Twitter Marketing: The Definitive Guide (2021)

What is Twitter Marketing?

The generation, publication and bringing content to your potential customers and audiences through the social media platform is what forms a Twitter Marketing strategy. The goal of this type of strategy is to attract new followers and leads, boost conversions, improve brand recognition, and increase sales.

Twitter is one of the leading social media platforms of 2021. It has more than 145 million active users every day. 

Additionally, Twitter has users starting from age 13, giving you a vast audience to deliver to. This makes it important for you to include it in your social media marketing strategy.

Twitter helps you expand your reach in many different ways. Since it is one of the most visited websites in the world, it is worth your time to develop a plan of action for the benefit of your business.

How to create a Twitter Marketing Strategy

1) Audit Your Account:

Conduct a Twitter audit on your existing Twitter account if you are already using the platform.

• Analyze hashtag performance
• Analyze Individual tweet performance
• Analyze your Twitter audience

You can go about a Twitter audit by examining your account analytics by hand. Once you are logged in, head over to your Twitter Analytics dashboard, select the ‘Tweets’ tab, set your desired data range and export data.

2) Find Your Voice:

Your Twitter account should be true to your brand and you should make sure that followers that you are an authentic business. 

You can be more casual and fun on Twitter than on LinkedIn and Facebook, however, you should stay consistent and try to appeal to the masses.

3) Use Hashtags, Trends, and Tag Users:

Using hashtags on Twitter may not be a necessity, but using hashtags in your tweets can boost your engagement rate. 

While using hashtags, make sure you:

• Do not stuff hashtags in your tweet. The optimal number of hashtags in a tweet is 1-2 only. 
• Find the right hashtags. The hashtags you use should be relevant. Use hashtags that your audience is following, and aligns with your brand.
• Follow trends. Join conversations on current trending topics to reach your audience.
• Create branded hashtags. They’re ideal for campaigns, promoting, and finding user-generated content. They also help you organize and collect your brand’s content. 

You should keep these points in mind while tagging users as well. Only tag users when it is relevant. This increases the chance for the tagged users to engage with your content. 

3) Utilize Ads:

Twitter Ads is ideal if you’re looking to grow your base of followers and brand awareness significantly through the platform. 

Your business can choose various goals with regards to your Twitter promotions including application installs, video perspectives, and site conversions, just as crowd focusing for your missions. This choice will affect the cost you’ll pay to run your promotion.

4) Find Out When to Tweet:

Keep your Twitter account active by posting regularly. Analyze your performance and see when your audience is most active. Tweeting at peak times can help you reach a wider audience, it can help you gain more CTRs, and boost your engagement rate.

5) Schedule Tweets Ahead of Time:

Scheduling Tweets will save your time and will help you stay active without having to always keep yourself busy. 

If you know the exact time to Tweet makes scheduling a consistent flow of Tweets much more manageable. It’s important to be consistent on Twitter. 

Tweeting at least once every day has shown to have higher chances of engagement on both ends. A tweeter scheduling tool might help you outpace your content calendar.

6) Engage with Your Followers:

One important thing to keep in mind would be to interact with your audience more than you promote your brand. 

Try pouring out fresh content on your Twitter account, keep it different from your other social media accounts like Facebook and Instagram.

Share the latest news about your industry, events, and content that people might want to retweet. 

Moreover, you can use Twitter as a grievance redressal platform. Take regular customer feedback on your products or services, and engage in conversations with your audience. 

Connecting with the people helps increase the authenticity of your brand.

7) Set Measurable Goals:

Twitter may not become a revenue channel for your business, however, its exposure to public conversation and awareness can be of benefit to your business. 

It can help you keep your target audience up to date with the company news, your content, and/or the latest offers. 

Your business goals for your Twitter account may include:

• Creating awareness about your business
• Driving customers to your website
• Increasing customer trust and loyalty
• Provide quick customer service and support

Focusing on your goals helps you create a precise strategy for your Twitter account.

8) Incorporate Twitter into Your Overall Social Media Content Strategy:

Your Twitter content strategy should conform to the standards set by your general social media-wide strategy. 

It’s a great idea to use a social media management platform, that lets you collaborate across teams and create standards that everyone managing social media can follow. 

