Table of Contents
What to Tweet?
- Keep the Tweet Short
- Add Visuals
- Ask Questions, Start Poll
- Call to Action
- Connect to Audience
- Hashtags
- Brand Voice
Twitter Best Practices
- Audit Accounts
- Set Goals
- Monitor Competition
- Assign Roles
- Guideline
- Content Calendar
- Measure Impact
Twitter is a powerful social media platform that can best help you achieve the online presence you need. If you do not know why Twitter should be a part of your social media marketing, Twitter has more than 145 million active daily users and the fifth most popular platform.
With that statistics alone, Twitter is a gold mine for opportunities and insights to build your brand, reach more audience, and drive more sales.
However, there are 500 million tweets posted every day, and you have to win the audience’s attention. Do not be intimidated with the fast-paced network. Instead. find out what it takes to have a winning marketing strategy on Twitter.
What to Tweet?
There’s nothing to deny with “the best content leads to best results.” But how can you swim through the vast competition in Twitter?
Over the years, internal researchers have identified the core and top-performing strategies. When you incorporate these tips into Twitter strategy, it will create conversations and keep the audience engaged.
With the vast competition, you have to add spice on your own and test a variety that will best resonate to the specific audience. Remember, digital marketing is fluid, you need to constantly change and improve your strategy.
We have some quick tips for you:
- Use only maximum of 2 hashtags per tweet
- Post conversational tweets
- Make them short and interesting
- Use GIFs, videos, or images
- Test and use analytics to see which tweet performs well
- Monitor events and trends
How can you be in the moment? Bring fresh and engaging content to your audience in the most effective and immediate methods.
Keep the Tweet Short
Twitter only allows their users to tweet up to 280 characters. It may seem short for you, but it teaches users to be concise of their message. Twitter algorithm is best for marketing, each tweet aims to focus on a specific message. If you have more to say, you can place a link to your website or start a Tweet thread.
Add Visuals to the Content
GIFs, videos, and rich images add personality and increase results. Twitter statistics reveal that over 2 billion video views per day happens on Twitter. If you want an effective video that your audience will remember include your company logo and add subtitles. Keep the video short, 6 to 15 seconds is the best!
Ask Questions and Run Polls
If you notice, Twitter is about conversations. You can interact with your audience effectively by asking questions, showing your brand personality, and gathering feedback. Engage with your audience through playful questions, ask feedback on new products, or give a poll to tiebreak decisions.
Tweet Company Updates
Twitter is the best social network for brands and companies to launch their updates. It does not have to be a big announcement. Any information, sale, event, or any promotional launch needs to break on Twitter.
Make Clear Calls-to-Action
Whenever you tweet, ask yourself– what do I want to tell to my target audience? Write out what you want to tell. Ask them to leave a comment, follow you, or sign up. If you need to tell something urgent, make sure to emphasize it. Always make it clear.
Connect to Audience through Replies and Retweets
Retweet relevant content, reply to tweets that can help maintain and improve your Twitter presence. You can retweet positive customer feedback, related articles that are helpful to your product, or ideas that align with your brand. If there are issues, resolve them through direct messages. Do not forget to be responsive to your customer’s mentions.
Use Timely and Relevant Hashtags
Using hashtags will help you expand your audience reach and create relevant conversations. You have to focus on the keywords that are relevant to your business. Make sure to use only one to two hashtags per Tweet. If you want to know timely hashtags, you can go over the “Explore” tab to know which topics are popular, and whether you can incorporate them in your brand in an authentic way.
Test Your Voice
Twitter is the platform where you should be bold to your audience and business alike. You can improve your voice and reputation by taking risks and testing your creativity. It’s up to you– add an emoji, silliness, or sassiness on your tweet. Let the audience engagement judge your creative efforts.
As you know the basics of what to tweet, you should always approach Twitter and other social media platforms with an actionable plan. You need to understand the algorithm of the platform and how it will fit to your overall marketing strategy.
Twitter Best Practices
You can start your marketing strategy through these components:
Audit Accounts
Does your brand have an existing Twitter account? If you have an existing account, you need to document them and determine which of the members from your team is responsible for handling them.
