Are you ready to ramp up your business’s Twitter presence? Here are our favourite tips to turn your account into a marketing machine.
1. Keep it relevant
This is fairly obvious, but it bears saying: Whatever you do, and including with all the advice given here, make sure your content and focus is always relevant to your target audience. Attracting the wrong followers is not going to help your marketing efforts.
2. Often is good
Tweets effectively disappear very quickly, given that Twitter prioritises the most recent content at the top of the page. This means you should tweet regularly. Forbes contributor Neil Patel suggests you can get away with 1-5 tweets a day, while Quick Sprout recommends 5-20 tweets a day, and Constant Contact recommends a minimum of 5 tweets a day with no maximum amount. (It is basically impossible to tweet too much, so your aim should be to find the minimum amount which helps you to achieve your objectives.)
If you are hosting an event, live tweeting is a great way to promote it to a wider audience. Plus this kind of content tends to be well received on Twitter. In this instance, don’t limit the number of Tweets you send.
Top tip: To help you achieve your tweet target, you can re-use the same content more than once – just remember to tweak them by updating the copy and image, and to space them out.
3. Engage with the people you want as followers
The Social M’s recommend you follow those Twitter users who you would like to follow you back. Re-tweet, comment on and like their posts, and join relevant discussions. This will help you gain reciprocal follows, while Twitter etiquette makes it perfectly acceptable to un-follow those who don’t do this.
Top tip: Identify influencers in your business niche and prioritise engaging with them on Twitter.
In a nutshell, the ingredients of a good tweet are: use your own content and include 1-2 hashtags, an image and a clear call to action.
4. The ingredients of a good tweet
In a nutshell, the ingredients of a good tweet are: use your own content and include 1-2 hashtags, an image and a clear call to action. It also helps to tag people in your post using the ‘@’ sign directly in front of their name, so that they see it in their feed (and will hopefully retweet it to their followers).
If you are hosting an event, its recommended practice to create your own hashtag for it – one which incorporates the event name or tagline, is unique and is easily identifiable. If your event is annual, you could add the year at the end so it can be ‘recycled’ each year and become increasingly familiar with your followers and attendees.
You should start using your hashtag before your event while you are promoting it, as well as during and afterwards too.
5. Use the tools are your disposal
There are a number of fantastic online tools that can make managing your Twitter profile far easier. Many have a basic free account option, which might be sufficient for your needs, as well as more sophisticated paid for options. Some of our favourite ones include:
- Twitter Analytics to help you gain insight into which tweets are popular and which aren’t (and from which you should be able to extrapolate as to why this is the case)
- Buffer, Hootsuite, Social Oomph and Tweetdeck allow you to schedule tweets in advance – and many have some useful analytics and additional features.
- Hashtagify and Keyhole for insights into which hashtags are performing well and you can benefit from using.
- Canva to design strong visual images for your tweets using existing templates which can be easily edited.
And of course, Twitter Business has a loads of great, always-up-to-date resources.
Tweet us at @theplannerguru and let us know if these ideas have been helpful, or to share your own recommendations!