You can also contact a Digital Marketing Agency to help make a Twitter marketing strategy.

Constructing a distinguishing Twitter presence that instantly catches attention ad proves effective to your business goals lies in following the best Twitter habits and keeping your marketing strategy exclusive to your brand and industry. 

How to Use Twitter for Business

1) Customize and Brand Your Profile:

Here are a few things you need to keep in check while creating your Twitter account:

• Choose a simple handle containing the name of your brand.
• Write the name of your brand, it will make it easier for users to search for your profile.
• Write a simple but powerful bio. State your brand’s purpose. You can also use relevant hashtags in your bio.
• Mention your location.
• Insert your website URL.
• Use the right-sized visuals for your profile picture and header.

These are important points for any brand profile on Twitter. It increases the legitimacy of the account in the eyes of your customers.

2) Create Lists

Twitter List is an organized collection of Twitter accounts that you have put together in various categories.

When you open a Twitter List, you only see tweets from those specific Twitter accounts that you have added to the list. Any user on Twitter can create a Twitter List. 

You can segment your list into various categories such as business inspiration, competitors, and target audience so you’re able to easily review their posts, interactions, and content.

3) Host a Twitter Chat:

To keep your followers engaged, you can schedule a Twitter Chat and you can take feedbacks, tell them about new things you are working on, discuss a topic, take their inputs, and so on.

To host a Twitter Chat (or TweetChat), you’ll need to choose a topic for every week, set a time and date for the chat to occur, and create a hashtag for the chat and heavily promote in the relevant groups or ask influencer to retweet.

For Example:

You can join SEOTalk every Monday at 9:30 PM IST.

Your Twitter bio, as a tweet, your website or any other social media profile is an ideal place for you to share these details.

Twitter Chat will create a more personal experience with your brand for your followers and increase its awareness. 

The participants should be able to see all the responses, questions and comments made using your unique hashtag and encourage them to share their views on the topic you have chosen using your hashtag. 

4) Advertise:

You can also find a new audience and influence them by advertising on Twitter. It makes your Tweets easily discoverable. You can advertise on Twitter through promoted tweets and Twitter Ads.

a) Promoted Tweets:

A promoted tweet will be visible in a Twitter stream or Twitter search results of the kind of users you wish to target. You will have to pay a monthly fee for as long as you promote your tweet.

You can save your settings on the kind of audience you want to reach with your promoted tweet.  All Twitter users will be able to interact with your promoted tweet like any other tweet.

b) Twitter Ads:

Twitter Ads is ideal if you’re looking to grow your base of followers and brand awareness significantly through the platform. 

Your business can choose various goals with regards to your Twitter promotions including application installs, video perspectives, and site conversions, just as crowd focusing for your missions. This choice will affect the cost you’ll pay to run your promotion.

5) Drive Traffic to Your Website:

Since Twitter is a platform that can be used to distribute informational content, attach links to your website, blog, etc. to increase CTRs, and drive traffic to your website.

• Display your website URL along with your Twitter bio.
• Incorporate links to your website in your tweets.
• Promote other people’s shared content with direct links to any of your website(s) or social media profiles by retweeting.  
• Embed tweets on your website with a Twitter Timeline.
• Bring traffic to your website by creating Twitter Ads that take people to a separate landing page. 

Use these ways to bring your audience to your website.

6) Use Twitter Moments:

Twitter Moments is a collection of tweets from specific topics or events. It includes the “best” of tweets from the topics like “Entertainment”, “Sports”, “Today”, etc.

You can use it to make a collection of your tweets on any topic relevant to your business. Followers can view Twitter Moments on your profile. 

Twitter Moments can help you by keeping your groups of tweets to help you market your business’ events and campaigns or related industry news. 

They create audience-appealing material with which to steer mass discussion to particular topics and/or events that will help your company market a brand image to customers that you want to and ultimately boost your marketing schemes.

7) Get Verified:

Your intended audience will have an easier time following your company’s profile and differentiating impersonator accounts or accounts that share similarities in usernames, design and content with yours, once you get verified. A verified account also makes your business look more legitimate and trustworthy.

