A Guide to Twitter Marketing

By the end of 2015, Twitter counted over 320 million users. Needless to say twitter is a great platform for marketers.

While starting up a page and start tweeting is super easy, I find it to be the most difficult platform to grow your followers fast. But also probably the most rewarding once you do it right.

Twitter? Twitter is an online social networking and microblogging service that enables users to send and read short 140-character text messages, called "tweets."

Read awesome live statistics here!

Have in mind that you will need a different marketing strategy for each one of your social media platforms. If you use your Instagram strategy of brodcasting visual content with Twitter, you will get stuck and lose hope.

You need to understand how Twitter works and how to interact wih followers.

Some of the main ways businesses use Twitter include:

• Sharing information and content

• Driving engagement for promotional activities

• Interacting with consumers

• Networking

• Branding

• Reputation management

With Twitter, you will need to be very organized, schedule your tweets in advance, create lists, participate in Twitter Chats, say thank you, comments on big companies profiles, be active in a regular & consistent manner,

Twitter might take more work than the other platforms, at least while you are setting up everything, but the rewards are way worth it.

How to be an efficient marketer on Twitter ? How to get more active followers ?

1) A good bio sells! Spend time coming up with a good bio. Be casual/informal. Wit or humour work well. But what makes you laugh might not make your neighbour laugh. So maybe it would be wiser to go for a simple, clear and inviting description. Neil Patel covered the key ingredients of a Twitter bio in a post on the Buffer blog;

- It’s accurate. One professional description.

- It’s exciting. One word that is not boring.

- It’s targeted. One niche descriptor.

- It’s flattering. One accomplishment.

- It’s humanizing.One hobby.

- It’s intriguing. One interesting fact or feature about yourself.

- It’s connected. Your company or another social profile.

2) Develop your content marketing strategy. Put a list of topics down on paper. behind the scenes, helpful tips, feature industry experts/news (more from industry influencers), community spotlight (neighborhood events, charities, fundraisers and nonprofits), customer spotlight (Respond to questions or highlight a positive review), focus on your people/employees. You could reserve a theme per day of the week using a calendar for example.

3) Use the 80/20 strategy. 80% of your tweets should drive engagement, interact with your followers, share content, like & comment. 20% of your tweets should drive direct response; mix in direct offers or promotions. So basically, tweet about them way more than you tweet about you.

4) Respond to everyone. Some will respond back, and others will retweet your response simply because they want to show their friends that you’ve engaged with them.

5) Always mention the @name of the person you tweet about or tweet to. But don't start your tweet with the @- mention unless you want your tweet to be only directed at the person you are tweeting at. Indeed, Twitter treats those tweets as if they are to be private. Only the person tweeting, the person being tweeted at, and those who follow both accounts will see the tweets in their streams.

6) Use hashtags. Research shows that hashtags can gain your tweet twice the engagement of a tweet without hashtags. Tools like Hashtagify.me and RiteTag can steer you in the right direction as far as which hashtags are most valuable and which ones make the most sense for your content. Indeed, they can tell you how many times a hashtag is getting Tweeted, and from that give you an indication of how likely it is that your Tweet will be seen. You can also use Twitter’s analytics platform to see how many impressions your hashtagged posts have received, which can help you to understand which hashtags are getting you seen.

Hashtags benefits:

- It allows your tweets to be seen by a wider audience than just those who follow you,

- your tweets become searchable and clickable even after you post your original message,

- and most importantly, it puts your tweet in a stream of other tweets from like-minded people who are interested in the same topic as you.

7) Get involved in Twitter chats. What are twitter chats ? Take all of 3 benefits mentioned above for hashtag use, repeat the process at a regular day and time each week and you’ll have what’s known as a Twitter chat. You do not need to start your own right away, maybe start with participating in existing ones ( — example: advertising (#adchat) and social media (#SMChat), or more niche topics like insurance (#inschat), science fiction (#scifichat), plus size fashion (#AskLaneBryant) )

7) Create Twitter lists. To do so, click on your avatar and then click on lists. Then, on the right-hand side bar, click on create new list. Add a good name and description as other people might want to follow your list. Save, your list is done! To add someone to a list, go over to his or her Twitter profile. Click on the Settings icon. Scroll down to Add or Remove From Lists. If you want to know more about how to use lists, read my blog post here.

8) Use IFTTT recipes. IFTTT stands for "If This Then That". It's an app that lets you create powerful automations (called "recipes") between different apps & services. Each IFTTT recipe is unique -- containing (1) a trigger (the "if this" part) and (2) an action (the "then that" part).There are plenty of them. I would say start with one that add you favorite tweets to your lists and one that tweets your wordpress blog posts.

You can read more about it here.

I would also create one that automatically adds people who tweet your name to a list. Here is how to do this step by step.

9) Use social media management tools. Remember; Regularity & consistancy are key ! Have a tool do that for you. I like to use Hootsuite but you have other choices like Buffer or Tweetdeck (here is a list of the best alternatives). Indeed, you should not be posting everything at once. You should be scheduling tweets in advance, so you can be more regular and space out your tweets. You can curate a bunch of great content to share (even retweets) and add it all to a queue that gets dispersed at the best times throughout the day. Here is a video tutorial on how to shedule tweets on Hootsuite. Read my blog post on why you should be using social media management tools.

10)Tweet a lot but not at once. The average person tweets 22 times a day!

11) It’s OK to tweet the same thing multiple times! Here you are on Twitter ! Your tweets have a life span is about 24 minutes. So tweet again your good content to

- Get more traffic

- Hit multiple time zones

- Reach new followers

12) Follow lots of people. As a beginner with Twitter, just follow as many people as you can, and don't mind the ideal ratio followers/following. Not yet anyway. Just follow people, give them about 2 days to follow back, and then use an app like Hoostuite (but there are specific tools like Tweepi or Followerwonk) to see who is not following you back, and unfollow them to keep a healthy ratio. People's ego would push them to have thousands of followers and only follow back a few, but to be honnest, I personnally refuse to follow these accounts becaue I feel they must be too arrogant to my taste. So I'd rather be one of those that have about as many followers as they follow, which at least shos that you will reciprocate their follow. Maybe mind that your number of following doesn't esxceed too much your number of followers, as it could give an negative image of desperation. That's why if you start following everybody, use an unfollowing app once in a while. A tool like ManageFlitter (Twitter unfollow tool) is a great tool as it also tells you which of your followers are inactive, so you can unfollow them, as they aren't useful to you in any way.

13) Find your most valuable followers and make a list out of them. There is a Twitter tool called Social Rank, which tells you the value of the people who follow you. Use it ! An engage with them more than with others.

14) Use Twitter Analytics to measure and boos your impact on Twitter.

!5) Tweet on Saturday & Sundays. Twitter engagement rates for brands are almost 20% higher !

16) Ask for your followers to retweet. Tweets that ask followers to retweet have 12X higher retweet rates.

I think this is a pretty good start! My best advise to you would be to set all of this as soon as you can, so you are well organized from the start and can fastly be rewarded for your efforts.

Anna B.

#SocialMediamarketing #Twitter