How To Use Twitter For Your Business Marketing

Twitter is a social networking platform that has become a major avenue for online marketing, owing to its 330 million monthly active users. Since Twitter has a 280 character limit on its tweets, marketing on this platform is different from other social media sites.

Here’s a 10-step guide on how to use Twitter to market your business.

Step 1: Build Your Profile Right

Your business’ Twitter profile and content needs to be interesting and engaging if you want to earn a follow from other Twitter users. Use your profile’s header and cover image to show them the kind of business you are. Have accurate information about your business’ address, phone number, etc. filled out, and have a link to your website on your bio. The cherry on top would be to get a verified blue tick on your Twitter profile for your business, which will make your business look more credible and established.

Step 2: Follow The Right People

Twitter’s extensive user base might mean that it would be tempting to follow hundreds of profiles in an attempt to create more following for your own business. While this might increase the number of people who follow your business profile, it probably won’t help user engagement.

A better way would be to follow a targeted set of profiles, such as industry leaders in your field, people who regularly engage themselves in your line of work, and even competitors. You can do this by targeting relevant hashtags and going forward from there.

Step 3: Start Your Day With A Tweet

Since tweets are limited to 280 characters, you have a very finite space with which to engage your followers. In order to do so, you have to keep tweeting interesting and relevant content regularly. While there’s no limit to the number of tweets you can post, an ideal place to start would be to post one tweet every day.

Furthermore, tweeting at the start of the day can make it more effective, by providing people with enough time to engage with your content, and possibly discuss or share it among their friends.

Step 4: Create A Content Strategy

People need to have a convincing reason to follow your Twitter profile. Your tweets need to be consistent in the kind of content they provide for a user to decide whether they will be looking forward to your tweets in the future. In order to effectively engage your followers, you need to have a set plan for your Twitter content. If you want to be the kind of business that consistently posts comics and memes, then go ahead and be that. Being funny is a great way to shoot to fame on Twitter. Another good way to go about this would be to create a daily schedule with different types of content. For example, on Mondays you could tweet about a product or a service that your business offers, Tuesdays could be set aside for promotional content, Wednesdays for industry-related news, and so on. Make people realize the value in following your Twitter feed, and give them the content they want.

Step 5: Make Use Of Twitter Chats

Twitter chats are basically conversations relating to certain hashtags, held at a scheduled time. You can either join a chat or host your own, and it’s a great way to engage with active users in your domain.

Twitter chats help your business by reaching out to a more targeted set of people who are more than likely to engage with your business in some way. By hosting a chat, you also get to establish your authority in the industry and develop a stronger following.

Step 6: Use Rich Data & Hashtags

When tweeting about something, make sure you try and include rich data such as images, GIFs, and videos as much as possible. Visual data is a great way to draw more attention and engagement towards the tweet, than just words.

You can also make sure you target the right audience by carefully choosing your hashtags. Follow relevant trending hashtags and use them in your tweets to gain further reach.

Step 7: Connect With Influencers

One of the best ways to widen your network and gain more authority is to connect with influencers in your field. Regular interactions with influencers can open your business up to a new group of potential followers and business leads. You can even check the influence of your followers using tools like Twellow and Klout and reach out to the ones with most authority.

Step 8: Engage In Promotional Campaigns

Another effective method to increase user engagement is to put up exclusive promotional campaigns on Twitter. You can also make use of the ‘Flock to Unlock’ marketing method, where you provide incentives or discounts to the first users to retweet your post a certain number of times.

Step 9: Track Your Content’s Performance

An important part of scaling up your Twitter marketing efforts is to know what has worked for you, and what has not. Hence reviewing your content’s performance becomes an important task. You can use Twitter’s analytics dashboard, or other social media management tools like Google Analytics or Sprout Social. Using these tools, it becomes easy to track metrics such as user engagement for a tweet, hours during which your followers are most active, and so on.

You can then use this data to provide the type of content that gains most traction, and schedule posts at a time when it will have the most reach.

Step 10: Keep It Light And Conversational

Just because tweets are short, doesn’t mean they have to be flat statements. Adopting a conversational tone can help users engage with your tweet, and prompt them to respond. Additionally, tweets that have a conversational flow can often lead to actual conversations that can generate leads for your business. For example, you can try tweeting “So what do you guys think about this? (insert article hyperlink)”, instead of just sharing the article by itself.