8) Focus on Building Your Follower Count:

Building your follower count will result in more people interacting with your account. Here are the basic tips to grow your followers:

• Your content should be shareable
• Use hashtags
• Include links to your Twitter profile wherever you can
• Create engaging content
• Interact with your followers
• Take help of Social Media Influencers

Twitter Marketing Tips and Strateties

Here are a few tips for you to start Twitter Marketing today:

1) Use Keyword Targeting in your Twitter Ads

You can use 2 types of keyword targeting on Twitter:

a) Search Keyword Targeting:

This will allow your tweets to show up when users search for keywords that you have determined relevant to your business.

b) Timeline Keyword Targeting:

This will allow you to target users’ preferences, views and actions based on the keywords they have used in their recent tweets.

2) Implement Hashtags

Tweets with popular relevant hashtags receive two times as much engagement.

• Use branded hashtags
• Follow trends
• Find the most successful hashtags
• Use only relevant hashtags
• Use a maximum of 2-3 hashtags

3) Organize a Content Sharing Schedule

Along with keeping your account active by posting regularly, you also have to make sure you tweet at the right times for maximum engagement. 

You can use tools like Twitter Analytics, Sprout Social, etc to find out the best time to tweet.

You can also choose the best time/day to post according to your business domain.

• For B2C, it is best to post on weekends
• For B2B, posting on weekdays works well

Some good times to tweet actively are:

• Between 8-10 AM and 6-9 PM on weekdays
• And around 12 PM or 5-6 PM on any day

4) Create a Campaign

To use the platform to its full potential, increase your brand appreciation through it and grow engagement with Twitter users, you can frame a social media marketing plan designed uniquely for Twitter. 

• Learn about your contesting brands
• Elect your course of action to entice your intended audience
• Decide the type and design of your content
• Publicize and share your account and its activities
• Evaluate your outcome

5) Write a Strong Profile Bio

Writing a good bio for your profile is an important step. You have to make the most of the 160 characters provided to you for your bio, choose your words wisely and make sure you make an impact. 

You should communicate your purpose properly, make use of hashtags and ensure the bio represents your business.

6) Use Images and Videos

Strengthen your tweets by including images and videos. Their visual appeal attracts users’ retweets. Images increase favoritism by 89%. 

Similarly, tweets containing videos improve user engagement by six times than normal tweets. Your content feels more personal and you can communicate more through videos and images than with words.

7) Interact with your Followers

Frequent interaction with your followers and audience members will make them important and valued and give them personal experiences to share with others. This will help retain customers and instill brand loyalty.

8) Share Media Mentions

If your business gets media attention, share the concerned article, video, image, or a direct link to the published material on Twitter. 

It’ll make your business feel more authentic to anyone checking out your profile as well as show prospective followers how many other people already know about your company and are enjoying your products and services. It also gives you a chance to build backlinks through your tweets. 

9) Keep an Eye on Your Competitors’ Accounts

You can follow your competitors’ accounts and stay in the loop with their activities. You can view their retweets, comments, hashtags, and the strategy they might be using. You can change your strategy accordingly.

10) Focus on Followers’ Interests and Needs While Creating Content

To reach your audience and connect with them, you must keep in mind your followers’ interests and need that relates to your brand. 

When you meet the needs of your target audience, there’s a higher chance that they will keep following you and interacting with your account.

11) Promote Your Events

You can promote your events on Twitter using branded hashtags, etc so that even people who are not your followers can get to know more about your company and might even sign up to participate increasing your brand awareness.

12) Check Your Direct Messages Regularly

Like different social media platforms, Twitter presents users with a Direct Message inbox wherein they could get in touch with you in a non-public message concerning any questions, concerns, or remarks they have. 

So, make sure to check your inbox frequently as this may make a contribution to customer support and services your business is known for, in addition to the form of care you offer your followers and customers.

13) Use Analytics

Track your Twitter account’s performance regularly. It will help you plan. Analyzing your account can help you identify factors affecting your account’s growth. 

Twitter analytics will help you understand how your content is impacting your audience. Depending on your needs, you can use these insights to promote your tweets and use Twitter Ads. 

Examine your account’s engagement rate, impressions, tweet activity, and information about your followers for determining the best plan of action to achieve your Twitter Marketing goals.