While Twitter is a powerful social media platform, it’s easy for your business to get lost in the “noise.”
But it’s worth cutting through and getting your message heard. It’s important to stand out.
The average Twitter user follows at least five businesses, and about 80 percent of all Twitter users have mentioned a brand in a tweet.
Dig deeper into the challenges and opportunities of Twitter for your business.
The following are eight expert tips to help you market your business more effectively on Twitter.
Audit your Twitter account
To know where you want to go, you have to understand where you currently are. Auditing your Twitter account is not only important to do, it’s something you should do regularly.
As you’re examining your account, ask these questions:
- What types of content are we posting?
- What’s successful?
- What isn’t working?
- Is our posting consistent?
- Who is our audience?
- When are our followers active?
- Are we seeing a return of investment (ROI)?
- What can we do to improve our Twitter presence?
Many of these answers can be found in your Twitter Analytics. Check out our snapshot to help you navigate Twitter Analytics.
Pay particular attention to your audience and who they are. This is critical to determining the content that will work best for your brand on Twitter.
Research your competition
As you’re getting a sense of what’s happening on your Twitter account, it’s worthwhile to evaluate what you’re competition is doing as well.
This will help inform your own Twitter strategy.
As you’re researching, ask these questions:
- What are they doing that you should be doing? Or can do better?
- What isn’t working for them?
- How do they handle customer service?
- How often are they posting?
- Are their followers engaging with them? How?
Dive deeper into what comprises a competitive analysis and how to start your own.
Set S.M.A.R.T. goals
Unsurprisingly, to know whether you’re successful in any marketing effort relies on the goals you set in the beginning.
Goals help us focus on what we want to achieve while also helping know when we need to pivot our strategy (because we’ll know if it’s working or not).
S.M.A.R.T. goals specifically are:
- Specific
- Measurable
- Attainable
- Relevant
- Time-bound
While you’re setting these goals, remember to break them down into measurable indicators so that you can easily grasp where you’re at in your efforts.
Maybe you want to drive more referral traffic from Twitter to your website. Understand where you’re at now, identify where you want to be (within reason) and set a deadline to get there. Once you’ve added some actions that will help you get there, you’re well on your way to outlining a Twitter strategy for your business.
Dive deeper (and beyond Twitter) with our seven tips for setting achievable marketing goals for your business.
Create a set of guidelines
A lot can go wrong on social media. Creating a social media style guide will help keep your communications clear, consistent and representative of your brand at all times.
These guidelines, which span beyond just Twitter, also help you onboard new team members more easily.
Be sure to include:
- Elements of your overall brand, such as tone
- Details about your audience
- Branded hashtags, including how and when to use them
- How and when to use emojis (and which emojis)
- How to format links
The key is to be ready for anything. And should the true unpredictable happen, include a standard operating procedure in order to decide the best course of action.
Make a content calendar
As you’re getting a sense of what works for your audience, you’ll want to plan out specific posts.
This will help you not only be more strategic and consistent overall with your posts, but you’ll also stay ahead of holidays and fun “social media holidays,” such as #NationalPuppyDay (for example).
As you’re creating your content calendar, think about:
- The best times to post
- How often you should post
- Any approval needed for your posts
- Balancing promotional posts with non-promotional posts
Check out our eight tips for creating a content calendar for your brand.
Follow best practices
As easy as this sounds, best practices can shift as platforms and audiences evolve. For Twitter, it’s important to stay on top of any shifting practices and trends.
However, in general, strive to:
- Maintain a customized profile that stands out
- Add value with your content (solving your audience’s pain points and challenges)
- Mix up your content types, with images, videos, infographics and GIFs
- Add relevant hashtags where appropriate
- Engage with your audience by tagging them, responding to comments and so on
- Monitor your brand with social listening tactics
- Use a social media management tool to schedule your posts, such as Tweetdeck or Hootsuite
Consider paid advertisements
When it comes to paid advertisements on Twitter, you have two types:
- Promoted tweets, where you pay for a tweet (which acts like any other tweet) to appear to a user who is not already following your account
- Twitter ads, where you have a goal beyond the promotion of a single tweet.
Types of Twitter ads include (but are not limited to):
- Follower growth ads
- Website clicks or conversions
- App-related promotion
- Lead generation
Measure your results
This goes back to your S.M.A.R.T. goals. As your strategic efforts get underway on Twitter, you want to regularly check in on your post performance.
How are you performing against your goals? In general, try to resist the draw of “vanity metrics,” such as pure follower number and likes. Keep a closer eye on click-throughs, comments and retweets.
Continue evaluating your goals, your performance and your ROI. Nothing should be “set it and forget it.” Social media is a fast changing industry, and you’ll want to stay ahead of the curve.
Now that you can make your Twitter presence more effective, consider leveling up your digital marketing process. Schedule your free demo of DailyStory today.
