5 Twitter Tips for Better Marketing

By Laurie Wood

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Did you know, the average lifespan for a tweet on Twitter is 18 minutes? This can make your marketing efforts feel a little lack-luster if they’re easily forgotten or not even seen. Twitter is a fast environment and needs a strong social strategy to make your business stand out from the crowd. Following my Twitter tips below will help boost your Twitter profile, aiming to support your marketing efforts.

1) BUILD YOUR PROFILE
The basis for any social platform’s beginnings – building your profile. For Twitter, you need an effective profile image (400 x 400 pixels), header (1500 x 500 pixels), bio,  username and website link. Your bio is limited to 160 characters, so it needs to be straight to the point. An idea is to focus your bio around your business’ vision and/or goal. Your username should to be your business’ name as you want to identify this particular account to your business, for e.g @BusinessName. However, if you can’t have your actual business’ name because it’s taken, try adding in punctuation like so @Business_Name. Avoid adding in random numbers on the end as this will make your username become less recognisable and thus easily forgotten. Finally, don’t forget to add your website link, this can be to the page you want the most website traffic, such as a Promotion page or About page.

2) POST IMAGES, VIDEOS AND GIFS
Twitter doesn’t just have to be text tweet after text tweet, in fact, tweets featuring a GIF or video receive higher engagement rates than ones without. Decide what medium would work best for your tweet. If you’re looking to advertise a product/service, then an image or video would support the promotion of this, however, if you’re tweeting about a live event you’re hosting, a string of text tweets keeping audiences informed would be recommended. GIFS, in particular, reaction GIFS are a great way to add humour to your content strategy and humour is a good technique to encourage audience engagement.

3) POST REGULARLY
Twitter is one of the few social media platforms that actually requires a heavy posting schedule. This is down to its fast-paced environment and urgency to release trending news which can result in Twitter feeds being flooded! Social media strategist, Louise Myers suggests posting 13 times per day. Although, you can post less, however, your content will be less impactful and will probably become hidden in the twitter feed flood.

Moving on, understanding when to post is important. There’s no point focussing all your energy pumping out those 13 valuable tweets on a day know-one is looking at their Twitter feed. Sprout Social made this handy chart below, fresh for 2019, which highlights the best times of day for tweet engagements i.e when your audiences are most active on Twitter. Use this chart as a basis for your posting schedule, remember you can post more than one tweet in an hour.

SS Twitter

4) UTILISE HASHTAGS
Hashtags are used on Twitter to categorise a topic and thus make your tweet become more easily found. By utilising a branded hashtag, you can create excitement and drive traffic around a product/service you’re promoting, or alternatively, using one long term will boost organic traffic as it will encourage your followers to latch on and hopefully start using it themselves. The programme Love Island, capitalises on the hashtag #loveisland and even uses it in their bio to encourage fans of the shows to tweet about it.

Mark Devitt@darkrcp
 

“He’s so bevvy” “ that’s so bev”

 
3,329 people are talking about this
 

Other than branded hashtags, the importance of trending hashtags can be just as valuable. Your trending hashtags tend to focus around breaking news, whether the prime minister has resigned or who was voted off the Great British Bake Off. The smart decision here is to latch onto any trending hashtags which you can relate to your business or marketing strategy. If you run a small business, then take note, the 7th Dec 2019 is Small Business Saturday and the hashtag bound to be a hot topic for discussion is #SmallBizSatUK.

5) ENGAGE WITH YOUR FOLLOWERS AND COMPETITORS
Customer service isn’t just over the till it’s online and followers want to be heard. Did you know the average response time for companies on Twitter is 1 day, 7 hours, and 12 minutes? Yet, 64% of customers on Twitter expect a response from companies within 1 hour! In comparison to other platforms, Twitter requires a lot of energy which can result in burnout. If you’re struggling to keep up with the demand of customers tweeting in, consider hiring more employees to share the load, or open a second account for your business, dedicated to all customer queries.

A sneaky but smart Twitter engagement strategy is to engage with your competitors. Why? Because your competitor’s followers will almost mimic the followers you have, they’re after the services or products you provide but may have never even heard of you. By replying to a tweet from a competitor, not only are you getting noticed, but audiences love seeing two rivals compete it out in a subtle cat fight.

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 Want to know more about how you can utilise social media? Follow me @LaurieWoodUK.

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