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If you’re getting it right, Twitter is the perfect platform to create successful social media campaigns to increase sales, boost brand recognition and increase customer service. Note the importance of ‘getting it right’, as it can be very easy to feel swallowed up by the millions of tweets flying around, meaning results can often appear a little underwhelming at first. However, Twitter is undoubtedly an important tool to increase your business’s online reach, and with the right marketing plan, the benefits will soon be seen.
Still not sure your business fits into this fast-paced network? Well, the average Twitter user follows five businesses, and 80% of all Twitter users have mentioned a brand in a Tweet. So essentially, if your business is yet to make an appearance on Twitter, you risk getting left behind!
After all, what is there to lose? It’s a free marketing tool waiting to promote your services and even if it feels like you aren’t reaching a large audience at first, your profile will mean that potential customers can find you if they want to.
Now we’ve established that your business has a valuable place on Twitter, here are our five top tips on how to make the most out of your account and achieve real results from using Twitter for business.
First things first, you need to create a plan. And just like any other social media strategy, it’s important to tailor this around the content you want to create and the goals you would like to achieve. Identifying your audience is a key first step; this helps to keep your posts targeted and focused. Another great way of pulling together a strategy plan is to research your competition. Analysing their social media can help you refine your own by spotting weaknesses in their strategy and identifying alternative ways that you can make yourself stand out.
So, you now have an idea of what you want to say, but it’s important that your posts have value. A great way to check this is to ask yourself if your tweets advance an idea, entertain, or educate your audience. The content you publish should attract new followers, encourage new leads and spark conversations – and if they aren’t doing any of the following, it’s time to go back to the drawing board!
It can sometimes be hard to squeeze what you want to say into the 280 character limit. Learning how to condense what you want to say is a skill, and one which is highly important to develop and refine in order to avoid losing the meaning behind a tweet.
And it’s not just the text that needs to be considered – tweets with images get 150% more retweets than those without, so make sure you’re using high-quality photos and graphics that grab attention and bring the post to life. Videos are also a great tool to spice things up on your feed. They’re also pretty handy to help get around the character limit, as they allow you to expand on a point or tell an extended story.
There are a few tips and tricks to help your posts reach a larger audience, the most popular being hashtags. These are great when used correctly – they grow your reach, encourage engagement and help you get discovered. However, use too many hashtags and your content can appear confusing or even declared as spam. Instead, look at the hashtags others in your industry are using and try to join the conversation without overdoing it.
The time you post is also helpful. In B2B, the popular times to post may differ as you tend to target an audience within work hours. Experiment with the timing of your posts and look at what is most successful; that way you get an idea of your specific audience and their active periods. Similarly, the frequency of your posts is also vital. It’s important you remain active and consistent, posting at least once a day.
While planning ahead and scheduling your posts to hit the feed at a certain time is beneficial, this won’t work with all of your tweets. Twitter’s primary purpose is to connect people; therefore, you need to be responding to mentions and joining conversations which happen in real-time. Other effective ways of engagement could be to offer giveaways, run competitions, or even launch a virtual event – think outside the box and find ways to generate a community within your page.
Once you have a marketing strategy underway, it’s time to start regularly analysing your results. Think back to the goals you set at the beginning, review your Twitter analytics and find out what’s working and what’s not, and then set more goals. The data can be rather overwhelming and difficult to interpret at first, but valuing your marketing efforts is vital in order to gain insight and refine your strategy moving forward. Luckily for you, we wrote a blog all about the art of analytics – you can thank us later!
Here I am extolling the virtues of statistics and analytical data to anybody who’ll listen. That is due to the fact there is a wealth of knowledge and information in those massive piles of numbers, graphs and charts.
The world of PR is changing. Reports of traditional printed media titles closing or moving solely online abound, while the world of influencers, blogs and social media outlets explodes exponentially...