When you have the account, you need to review all of them thoroughly. Collect the information about its engagement rate, tweet frequency of the account, and the number of followers the account has.
If you have multiple existing accounts, you need to audit the brand compliance for the existing accounts. Do they have the same handle or username with your other social media accounts? Does your bio and profile picture represent your brand? Check whether there are out of date promotions in your header image, profile picture, or bio.
After you have audited the existing accounts, you can have the baseline for your Twitter performance. The baseline will help you set goals and create strategies.
Set Goals
Every success in social media marketing starts with specific and measurable goals. You cannot be successful in building your online reputation and brand if you do not know and understand what you want to achieve.
That’s why you have to set your goals, but how? Use the SMART method– Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Relevant, and Timely. If you can see, going viral is not a priority. Your goals should align with your business objectives, and these objectives have to be broken down into measurable indicators of success.
Let’s say you want to increase the traffic to your website. You need to translate this goal into a SMART method by aiming your average click-through rate. Determine your baseline click-through rate from your Twitter metrics. With the baseline, you can set an achievable goal over a specific period. You can aim for an increase from 2.5% to 3.5% in four months. By that, you can tell whether your strategy is successful because of the SMART goal.
Monitor Competition
Aiming for success wouldn’t be thrilling if you do not want to get ahead with your competitors. You can review Twitter accounts of your brand competitors. You can analyze their social media, compare their strategies to yours, determine their weaknesses or gaps, and how you can distinguish yourself from your competitors.
Assign Roles
One way to succeed in social media marketing is to have an active account. You need to monitor the audience engagement of your account. It is a must to reply to mentions and direct messages from your followers. If you are not checking regularly and you fail to respond, it might affect your brand reputation.
If your brand has a busy account, you need multiple team members to handle the responses. If you will assign individual team members, it is best to let them sign their names to have a personal touch whenever they respond to mentions or messages.
Ensure that every person on your team knows their responsibilities. If you do not give them specific roles or designated time, multiple team members might respond to the same inquiry and they might offer redundant or conflicting answers. Thus, assign clear roles and responsibilities.
Create a Guideline
Since there will be multiple team members who will monitor and respond to your audience, create a social media style guide. The guide will keep your communication clear and consistent. It will prevent your team from making any mistakes on social media.
The guideline should be shared with everyone who is onboard in your social media team. Indicate how they should use Twitter with details like how to use relevant hashtags, when and how to use emojis, and how to format links.
Moreover, you need to prepare your social media team for any type of conversation. You will encounter good, weird, or bad engagement on Twitter or in any social media network. Criticism and bad reviews are inevitable, there are trolls who want to exploit your brand. Thus, you have to know better in handling them.
Make Content Calendar
Creating a content calendar may take up time, but in the long run it actually saves you some effort and stress. You will not struggle on how to come up with witty, engaging, and authentic tweets.
Social media content calendar is helpful in aligning the content you will post on all of your social media channels. The calendar will help you determine possible gaps and conflicts. Seize opportunities for timely or interesting content.
Consider the posting frequency, the best time and date to post, and who will approve the post. The content calendar will help you assess the quality of your content. It is best to follow the rule of thirds in tweeting:
- ⅓ of the tweets should promote your business.
- The next ⅓ will talk about personal stories.
- The last ⅓ will share informative insights from brand influencers or industry experts.
Keep an eye on the content calendar that you made. Do not forget to reply and monitor mentions, direct messages, and even interact or join in conversations.
Measure Impact
Regularly evaluate and analyze your marketing efforts to determine whether it is progressing towards the SMART goals you set.
However, the data can be overwhelming. You have to monitor several data metrics, and some are not helpful. You need to know which ones matter. For example, you have one tweet of a funny meme, although it had a lot of retweets and engagement– did any of those translate to sales or conversions?
Only collect data that best demonstrates the value of your marketing efforts, these data provide insights that help you improve your strategy over time.
Final Thoughts
Twitter is a powerful platform that you can use for your social media marketing plan. Use these best practices to start on the right foot. Capture your audience’s interests through your witty and original tweets. Ensure to post at the right time and day. Reach the right people and convert them to customers.
