Known for its smart and witty statements in 140 characters or less, Twitter has quickly become a platform for the smart and quick-minded. However, due to its size and proliferation, most small and medium sized businesses can no longer afford to ignore this social media giant.

Since its inception, Twitter has quickly evolved as a powerful platform for the development of thought leadership as well as engaging, thought provoking conversations. Business leaders quickly adopted it as a means of showcasing their talent, products and services and it is a fantastic way of tapping into a huge user-base. For example, did you know that you can use your Twitter account to do all of the following?

  • Build brand-awareness and positive brand sentiment
  • Share information about your company and products
  • Connect with like-minded people in your industry who share your passion
  • Attract new clients and customers
  • Source information about your clients and customers
  • Engage with your audience
  • Stay front-of-mind with your existing customers
  • Extend your offline networking activities online
  • Drive interested customers and prospects to your website
  • Connect with potential business partners
  • Identify potential strategic alliances
  • Promote your products and share exclusive offers
  • Share valuable PR articles about your brand
  • Improve your customer service offering
  • Listen to what’s being said about you and your brand.

In this day and age, can you really afford not to be on Twitter?

Your Brand’s Profile

Your profile is key to gaining Twitter success so you should ensure you take advantage of all it its customisable features. Everything about your profile needs to be smart and appealing.

Your Twitter Handle is how other people will identify you and address you. It therefore needs to be short and sweet, ensuring that it doesn’t take up too many characters when people tweet you whilst clearly showing that it’s your company.

Twitter-for-CEOs

Your Twitter Bio

In your bio, you only have 160 characters to play with so you really need to show your followers who you are and what you’re about. Try to think about your followers and imagine what they would like to hear as you put forward your company’s message. Make sure it is interesting and engaging, not just self-promoting.

Your Profile Images

Following on from this, the images on your profile are also important. If you are an individual, ideally, your profile picture should be a professional headshot. On the other hand, most businesses tend to display their logo. Let people see who you are right away on their Twitter feed and searches. Whatever you chose to use, it’s important your image is crisp and attractive as your followers will see it on their timelines every time you send a tweet.

Your header image is the photo that sits on your Twitter background and should be one that encapsulates your brand and puts your message across in a bold, creative and captivating manner. Your background design should not be too bold or daring, and should instead compliment the page you have created. Try not to distract from your content with an overly dazzling background.

Your Followers

The whole point of marketing on Twitter is gaining followers and generating a healthy fan base. Your followers are the ones most likely to retweet your posts, respond to your updates, and purchase from you. They are also more likely to bring their friends to you which is key to progressively gaining a strong following.

Follower engagement is key on Twitter if you want to promote your brand and grow your followers. When crafting your tweets, try should include a full range of content, i.e. make sure they range from educational, to humorous, intelligent, and also promotional material. It’s a really fast-paced environment so if you want to stay front-of-mind it’s important that you tweet frequently, consistently and with great enthusiasm.

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Also, don’t be shy about placing “Follow us @…” buttons across your website, additional social platforms, and all of your marketing material. The same is true for your email signature which should always include your Twitter handle.

Another good trick is to link your email address book to Twitter. By doing so, Twitter will automatically “find” your contacts who are on Twitter – and by following them, you’ll undoubtedly prompt them to follow you back, thus broadening your follower base.

Your Twitter Lists

Have you heard about Twitter Lists? These are an ingenious way of categorising people you are following, listening to specific groups/topics/industries, and curating content to share and retweet later.

Curating content is quite important as it shows you’re not only in tune with the leading experts in your industry, but that you not purely self-serving either. Create a list of all of the leading thinkers in your industry and key track of conversations and key trends in a daily basis. Be sure to share, @mention, reply to or quote tweets or articles that interest you, and look for way to ignite a dialogue amongst your followers.

Your Tweets

When you create your tweets there are a few key things to think about. The first is to keep everything concise and clear. You only have 140 characters, so make sure you only add the important stuff. It’s also recommended that you leave around 40 of those characters free so that your followers can add responses to increase engagement.

Think carefully about the sort of things you tweet about. Try to avoid using Twitter as a megaphone for promotions. This can be quite boring and rather off-putting for your followers. Instead, try to use Twitter as a channel for sharing a compelling and engaging story about your brand, one that really shows off your personality. Your followers will enjoy learning about the history of the company, the triumphs and challenges, as well as an insider’s view to working in the company.

Twitter-Engagement-and-Followers-The-Simple-Study-Findings

Get Found with Hashtags

Hashtags are everything and can help you to be found in searches. Hashtags even help to drive up engagement by as much as 200% so be sure to include them in all of your tweets.

Find relevant and interesting hashtags so that you can craft a tweet to suit your business. You can use tools such as hashtag.org or twubs.com to investigate potential hashtags for your brand and selective the best ones.

Twitter Hashtags

Make the most of Mentions

Finally, mentions are a great way of creating an engaging tweet. Mentions allow you to interact with other users directly and create dialogue so that you can really engage with them. They’re particularly useful when trying to attract the attention of top influencers within your industry. For example, if you’re curating content, when retweeting a key influencer, why not @mention them to let them know you’re endorsing their content. Who knows, you might even get an @mention or follow back!

Looking for top industry influencers to follow? Try klout.com.

Engage your Audience with Twitter Chats

Twitter chats are great for hosting conversations with all of your followers and the centre around a specific hashtag. The hashtag allows you to follow the topic and participate in it with great ease. Hosting a Twitter chat lets you get to know and understand your followers, as well as creating something personal and engaging.

Leverage Twitter Marketing to Grow Your presence Online

Twitter Marketing is really quite simple and a sure way to get your business going strong. When it comes to advertising, remember to take advantage of the promoted tweets and regularly refresh the images you use in your ads for better engagement and interest from potential customers. But remember to follow the 80/20 rule. 80% of your tweets should focus in driving audience interactions through engaging content, and only 20% of your tweets should be about your promotions or offers.

Twitter is great for starting conversations easily and allowing you a very direct form of interaction with potential customers. Following these simple and easy steps are sure to have you ready and tweeting effectively in no time at all.

Nina Epellé
Nina Epellé
Founder and Principal Consultant, Digital Gold HQ

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