Twitter is one of the top popular platforms for consumers and brands alike. Although it doesn’t grow in terms of active users as fast as other social sites, it’s still a highly used platform.
Learning how to use Twitter effectively can help boost a brand’s reputation and drive fans to make purchases.
Twitter itself is easy to use. However, not everyone puts in the effort to get the most out of the popular social site.
Truth be told, optimizing a Twitter feed does have the potential to consume a lot of time. On the other hand, it’s often worth the investment because of the impact it has on a business.
A lot of this time can be cut down by using social marketing tools. At any rate, using Twitter for the business is a great way to maximize awareness of the brand.
Here are seven expert tips to use Twitter for business. This is a culmination from experts around the world, including myself. As nearly one-third of adults using the Internet in the United States use Twitter, you should consider creating an engagement strategy.
1. Make Use of the Profile
There are three very distinct sections of the Twitter profile. The avatar image, background cover and bio description. All three of these need to be developed wisely.
As first impressions are quite important when it comes to engaging anyone, you want your profile to shine.
It also makes you look more professional.
Profile Avatar
Choose an image that best represents your business. This is the graphic that will be tied to your posts and any interactions you have. A lot of companies will simply use a logo for the brand.
As images play a prominent role in helping people remember, this is an excellent method for connecting the business to content. The optimum size for Twitter avatars is 400 by 400 pixels.
Background Cover Image
The background image, or header image, helps set the tempo for the Twitter profile. It is the large banner image that appears and is often the first thing visitors will see when looking at your Twitter account.
Keep this picture relevant to your business. You don’t want to confuse the message of the graphic with what your company is trying to convey. It is best kept at 1500 by 500 pixels.
Bio Data
You have 160 characters to describe your business. The more details you can provide, the better. Develop a brief summary of the business complete with keywords to improve searching results on the platform.
Add a link back to your site for easy access. A lot of people will include hashtags within the bio for additional coverage as well. However, keep in mind doing this will link your bio to those particular conversations permanently.
2. Minimize Being Salesy
The average value of a Facebook user is approximately four times greater than that of a Twitter user. This means Facebook is far more effective at garnering sales than Twitter. However, Twitter is more apparent when it comes to brand recognition and awareness.
To put it plainly, Twitter is best for conversations rather than sales.
It’s OK to boast a bit of sales on Twitter. Some companies experience a bit of success by driving traffic to products or services. The point to remember about Twitter is that it focuses more on relational content rather than generating direct income.
What does this mean for your business? It means you want to use Twitter as more of a method to create contacts and leads rather than directly selling products or services.
It’s a quick way to share news, information and comments very quickly among more than 300 million active users.
Think of Twitter as more of a method to engage brand awareness. It’s kind of like the PR platform of social media. Sharing the right content on Twitter has potential to be far more effective than many other social channels.
Its ease of use and quick response rate make it invaluable when simply sharing content. This is vastly apparent whether you own a small business or you’re a politician.
This doesn’t mean that you shouldn’t promote your business holdings, though. It may not be a bad idea to run promotions such as sharing a coupon code periodically to encourage interaction.
Just don’t go too far by advertising non-stop. If your content looks too much like a commercial, it may be easily ignored.
3. Be Informative and Share
Twitter is a great place to share information about your company or the goods you provide. You’ll see a lot of businesses add in facts and information regarding products that are less salesy and more informative.
For instance, you could link to a history of hard drive development if you own an online store for computer parts.
It’s all about keeping the posts relevant.
Don’t be afraid of sharing other websites of interest with your followers. Your tweets don’t have to be completely centered around your business alone. This makes your business profile look more professional as well as respected. In fact, sharing in this manner may lead to backlinks from site owners.
This could greatly benefit search engine optimization, that is, as long as you connect with those developers.
Always make sure you are posting correct stats and information. The last thing you want is the populace pointing out incorrect data, which could damage your overall reputation. Cite your sources and provide solid facts when posting content on Twitter.
It’s safe to assume that anything you post on the Internet will be there forever. Embarrassing comments people try to delete often find their way into a screen capture.
Never post anything you’ll wind up regretting or that may compromise the integrity of your brand. It could take months to repair any damage a “bad tweet” can cause.
Keep your tweets professional and accurate as it will help avoid problems such as these.
4. Don’t Go Nuts with Hashtags
Hashtags are a vital part of posting content on Twitter. These keywords of sorts connect your post to various conversations. For instance, using “#health” will include your post within that particular topic.
Using hashtags can easily get your content in front of more people. However, too many of them can actually be detrimental. According to statistics, Tweets with a maximum of two hashtags are 21% more likely to have engagement. On the other hand, three or more hashtags causes this engagement to drop to 17%.
In other words, you’ll lose more of your audience by using three hashtags and above.
If at possible, include your hashtags within the content. It will increase the number of characters you’ll have available. Take the following “tweet” for example:
Eating an entire bag of cookies is not exactly setting a #healthy goal for optimal #fitness. Fruits and veggies all the way!
Do you see what I did there? I added both the “#health” and “#fitness” groups into a single tweet while including those words within the message. This is far easier than trying to fit a string of hashtags at the end.
Plus, it simply looks more professional and clean.
It’s best if you find a couple of effective hashtags rather than trying to fit the post to encompass them all. Tools like Hashtagify are great when it comes to finding the best topics to join for any keyword in real-time.
There is a bit of strategy that goes into creating the perfect tweet to get the most views possible, and tools like this are invaluable to that cause.
5. Include Visual Content
On average, tweets with images will receive 150% more retweets than without. This statistic actually follows suit with most social media platforms. Anything visual far surpasses text on Twitter, Facebook and other platforms.
Throw in video content, and you have the beginning of a viral hit.
Like the saying goes, “A picture is worth 1000 words.” When it comes to social engagement, it couldn’t be more true. Visual content is shared and liked far more often than any other type of content on Twitter.
This is the driving force behind why so many people include as many images as possible.
What kind of graphics can you do for the business? That really depends on what kind of company you have. For example, many restaurants will simply use food images to tempt the taste buds of followers.
If you own a landscaping company, perhaps images of recent projects can show your skills. It really depends on what kind of products and services you offer.
Being imaginative can also be a boon to creating images for Twitter. Maybe you could create a comedic meme that is relevant to the company. You’re only truly limited by the imagination.
People are more likely to engage with visual elements than simple text. Luckily, adding graphics to tweets is relatively simple when you’re using tools like Pablo. This web-based application will resize your graphics to fit perfectly on Twitter while giving the options to add text and logos to the image.
Essentially, you can increase the number of words used by adding them to a graphic.
6. Engage the Audience, Don’t Ignore
As many as 85% of small and medium-sized businesses state how Twitter is important for customer service. However, very little of this would be possible if the business didn’t engage the target audience.
Too many businesses simply post tweets and then move on to the next. But what about those followers who comment or try to communicate? In reality, it’s important that you try to keep the conversation going. This is important as it creates a bond between your business and the commentor.
People follow brands to show loyalty and to feel like they’re in the loop when it comes to information.
A lot of them feel more connected to a business, which strengthens how they feel about the products or services offered by that organization. This often fuels how those individuals wind up spending money with said business.
The secret to succeeding on social media really isn’t a secret at all. It’s about being “social,” hence the term. One of the best Twitter tips for business I can think of is to always engage with others. Even those who are not followers may be swayed to join.
Ask yourself, “How approachable is my business?” If someone leaves a comment, is it addressed? While it may be difficult to keep up when you have thousands sending messages all at once, addressing a handful is better than nothing at all.
It demonstrates continuity and makes others feel as though their contributions are important.
Engaging helps build trust. This is vital as consumers need to trust the company they are purchasing from. Otherwise, there will be no concurrent sales or leads. Building a strong platform for customer relations starts with how well your business treats those that help pay your bills.
7. Always Monitor Your Progress
Analytics is more than just tools that gauge how well your website is performing. Tools like Twitter Analytics can be informative when it comes to gauging your social performance. It will break down impressions, visits, tweets and mentions.
By taking a look at your engagement rate for specific tweets, you can see what works for your posts. These engagements can be clicks, retweets or liked by others. It’s a look at how people are perceiving your business.
Analytics is a great tool for Twitter marketing. When you’re following reaches a significant level, you’ll receive all kinds of data regarding what they like. This can help you come up with all sorts of engaging content to grow your reputation while encouraging others to follow as well.
Keeping an eye on the statistics of your Twitter profile helps you develop strategies for future posts. You can determine what hashtags work the best with your followers as well as the type of content they find most interesting.
After all, there’s no sense in keeping a campaign going if it’s not producing desired results.
Using Twitter for business marketing is optimized through the use of analytical tools. It’s much like how you monitor the development of a website because much of the same strategies can be used.
For instance, content development and audience retention are important aspects even if that content is limited to 280 characters. You still need to focus on quality…and that’s where analytics comes into play.
Connect With Your Audience
Engaging on social media has potential to boost traffic regardless of the web hosting platform used. From eCommerce to blogs, connecting with users and communicating makes the business more approachable for consumers. Twitter marketing has great potential as long as it has a good strategy fueling it.