Twitter is a great platform to reach a large audience with minimal effort. These top 17 Twitter tips for business can help you get on the right track to successful Twitter marketing for business.
Top 17 Twitter Tips for Business From Experts Who Know
Twitter has long been one of the most successful social networks in the world. It changed the face of communication, politics, and news, opening up the world of ‘micro blogging’. With 340 million users (42% of whom are on the platform daily), it’s no wonder that businesses see that Twitter is the perfect place to market. And there are quite a few strategies that can help support Twitter marketing.
It can be overwhelming to dive in and determine how to best utilize Twitter in an effective and impactful way for your business, but these Twitter tips for business should help you hone in on your Twitter marketing strategy.
Behind the Scenes Twitter Tips
There are a few things you can do behind the scenes to optimize your Twitter strategy.
1. Use The Right Tools
Having the right apps and tools can reduce your time spent on Twitter dramatically. You can use Twitter tools to schedule tweets to be published in the future, find people to interact with, monitor your hashtag, brand mentions, and other relevant topics, and even determine the best times to tweet. Use the below tools wisely to become more efficient (but not to completely automate your Twitter efforts):
- Buffer: Buffer is a smart scheduling tool. Drop your tweets into the dashboard and it automatically schedules them throughout the week at pre-determined times, reducing your scheduling time. In addition to your original content, they curate content for a variety of topics and offer relevant articles for you to share if you wish. You can also use it to schedule posts on Facebook, LinkedIn, Google+ and Pinterest and gain useful analytics.
- Bit.ly: Shortening your links is vital for a professional looking tweet. Bit.ly does that and much more: use it to track analytics, such as how many people clicked on your link, and create custom shortened links. You can also plug your Bit.ly API key into other tools, such as Tweetdeck, to gain insight into how many people are engaging with the links you share through that application.
- Tweetdeck: Tweetdeck is a Twitter management tool you can use to monitor multiple Twitter accounts and activity on the network. You can create multiple columns on the dashboard, such as one for @mentions, direct messages, home feeds, trending topics, and specific hashtags or keywords. This allows you to monitor for anyone who is directly interacting your brand, as well as anyone talking about you without @ mentioning your Twitter handle. You can also monitor relevant subjects or hashtags to find new users to engage.
- Tweriod: Use Tweriod to find the best time to tweet. It analyzes your tweets and your followers’ tweets to determine what times will give you the most exposure for your content. By finding out what time each day your followers are most likely to see your tweets, you can choose when to be active on the network for the most efficient use of your time.
2. Create a Content Calendar
Being consistent is important on social media. If you don’t post for two weeks, users will think no one is checking your accounts and won’t see the value in following or tweeting you. The easiest way to stay consistent with your presence is to create a content calendar. Outline how often you want to post in a day and create a calendar that you can fill in a week or up to a month ahead of time.
You can schedule out daily tweets about your products, industry news, and other relevant topics. When you have time, you can supplement with real time tweets and interactions with users, but this gives you a minimum presence in case you’re too busy to tweet one day.
Twitter themselves put together a lot of great guides and resources which are a huge help when developing what types of content to create for when.
3. Polish Your Twitter Profile
Think of your Twitter profile as a potential customer’s first impression of your business. Using only a username, an image, and a short bio, what do you want to communicate to them? Use your bio to tell them the (brief) story of your business. Don’t forget to include your location and a link to your website.
Make sure your image and username are in line with your brand and consistent with your other social media profiles. You can use a service like knowem.com to check if your username is available across different social media networks. It’s ideal to have the same username, or at least something very similar, on all of your profiles.
Engage With Your Audience On Twitter
Twitter is best when you are having a dialogue. Use it to engage with your audience.
4. Be Social on Twitter
Twitter is called a social network for a reason, right? Don’t forget to interact with other users. Try to respond to as many tweets that @ mention your brand as possible. A retweet or simple thank you can go a long way. Users love it when their favorite brands interact with them on social media.
You can use tools such as Tweetdeck or Hootsuite to monitor Twitter for users who are talking about your brand name without @ mentioning you, as well as those using certain hashtags or other keywords related to your brand. Use this information to find users to follow and interact with them.
5. Connect With Other Users
Find relevant users to follow. These can include your customers, any vendors or partners you work with, trade or professional organizations for your industry, anyone in your professional network, influencers who talk about your industry, and even your competitors.
To get started, you can use Twitter’s function to find your friends. Then you can use the advanced search function to find others. Get comfortable on the platform – don’t be afraid to click around and explore. Then start tweeting with your followers.
