If you want to grow your business on social media, you’ll love this Twitter marketing guide.
Despite the many new advantages that digital marketing provides marketers, one constraint still endures. The question of where best to allocate our resources to maximize returns.
Since the early 2000’s different social media platforms have sprung up. Each with different core demographics based on the nature of the platform. Each offering provides access to a very large market given you can make a positive impression. Digital marketers have to understand where their audiences are and the best ways to use social networks to reach them.
In this guide, we will highlight how Twitter is beneficial for your brand in maximizing your digital marketing efforts.
What’s in this Guide?
- Setting up a Twitter Account
- Customizing your Twitter Profile
- Twitter Marketing Strategy
- Advertising for Twitter
- Conclusion
Twitter currently has 199 million monetizable daily users on the platform, and over 500 million tweets are shared every day.
It is also used by 82% of b2b content marketers for organic content marketing, making it the joint-second most used social network by content marketers.
And while the percentage of content marketers using paid ads is still quite small (at 27%) compared to Facebook (67%), 2020 saw an increase of 35% in total ad engagement. This is a promising sign for those looking towards the future of marketing on the platform.
Digital marketers who are Twitter users are afforded a cost-free marketing tool that gives them the ability to share content with their customers in real-time. Brands can provide their customers with quick service and support, and this helps establish trust between the brand and the customer.
If done right, it also serves as a signal to other customers that a particular brand might just be worth patronizing, thus extending their reach. At the end of all the customer goodwill lies increased revenue. Beyond this, they also get to observe their competitor’s activities and thus stay up to date with the trends of the industry.
If any of the aforementioned benefits sound appealing to you, then you might want to learn about how to achieve them for yourself. In this article, we will detail how to set up your account and create a perfect profile. Then we’ll discuss how to develop a marketing strategy for your brand, and how to use Twitter Ads.
Chapter 1: Setting up a Twitter account
Signing up on Twitter is easy, we aren’t going to dwell on it. Go to www.twitter.com and click on the “Sign Up” button. Follow the steps laid out for you, and you’ll be in a couple of minutes. Then we can get to the more serious business of customizing your profile.
Chapter 2: Customizing your Twitter profile
There are six important aspects to cover when customizing your Twitter profile. We’ll look at different aspects and best approach for each.
1. Handle:
This is your Twitter username. You have to pick one when you create an account. Your username should be your company/brand name. Doing so makes it easy for customers and any other interested parties to search and find you. If you already picked a username that isn’t your brand name while setting up, you don’t have to worry. Simply go to Settings and Privacy, then click on Account, and adjust your username.
2. Profile Picture:
This image is going to show up beside every tweet you send, so choose a logo or any other image that you use to represent your brand (The CEO’s face for example). Whatever you decide, recognize that this may be the image that sticks in the minds of your followers when they think of your brand. You must be deliberate.
3. Header:
Here you have a little more leeway. This is the background image of your profile and you can use it to provide insight into your company or the services you provide. You may also change it more frequently than a profile picture, so you can advertise campaigns on it as well.
4. Profile Bio:
This is where you describe yourself and what you’re about in 160 characters or less. You can be witty, or simply use your brand’s motto. Whatever you put here should signal your brand’s personality. And remember, brevity is key.
5. Website URL:
This may lead to your company website, but you could also use it to lead to landing pages for any campaigns you may have running. It’s important to make sure that you know where the link is leading your profile visitors, so check it regularly.
6. Location:
Displaying your location can make your company feel more tangible than simply something hidden behind a screen. This is extremely important if you’re a small business with a physical address.
Once you’ve set up your profile, then it’s time to kickstart the marketing process. This is when you have to develop your Twitter Marketing Strategy.
Twitter Marketing Strategy
All digital marketing efforts begin with strategy. You have to make sure that your investments, work towards your main goal. Therefore, when developing your strategy, consider the following:
- Creating SMART goals
- Developing content for Twitter.
- Analyzing optimum time of post.
- Measuring the performance of your Twitter campaigns.
Creating SMART Goals:
These cannot be vague, they must be S.M.A.R.T. You should decide if you aim to drive traffic towards your website, or improve customer relationships through fast customer service, or increase brand awareness. This knowledge will be useful in informing how you proceed. Read this guide to create smart goals that align with your social media objectives.
Developing Content for Twitter:
You can get inspiration for your content from many different sources. but make sure it’s relevant to your audience.
Some ways include repurposing blogpost snippets and observing competitors timeline.
