The Twitter platform is not left out in the social media marketing race and users often ask about how to market on Twitter. As you may know, one of the worlds’ leading and powerful social networking tools and search engines today is Twitter. Virtually all sorts of the latest information about any topic can be found on it.
Many brands and businesses are able to market on Twitter by engaging users, audiences, and followers. This is often done to increase brand awareness, create buzz as well as boost conversions. Thankfully, Twitter makes it easy to share content regarding marketing.
- Also, if you consider the statistics behind the platform, you will surely know it’s a viable marketing tool to have.
- The platform has nearly over 400 million average monthly users
- Over 7,000 new tweets are sent every single second.
- The shelf life of one tweet is four times shorter than anything you post on Facebook.
- The average lifespan of one tweet is only about 18 minutes.
The stats above appear impressive but without a well-laid marketing strategy, your efforts can become futile. In this article, I will be taking you on a journey to help you understand how to effectively market on Twitter.
Twitter Marketing Strategy
No doubt, Twitter is great for marketing and if you intend to grow your business, you should consider using it. A caveat though is that the platform remains a fast-paced one. This makes it easy for your content to get lost among the multitudes of tweets.
This is where your skill and knowledge of Twitter marketing strategy comes in. in order to make a meaningful impact and see an appreciable ROI on your marketing; you must first learn how to market successfully on the platform.
Your Twitter marketing plan should revolve around the creation, publishing as well as distribution of your content. Keep in mind that your contents have to resonate well with the buyer personas and audience on the platform. Certainly, setting a clear goal will be the basis of your strategy. These goals can include; improve brand recognition, attracting new followers, generating leads, boosting conversions, or increasing sales.
Implementing a marketing plan on Twitter is mostly similar to other social media platforms only with a little bit of tweaking. You still have to create unique and useful content and research your target market on the platform. Also, you will want to schedule your posts for consistency as well as analyze results after a certain time.
That said and done, let’s focus on some Twitter-specific strategies you should implement along with your marketing phase on the platform:
Brand Your Profile
This has to be the very starting point of your marketing journey on Twitter. If and when potential customers arrive at your page, you won’t get their attention instantly. The quickest way to do that is to make sure that they can tell that this page or profile belongs to you.
This includes actively branding your page to adequately represent your business. Include important details such as your logo, colors, and any other recognizable information you wish. Thankfully, the Twitter platform provides a handful of locations to implement the customization process:
Twitter Handle
Your Twitter handle is your username and should include the business name. It is important to keep this as short as possible as a long handle could impact search by users. Your Twitter handle makes for easy identification so the audience and potential customers can find you via search on the platform. Danielshustle recommends keeping your handle or username the same across all social media platforms.
Twitter Header
A header is the background image serving on your Twitter profile. Since you are interested in marketing your business, use images related to the business. This could be the business logo or a branded image. Headers add extra appeal to your profile by helping to clearly illustrate what your brand stands for.
Twitter Profile picture
The profile picture on Twitter represents the face of the account. It helps tie an identity to a certain profile. And since we are learning about how to market on Twitter, you should always have one. We recommend having your business logo in this section of your profile. This is because; it will be displayed alongside every post and interaction you make on the platform.
Twitter Bio
This serves as a summary of what your business is all about. A Twitter bio presents your audience with a detailed yet concise description of what it is you do exactly in less than 160 characters. Many include mission statements, values, or even a powerful CTA attached to some witty or humorous statement. There is no one answer fits all for this and what you include in your bio will rely greatly on what you do.
Implement Twitter Lists
Twitter List is an organized group of Twitter accounts users have selected and placed in categories. The list can be created by any user and businesses should employ this on their journey on how to market on Twitter.
Twitter lists are advantageous to businesses especially those that wish to follow only specific accounts. For one, businesses can use this to seek inspiration, monitor completion, view others’ content and interactions as well as learn from others in their niche. Segmenting your lists into groups will further ease your use of Twitter lists as such as only seeing tweets posted by the accounts on the list.
Advertise on Twitter
No marketing strategy is completed without advertisement. This is because organic reach will only take your business as far as possible and if you want major impacts, you need to spend some cash. Now that nearly all social media platforms are becoming pay-to-play mediums, advertising on Twitter is an awesome way to connect with your target audience.
Running adverts on Twitter will help improve discoverability and ultimately your reach. This will also have a positive effect on your business as well as your marketing goals. Advertising on Twitter can be done in two ways:
Promoted Tweets
Promoted tweets make your tweets appear in the Twitter streams or Twitter search results of specific users. This is a great option for anyone looking to get more people on a specific webpage. Your business will pay a monthly fee as long as you’re promoting a tweet.
Twitter will put your promoted tweets in a daily campaign targeting the type of audience you want to reach as previously indicated in your settings. All Twitter users have the ability to interact and engage with Twitter Ads the same way they would with your organic content.
Twitter Ads
Twitter Ads is a great option if you’re using different types of tweets to achieve one goal for your business. It’s ideal if you’re looking to grow your base of followers and brand awareness significantly through the platform.
Businesses can decide between different objectives when planning Twitter ads such as app installs, video views, and website conversions. They can also include audience targeting in their campaigns. This decision will ultimately determine the price a business will need to pay to run such an ad.
Host a Twitter Chat
Twitter chat creates engagement with followers and interested audiences alike. Businesses can schedule and host a Twitter chat to interact with their audience, discuss topics and seek opinions as well as input. This essentially helps the business to create a growing community of loyal customers.
These customers are helpful as mentioned above and can further help spread the word about your business. This means they can provide a business with free word of mouth marketing which can be an added advantage on Twitter. It also creates a more personal experience between your audience members and your business.
Hosting a Twitter chat is easy to set up. Simply select a topic, time, date and create a hash-tag for the chat. A business or brand can now distribute this information publicly via tweets, website, Twitter bio, or other platforms.
Once the chat commences, the audience can join and participate to view responses, questions, and comments regarding the topic. They can also share their own comments by adding the relevant hash-tag to their tweets. Further retweets even help spread the word and increase reach.
Get Verified
When it comes to how to market on Twitter, owning your presence is essential. Businesses and brands can simply apply to get their Twitter profile verified depending on the size as well as industry. Twitter states explicitly that they typically only accept requests for account verification if you’re in “music, acting, fashion, government, politics, religion, journalism, media, sports, business, and other key interest areas”.
If a business’s verification application is successful, a badge with a blue checkmark within it will appear beside your handle. This denotes your account as an authentic one. Verification on Twitter has its own benefits in that audiences can distinguish between your account and similar ones. Essentially, verification on Twitter adds legality and trust to your business. Thereby preventing frauds as the audience can know if they dealing with the real business or a parody or scam account.
Hacks to Improving Marketing on Twitter
We’ve shared a detailed guide on how to market on Twitter with you. But our guide won’t be complete without some hacks to help you get the most out of your marketing strategy. Here are a few tips we think will be useful for you on your marketing journey:
Tweet During Peak Hours
If you want to successfully learn how to market on Twitter, you need to understand the platform. Like every other social media platform, there are peak periods on Twitter. Certain days and times of day show more active users on Twitter.
Targeting these periods means your contents have more chances of the audience interacting with it. By identifying those hours and days and posting during them, you’ll gain more impressions, boost engagement, as well as massive clicks.
According to Buffer, tweets posted on Friday, Saturday, and Sunday have higher CTRs than those posted during other days of the week. For peak hours, many suggest that posting between 12 PM and 6 PM is the best time to post.
Please keep in mind that your peak posting period will depend greatly on your target audience. This will require you to test how your content performs at different times and days to find out what works best for your brand. Or simply check when your competitions upload their tweets.
Leverage Twitter Advanced Search Feature
The Twitter platform provides its advanced search feature to help businesses ad brands have a feel of their reach, perception, and awareness. This feature can help businesses to find potential customers by searching through industry-specific terms.
Advanced searches simply place new leads directly in business’s path. It is now up to the business to take advantage of these free leads to concisely market themselves.
Use Images and Videos
When possible, try to include quality videos and photos in your tweets. It’s been proven that tweets with images outperform tweets strictly made of text. Photos and images provide an eye-catching and engaging element in your content as Twitter users scroll through their feeds. Videos are proven to actually outperform tweets with images as well. In fact, tweets with videos are likely to get an average of six times the amount of engagement than tweets without them.
Videos and images are a great way to show your audience your product line or how to use an item you sell as well as make your content feel more personal. Plus, images and videos in tweets are proven to help you increase your engagement.
Utilize Analytics
At set intervals, you want to ensure that your strategy is still producing positive results. This is where your Twitter analytics information comes to bear. To help you focus more on achieving your goal, analyze the following metric carefully:
- Engagement: analyze the number of retweets, follows, replies, favorites, and click-through your tweets are getting. Try as much as possible to spread your review to include all hashtags and links.
- Impressions: view the number of times your tweets appeared on one of your audience members’ timelines (whether or not they’re actually following you).
- Hashtags: review which hashtags are being used regularly and most frequently by your audience and followers.
- Top tweets: Review your tweets with the most engagement.
- Contributors: Keep up with the level of success each of your contributors makes. Contributors are individuals with admin access to your account. This should help you know who to keep and who to discard.
Conclusion
Learning how to market on Twitter might be just the edge you need to boost your sales, reach, awareness and conversion. The Twitter platform offers various opportunities to help businesses and brands grow. The platform is easy to use and has a large share of active users to market to.
If you haven’t implemented Twitter into your marketing strategy, now is the time to do so. Follow the above steps to have a smooth and effective marketing experience on the platform.