6. Tweet at Peak Times
Since Twitter operates in real-time, showing tweets in the order they are published, the shelf life of a post is much shorter than networks such as Facebook. If someone follows thousands of users, they can easily miss your tweet if they don’t check the app for a couple of hours. Sprout published this great guide on the best times to post on social media. This will vary based on your followers, industry, time zone, etc., but is a general guide you can use to determine when to tweet.
7. Retweet Sparingly
You want your Twitter feed to represent you, not the words of others. While it’s perfectly acceptable to retweet interesting sayings or updates, do this as little as possible. Keep your updates about you, using your words. However, if there’s something that truly resonates or promotes your business, go ahead and retweet away! Just remember to stay business minded about everything you do, especially with retweeting.
8. Use Hashtags Strategically
One way for users to discover you is through hashtags. You can use popular hashtags that are related to your brand or industry in your tweets. When you choose hashtags, try to pick ones that are specific to the content in the tweet. Skip long, clever, and/or wordy hashtags – people won’t be searching for those, and they take up a chunk of your limited character count. Also, don’t load up your tweet with 20 hashtags, as that will make it appear spammy. Stick to 2-3 relevant hashtags.
Find Your Audience on Twitter
To make Twitter work for your business, you need to be strategic about finding your audience.
9. Follow the Right People
Just like the old saying, you are who you surround yourself with, the people you follow on Twitter will help define you. Following people is easy, so easy that it might be tempting to just follow anyone and everyone. But, if you want to use Twitter to market, you need to think how the people you follow will make you look. Make wise decisions.
10. Update Your Followers
The word ‘update’ here can be used two ways. First, you should use your Twitter account to keep your followers in the know about what you’re doing and how you’re changing things. The second ‘update’ you need to do is unfollow, block, and add to your followers consistently. You shouldn’t allow spammers into your Twitter feed and, if you’ve found you and a follower have split on something fundamental, clean house. Be on the look out for new and “up and coming” accounts that are relevant to you and your marketing strategy.
11. Promote Your Business (but still be social)
Once you’re off and running with your Twitter presence, it’s time to find a balance between promoting your brand, sharing interesting information, and interacting with others. We recommend sharing useful information (such as industry news or trends) interspersed with information about your products and services (focusing on how they benefit your customers). The more you can be a resource for your followers, the more they will consider you valuable, so be sure to share interesting tweets and answer their questions in a timely manner.
Get Tweeting
12. Use the Right Words
There is a right and wrong way to structure your tweets. Research accounts you admire or hope to emulate and notice the wording they use. Keep up-to-date on Twitter slang and abbreviations, so you can make the most of your space. And practice writing in direct, concise sentences, so you can get all the info you need into your 140 characters.
13. Be Consistent and Be Present
Create a publishing schedule for your social media and stick with it. Since tweets are shown to users in chronological order, they have a short lifetime, meaning you can post to Twitter more often than other networks. Tweet often and check-in at least once a day to respond to any mentions of your brand.
14. Tweet useful, engaging content
Before you tweet, ask yourself: is this informative, entertaining, or useful? Is it relevant to my audience? Would someone be inspired to share or respond to it? If the answer is no, think twice before publishing. The more useful your content, the more likely someone will retweet it to their followers.
15. Interact With Your Followers
Don’t forget that this is a social network. It’s about starting conversations and developing relationships, not just publishing tweets about your products. Connect with anyone who is tweeting about you and respond to their tweets, even if it’s just to say thanks. You can also seek out users who are tweeting about topics related to your business and start interacting with them.
Lead The Conversation on Twitter
Position yourself as a thought leader on Twitter.
16. Participate in Twitter Chats
Similar to live tweeting at special events or conferences, using an official event hashtag to participate in a Twitter chat can give you exposure and the opportunity to build relationships. Find Twitter chats that are relevant to your industry or brand and actively participate in them by responding to the questions and interacting with other who are participating.
17. Host a Twitter Party
Twitter parties are a great way to connect with a large group of Twitter users at one time. It’s a virtual party that lives on Twitter via a unique hashtag. All tweets using the hashtag will appear on the same page, allowing people to follow along and join in the conversation. By partnering with key Twitter influencers during a Twitter party, you can reach many users in your target audience.
Let’s Help Your Next Social Media Marketing Campaign Succeed on Twitter!
Now that you’ve got these Twitter tips for business, you know that strong presence, great content, and knowledge of your audience are the start to a great Twitter campaign. Contact us to help make your Twitter content go viral with the right influencers.
