6 Twitter Tips for Small Business

Twitter is one of the most under-utilized social media platforms for small businesses. While the platform may not be best suited for some small businesses, there are many business owners that can benefit from using the platform with successful growth in mind.

But, in order to successfully use the platform for business growth, you have to come up with a solid strategy.

Building your Twitter Marketing Strategy

1. Brand Awareness

It is no secret that Twitter is a powerful social media platform as it boasts 330 million active users each month as reported in the first quarter of 2019. With those monthly users comes over 500 million tweets sent every day.

With these many users at your disposal, why wouldn’t you take advantage of the exposure?

While you don’t have to “tweet” every day to get the proper brand awareness involve yourself in your community and industry and let them know that you have a voice.

There are quite a few ways to spread your brand over Twitter and I am going to go over a few ways you can interact with people without being annoying.

 

Follow Industry Leaders

Go out of your way to make a list of relevant leaders in your industry. There are a couple of reasons for this.

• They are most likely posting awesome content that could be useful for your own business.
• The content that they create could be a useful guide to reaching out to your audience.
• You can create relationships with them. Like, share, and mention them on your Twitter and they could begin to recognize you and return the favor.

Overall, if these industry leaders are doing so well, then they must be doing something right. Take notes.

 

Follow your Target Audience

If you want to bring in leads from your target audience, it would be helpful that they follow your brand.

Many times if a person gets a notification that you followed them, they will follow you back.

While having many followers is not a huge success measure, if you have many followers in the specific niche that you are targeting, then you have a good chance of converting them to sales.

 

Engage with People. Be “Interested” in Them

People love it when you love them.

I mean the social status of having to check social media at every waking part of the day to see if perhaps one more person had “liked” or “shared” what you had to say is amazing!

Possibly sad.

Regardless, put your business out there and start engaging with both your target audience and others in your industry.

The more you take interest in your audience, the more likely they will be to form a bond with your company and building that relationship is key to building your online presence.

For engaging with other industry leaders, think about the potential reach you can have when they share your content? Start showing them your interest in the hopes that they take interest in your brand and content.

 

2. What are customers and competitors saying about your business?

There is a great tool offered by Twitter that can help with both of these options called Twitter Advanced Search.

While this tool may seem a bit complicated at first, once you get the hang of it, it can be a valuable resource for implementing your Twitter strategy.

 

Your Brand

Want to know what people are saying about your company? Easy.

In the words section, you can add multiple words (in no particular order) and it will show relevant tweets containing those keywords.

For finding what is said about your brand, use the exact phrases box. When I type in Microsoft Office into the search, I get the result of every tweet that contains that phrase.

This is super helpful in understanding what people are saying about your company. Are people talking negatively about your brand? Then you would want to be there to address the issue.

Are people talking about your brand in a positive manner? Well then wouldn’t you want to reinforce those awesome comments?

Recognize what people are saying about you and communicate with them about it. This can be monitored easily with a social media dashboard such as HootSuite.

 

Competition

While you may be interested in what is said about your brand, you should also be staying up to date with what is said about your competitors.

When in the Advanced Search tool for Twitter, use the same methods to search for your competitors brand name.

 

3. Use Lists

Lists can be a great part of your Twitter marketing strategy.

For our digital marketing services, I have multiple lists to keep me organized in potential customers, competition, and industry leaders.

I can’t tell you any “right” or “wrong” way to create lists for your business. The point is to use them to have a tab on influencers or others in your industry.

When I am able to separate accounts defined by who they are to my business, then I can easily refer to each list to see specific content pertaining to what I am looking for.

Are you interested in knowing what all of the experts are saying in your industry? How about any recent news for your industry? The lists allow you to stay up to date with any of these tasks and much more.

 

4. Incredible Content

Having awesome and unique content is a huge part of any strategy, whether it be for your Twitter account or for driving an audience to your website.

Once you have your niche specified, write useful content to them. People want to see information that is specific to them and when the content is appealing, people are more likely to engage with it.

With that in mind, keep your content fresh. Think about it. If you were to create two articles a week for your website’s blog, then you could use that on all social media platforms, including Twitter.

If you keep consistently writing articles, after the course of one or two years, you will be able to cycle through old articles on your Twitter account.

This will allow you to post more original content without reusing content you already published.

If you are interested in learning more about creating awesome content, then check out Joe Pulizzi’s book, EPIC MARKETING.

 

5. Use Images & Videos

It is no secret that posts with images are bound to receive more engagement than content without images.

If you have something to say, consider if you can attach a relevant picture to it.

Make sure that the picture is appropriate for the message, though. It wouldn’t make much sense to attach a picture to a tweet just for the fact to bring in more engagement if it doesn’t make sense.

Twitter also allows GIF videos to attach to a tweet. These are similar to short videos except that it is an image file format that animates when combining several images.

Another visual-rich method would be to attach videos to a tweet. While the social media platform does not allow you to directly integrate videos into tweets, you can use a third-party service such as Vine to add a short video.

If you are looking to add a longer video to your tweet, simply add a video to YouTube and copy the link into your tweet to display the video.

Having a mix of videos and pictures allows you to share awesome visuals with excellent content.

 

6. Using Twitter Cards

Twitter allows you to share content directly from your website to drive traffic with photos and videos of your choosing.

By adding lines of markup to each web page you would like to share, you can have the article show up in a “card” format, which is much more visually stunning and can drive more traffic to your website rather than a simple link.

There is plenty of documentation of Twitter Cards on their website.

Most website platforms include a plug-in that will allow you to add Twitter Cards to each page without having to manually add code to each page.

This is the most effective way to present content from your website and will drive more traffic, resulting in a higher lead-generation.

If you wondering how you stack up against the competition on social media, check out this free digital marketing report below.