You can also use the trending topics on Twitter, and if you’re creative, you may be able to find ways to link your brand with whatever is popular at the moment, which could give you a very wide reach.
However, it’s important not to force it, if the connection isn’t organic, people will sense it and maybe put it off.
You can also use the advanced search functions on Twitter to see what people are saying about specific keywords that concern you. Finally, you can post Twitter polls asking your followers what they are interested in.
Having sourced your content ideas, you have options of how to present them. Feel free to use images and videos, as they both do very well in terms of engagement.
Tweets with images getting 89% more engagements than those without, and tweets with videos being six times more likely to be retweeted than tweets with pictures. You also have the option of creating Twitter threads, which are a chain of tweets talking about a particular topic.
It’s important that you experiment with the different options you have, notice where you get the highest engagement, and continue to improve on that.
Once you’ve sorted out the “what” and the “how” of your content, you should think about continuous engagement. You could host a Twitter Space to talk about a given topic, and position yourself as a thought leader in the field, and you could also host Twitter chats.
Hashtags(#) are a useful tool for both Twitter chats and regular engagement. Using a Hashtag allows all the tweets around a given topic to be easily identified, and tweets with hashtags receive two times more engagement than those without them.
You must be using relevant hashtags, which means that they make sense for your brand and industry. Lastly, try not to use too many of them.
Analyzing Optimum Time of Post:
The important questions here are, When should we post, and how often? Neither question has a straightforward answer, but we’ll give the points to consider as you make your decisions. The answer to “when?” depends on several variables like whether it’s the weekend or weekday, whether the business is B2C or B2B, and what the goal is, in terms of engagement.
You have to consider these factors as you make your decisions. For the question of “How Often?”, there’s also no set principle other than making sure that all your content is of the highest quality. Factoring this with the timing windows for the best engagement should offer you all the insight you need.
Make a content calendar to ensure that you are never caught behind schedule,ntent calendar. This way you can plan your tweets. You can also take advantage of the scheduling tools provided by Hootsuite and Buffer to automate the posting process.
Measuring Twitter Performance:
You must know definitively the results that your marketing efforts are achieving. This is why you should analyze your performance. This should be done following the goals that you set at the beginning. This way, you have specific benchmarks that you’re measuring your performance against.
In terms of metrics, you may want to track your engagements (all the time’s people interacted with your tweets) and your impressions (all the times your tweets showed up on people’s timelines). To do this, you can use any of the popular analytics tools like Hootsuite or Sprout Social, or you can use Twitter Analytics.
Advertising for Twitter
Twitter Ads offer you an opportunity to ensure that your content shows up in front of those who would be most interested in it. This can help you increase your following, promote your products and raise awareness about specific campaigns.
A benefit of using Twitter Ads is that it allows you to target your audience very specifically, and provides you with detailed analytics. The dashboard tracts to your impressions, results, your engagement rate and the cost-per-result. And this information can be aggregated or segregated to focus on specific criteria or tweets.
There are different kinds of Twitter Ads for you to pick from depending on what your goals are:
- Promoted Tweets: These show up in the timeline, on users profiles and at the top of search results. They look like regular tweets, as such they can be liked, retweeted, or commented on. However, they will be labelled as “promoted”.
- Promoted Accounts: These target users who do not follow your brand. They show up on their timelines, search results and in the “Who to Follow” suggestions. They also are labelled as “promoted.”
- Promoted Trends: These show up in one of the first spots under the Trends for You section. They act like any normal trends, and if clicked upon will show you the search results for that particular topic.
- Conversational Ads: Twitter also offers you the option of creating ads that include Calls to Action. When Twitter users interact with them, it opens up a tweet composer allowing them to tweet an editable branded message. These are very useful in boosting engagement.
Twitter Ad Manger
To start using Twitter Ads, all you need is your Twitter account. Once you have this, you can proceed to ads.twitter.com. After selecting your country and Time Zone, you’ll have access to the Twitter Ads Manager.
In the manager, you can choose between the objective of Awareness, Consideration, and Conversion. Next, you set up your “Ad Group”, and you can set up more than once, at this point, you will also state how much you’re willing to pay per interaction. Once that is sorted, then you can target your audience.
You can do this by demographics and by keywords. When you’re satisfied, you can choose where you would to display your adverts and launch your ad campaign.
Conclusion
Congratulations on getting through the guide. Now comes the practice part. You may not get the hang of it all at once, so give yourself some space and time to experiment. Figure out what works for you, and then keep on practicing.
To learn more about marketing for other social media platforms, see our guides on:
