How To Use Twitter For Business & Marketing
With over 300 million monthly active users and 500 million Tweets sent every day, Twitter offers your business a great opportunity to reach an audience of new and existing customers all around the world.
A lot of people come to Twitter to discover what’s happening in the world, to share information instantly, and to connect with people and businesses around the globe.
So, no matter what type of business you operate — graphic designer; fashion designer; B2B solutions provider; online business; restaurant; retail store; media production, etc. — you can use Twitter to build meaningful connections with a relevant and engaged audience.
The Benefits Of Twitter For Business
1) It Is Free.
2) For Keeping Up With Industry News & Trends:
Twitter is a great resource hub for gathering information. You’ll have immediate access to the most up-to-date, industry-relevant content that will position you as an expert in your industry.
You can research local and global trends on Twitter and even keep tabs on your competitors in the industry.
By monitoring the tweets of your competitors, you can learn how they make use of twitter & even know their next moves, products or events.
3) For Generating Brand Awareness:
If you need more exposure for your business, then Twitter is the way to go.
Imagine having a thousand followers who retweet/share your posts every time you tweet. Imagine the reach! Just make sure you upload contents that are fun, timely and relevant, and watch the magic unfold.
Hot: Network With Over 1,000 Businesses & Entrepreneurs In Nigeria!
4) For Managing Reputation:
Not only does twitter help you generate publicity, it is also an avenue to manage your online reputation.
Reputation can be good or bad. That’s why you must be actively active.
Businesses like yours can use twitter to monitor and respond promptly to what people are saying about you. The faster you can respond to both negative & positive tweets involving your small business, the better.
5) For Engaging With Your Target Audience:
Don’t underestimate the power and effectiveness of 140 characters for communicating with your target audience.
Twitter gives you the opportunity to follow your customers and be a part of their lives. You can share their tweets and also respond to their inquiries.
Using twitter for business will make you feel closer to your customers. This kind of relationship will result in increasing brand loyalty, which can translate to sales in the future.
6) It is an Effective Tool For Public Relations:
With twitter, you can make public announcements on deals, promos, events, etc. without spending a dime on traditional media outlets.
Simply tweet your press releases & company news on your twitter handle and your followers will be notified instantly.
7) For Promoting Your Web Contents:
If you have great content on your website and you want to drive additional traffic to this content, you can use Twitter to do so.
Simply attach the URL of your content to a tweet and share with your followers.
Now that you are convinced, let dive into details about how to use twitter for business.
How to use Twitter For Your Business.
1) Set Up Your Profile:
As stated in our previous post (How to use Facebook for Business in Nigeria) your business page should be different from your personal profile page. This type of page gives you permission to talk about your business on a regular basis.
Your Twitter profile contains your: @username; Profile photo; Bio; Website URL; Header image & Pinned tweet.
Your Bio is an important component of your marketing as it informs your visitors what your business or product is about in 160 characters. Make it count.
You want your Twitter space to blend with your brand. This means using your business logo, colors, fonts, user name, and everything that is associated with your brand.
If you are yet to set up a profile page, watch this short video & learn how to create a twitter business page:
2) Connect With Influencers In Your Industry:
Since the plan is to get more exposure for your business, don’t just follow anyone at random.
Follow people and businesses you know. Follow those whose tweets you find interesting and relevant to your business. Follow those whose messages are consistent with what your business represents.
These are examples of those to follow:
- Your customers and clients
- Partners & businesses you work with
- Your competitors
- Professional organizations you belong to
- People in your professional network
- Influencers in your industry
- Don’t follow people with an egg picture. If they haven’t bothered to upload a real profile picture, they probably don’t mean business.
Use “Twitter Lists” to group the people you follow into categories, so tweets from important people don’t get lost.
Twitter allows you to create up to 20 different Twitter lists with up to 500 accounts in each list. Cool feature.
To find your influencers, start by searching for industry keywords (like photography, if you run a photography service) using “Twitter Search” and paying particular attention to who is getting retweeted the most.
They could range from journalists, thought leaders, potential clients/customers, big-name bloggers, to writers, potential partners, etc.
3) Tweet & Retweet:
Twitter is all about the tweets. So, start tweeting.
Posting on Twitter is mostly text-based & you have a strict 140-character limit. Besides texts, your tweets can also have web links, images & gifs, videos, polls, etc.
Regular tweeting is a sign of an active, healthy profile. Don’t be afraid to retweet as this will help generate content and also cement your own thought leadership within your industry.
Here are some few tips for your tweeting:
a) Help others with problems by using the hashtags (#) for your industry terms.
Remember, Twitter recommends that the best practice is to use no more than 2 hashtags per tweet. Use of more than 2 hashtags drops the engagement by an average of 17%.
b) Share tips related to your business and work-life balance.
c) Share photos of conferences, travel, products and other interesting finds. Tweets with images are 94% more likely to be retweeted.
d) Provide selected highlights from a conference or event.
e) Report industry, company, world, and other news that’s related to your business, together with some commentary.
f) Link to articles and content posted elsewhere with a summary of why it’s valuable.
g) Post original thoughts on your topic, industry and business.
h) Participate in Twitter chats related to your industry or business on a regular basis.
i) Give referrals via Twitter. What goes around comes around.
j) Respond to tweets that relate to your industry.
k) Unless you’re a food blogger, don’t tweet what you had for breakfast/lunch/dinner. People don’t care and you’re wasting their time.
l) Don’t tweet about sex or religion unless this is your area of specialization and that’s what you’re marketing.
m) Do not overly promote yourself. Be generous, add value and share a lot. It’s the best kind of promotion you can do.
n) Don’t send a tweet without checking your spelling. Spelling mistakes make you look totally unprofessional.
Finally, ensure that you spread your tweets throughout the day, rather than posting them all at once, as people check Twitter at different times of the day.
4) Integrate Twitter into Your Business Website:
Let everyone that visits your website know that you’re active on social media. Give them a reason to follow you and a way to follow you.
Here are a few easy ways to do this.
You can add a widget that will display your Twitter timeline on your website. There are four embedded timelines to choose from:
- User timeline – your public tweets
- Favorites – the tweets a specific user has marked as Favorite
- List – a public list that you own or subscribe to
- Search – customized search results
To create the Twitter widget, go to Settings, select Widget, click Create New, make you choice, click Create Widget, and then simply copy and paste the HTML into your sidebar.
b) Use Follow and Share Buttons
Another way is to use social media sharing buttons to make it easy for your readers to share your website content on Twitter. And also, follow you directly from your website.
c) Embed tweets on your blog:
Widgets aren’t the only things you can embed on your website — you can embed specific tweets, too.
To embed a tweet, go to the tweet you want to share and click the ellipse button under the text.
A drop-down menu will appear; choose the option Embed Tweet, and it will take you to a new page with the appropriate HTML code.
From there, just copy and paste the code where you want it to appear.
5) Advertise On Twitter:
Like Facebook, Twitter allows you to pay to promote your business on the platform.
Twitter Ads offers many options for advertising, including promoted tweets; promoted accounts; promoted trends; promoted videos, mobile app promotion, etc. that you can purchase to reach potential customers who may not yet be aware of your brand.
Twitter also possesses targeting capabilities. Whether it is by interests, demographics, or behavior, you can dig pretty deep into these targeting capabilities and use them for marketing.
Promoted ads help amplify your Tweets to a wider audience to drive more engagement with your content.
6) Sell on Twitter:
Now anyone can sell or buy products, digital goods, or services directly within a Tweet via Buy Now (An e-commerce feature on twitter).
With Buy Now, businesses can drive more conversions and remove much of the friction in the mobile purchasing process.
Any company that signs up to the scheme can now add the button to tweets, and once a user has stored their card and address details on Twitter, payments are made instantly.
In conclusion…
As the social media community continues to grow & thrive, it is wise to incorporate social media marketing into your overall marketing strategy.
Twitter is a great choice for some businesses as it offers a lot of useful options and tools to help businesses achieve their marketing goals.
Although advertising on twitter might not be as cheap as Facebook’s, the free offerings on twitter re more than enough to give your business the exposure you desire.
Credits: Firebrand talent, ElegantThemes, SocialMedia With Priyanka