets.
- New followers gained on daily/monthly basis.
- Following Vs. Followers comparison
- Recent Unfollowers data.
You should have deeper insights about your Twitter community growth and segment your most influential followers into various groups with help of Twitter lists. This will help you post relevant content for your influential followers. You should constantly review your account performance and update your marketing tactics based on it.
You can make use of social media marketing tools like HootSuite, SocialTalk, Objective marketer, Wildfire etc. to improve the effectiveness of your marketing campaigns. You should understand that Twitter is just a tool and your marketing success depends on the tactics you follow and continuous improvement based on analysis of the past performance. By having clear marketing goals and devising a powerful marketing strategy, you can certainly build your brand reputation and grow your business using Twitter.
