Twitter is a brilliant social media network that has the potential to make a really positive impact on your business - but only if you do it right. Gemma Went explains
If you're willing to make a few tweaks, and put a little work in, you can start seeing some serious results for your business on Twitter. You'll raise your profile, you'll attract leads and you'll develop authentic relationships within your market.
Here are some tips to help you raise your game on Twitter:
Optimise your profile
Make sure each field in your profile has been filled out, and make sure you have a nice smiling profile picture. I'll repeat, a happy looking version of you - no logos. People do business with people, not entities.
Your cover photo is another great space for you to fill. Again, don't go for a logo. Instead, use this valuable real estate to promote a free offering. This is easy enough to do with a free graphic design tools such as Canva and Visme. I'd also recommend adding a link to that offer to the top of your profile by popping it into a pinned tweet.
Your Twitter bio should be succinct - you only have a few characters to play with. Remember to include the key terms you want your business to be known for, so that you show up in any relevant search results. You can also add a link to this bio - I recommend a bespoke landing page, rather than a generic homepage, so that you can move them onto your email list.
Monitor and respond
It's easy to jump on Twitter and fall into a black hole of updates - that's not the best way to make an impact. Get intentional with your approach. Start by creating a set of private Twitter lists. I'd suggest the following themes:
- influencers in your niche - including publications;
- current clients;
- prospects;
- competitors;
- people you'd love to collaborate with.
Lists allow you to filter out all of the irrelevant content from your Twitter feed, so take advantage of them. Once you've created your lists, you can use a free monitoring dashboard to see what's going on - I like Hootsuite and Sprout Social.
Hootsuite enables you to quickly skim through your List feeds from your desktop. Monitor your competition so that you can learn from their marketing techniques. Take a look at what's working for them, and what isn't resonating. Use this data to refine your own approach, but never copy their style.
Monitor your other lists for any questions you can respond to, or discussions you can add to. Start building a relationship with these users, and add value (with no strings) wherever possible.
You can also use Hootsuite to monitor key search terms or hashtags in your niche. Think of a key phrase you want to search for and you'll get a live feed of tweets containing that phrase.
Curate and create
One of the biggest mistakes I see from brands on Twitter is a lack of interaction. They dive onto the platform, promote their wares and then disappear. This will not help you grow your business, or raise your profile. Twitter is social, it is not a place to make people feel sold to.
I recommend a split that looks something like this:
- 70% engagement;
- 20% curation;
- 10% creation.
That means 70% of your activity should be live interactions - retweeting people, responding to them, Liking their updates, joining Twitter chats.
20% should be sharing content that was not created by you. I like to use Feedly to find interesting links to share with my followers.
10% can be promotions of your own content.
This may seem overwhelming, but it doesn't have to be. Use some of the wonderful tech out there to simplify your life. I've integrated Buffer with Feedly, so that I can share my curated content with the click of a button.
CoSchedule is a brilliant tool for syndicating your own content across your social platform, but it doesn't come free. I also use IFTTT to trigger social updates - I particularly love cross-posting Instagram snaps onto Twitter.
Review
As with any other social platform, Twitter marketing is a continuous process. I recommend reviewing your analytics every month. Twitter has a brilliant in-built analytics platform that you can use to see which of your posts have had the most engagement and which have bombed. Use these insights to refine your approach going forward.
There are many ways to help you boost your Twitter results and get more out of Twitter; these tips will give you a really good foundation.
Written by Gemma Went. Gemma is a digital marketing strategist and small business mentor.
