There is great value in using social media to promote a business of any size these days. Many social media platforms have become so famous for being used by brands to run advertisements that we wonder if they were really launched for people to interact with each other.
The ability for users to share posts easily on social media sites benefits businesses that market their products and services there. A brand message can spread so quickly and easily on big social communication websites that companies are inspired to consider that as the most effective means of marketing.
One such popular social media website is Twitter, which has been around for quite some time now. It existed long before Instagram and TikTok came in. It is known for its ‘tweets’ and hashtags that people use to share and spread any posts that they like.
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When a business promotes its products and services by creating, posting, and sharing tweets, the process is called Twitter marketing. Marketing on Twitter has a special place in the marketing strategies of most businesses these days. It is relatively more straightforward and convenient for a business to create a Twitter marketing strategy than to build one for Facebook or LinkedIn. Facebook would typically require you to start a Facebook Page or Group before posting your product photos or business info. LinkedIn would also prefer you make a separate business page instead of continuously promoting your business on your personal LinkedIn profile. But Twitter does not require you to do any such thing.
You can use your personal Twitter account for Twitter marketing. You can also share the posts and messages of other brands on your personal Twitter account. You might want to rename it though to your brand name, but the mechanism of the account will remain the same. Using a Twitter marketing strategy for business is not only simple but also fast-paced. It takes only a few seconds to share a link or post on Twitter, and that post can appear on your followers’ Twitter news feed within the next second, who might choose to share it further if they appreciate it.
Do you want to build a Twitter marketing strategy to drive more sales for your business? If yes, continue to read until the end because, in this post, we will guide you on how to use Twitter for marketing and give you ideas on the kind of actions to take to make your efforts more fruitful.
7 Ways to Use a Twitter Marketing Strategy For Business
Here are 7 great ideas to do marketing on Twitter.
1. Use Hashtags
What are hashtags? Hashtags are searchable words or phrases that users can identify with and are expected to search on a social media site. When you use hashtags in Twitter marketing, you increase the visibility and discoverability of your posts, even beyond your Twitter followers. Most active Twitter users are usually familiar with all the popular hashtags in a particular niche at any given time.
For example, when hashtags like #FollowFriday and #ThrowbackThursday became popular, people started searching and viewing posts of all others tagged with these. Even if they were not following each other on Twitter, they could find and see each other’s Twitter posts that had these hashtags on them.
Many brands leverage the value using hashtags and latch onto the trending topics at a given time to get their message across to large Twitter audiences. You can also think of your own hashtags to drive the attention of your Twitter audience to your products, services, or events.
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A good piece of advice here for Twitter marketing would be to only use hashtags that sound relevant to what you offer. If the hashtags you use are not relevant to your products or services, they won’t be able to drive any conversions or sales for you. They would rather just make your audience confused. But if you use relevant hashtags, your audience will get your message clearly and consider buying from your brand.
You can also use hashtags that are directly related to the type of content that you most regularly share. For example, if you often write about starting a new business, you can use the hashtag #entrepreneurship with your posts. But using too many hashtags is also not good. If your posts are full of hashtags all the time, they might start appearing like spam. Give complete statements for people to read, and just include one hashtag in the beginning or at the end.
Moreover, when you are marketing on Twitter, always keep an eye on the trending box, which can be found on the left of your Twitter timeline on the desktop. On mobile, it appears in the search tab of the app. This trending box provides inspiration on the type of content to share on Twitter, which has more chances of being discovered by other users around that time. But again, make sure whatever you share is relevant to your brand.
2. Handle Queries Through Direct Messages
The concept of direct messaging has evolved ever since the internet came into existence. It is a helpful way of troubleshooting issues, answering queries, and handling complaints. The same applies when you use direct messaging in Twitter marketing.
It is wise to sort out customer complaints and take care of their issues through DMs, instead of replying to them on public posts in online communities and letting everyone else read the conversation as well. You wouldn’t want other Twitter users to see that your customers are having a problem with your products or services because if they do, they might start thinking less about your brand.
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Since there is no character limit in DMs, you can explain the solution to your customers freely in them. You can communicate as much as you like. For effective marketing on Twitter, it is important to keep the Twitter users satisfied with their communication with you. Thus you need to be open and welcoming towards any user who DM’s you with a question or problem. You should allow anyone to DM you, especially if you are using a Twitter marketing strategy for business. Go to your ‘Privacy Settings’ and check ‘Receive direct messages from anyone.’
3. Use Photos, GIFs, and Polls
Twitter features allow you to add up to four images to a post. Some users create graphics and add them to their tweets. You can also use GIFs in your tweets. The more of these you use, the more your followers will be engaged with your posts.
One fun way to engage users while you do Twitter marketing is to create a poll as follows.
- Click ‘Compose’, then click ‘Add Poll’. The poll button has a horizontal graph picture on it.
- Type in your poll question into the ‘Compose’ field.
- Enter your responses or answer options into the ‘Choice’ fields. Each question can have up to 4 answers, and each answer can have 25 characters.
Your poll will stay live for 24 hours in the default settings.
4. Do Live Tweets
Start using live tweets if you want to get a topic popular on Twitter as part of your Twitter marketing. Live-tweeting is commonly used for giving your reactions to an event as it is happening. For example, if you tweet a live reaction to an entertainment event, such as Oscars, or a piece of breaking news, you are involved in live-tweeting.
You can do it the other way round too. Throw an event, create a hashtag, and tell attendees to tweet about it live using the new hashtag. Their tweets will be responses to your original tweet about the event. This technique is used by many brands as part of their Twitter marketing strategy.
5. Participate in Twitter Chats
Another way brands use and implement a Twitter marketing strategy is by hosting a Twitter chat on topics relevant to their products or services. This is a straightforward way of starting a discussion about your offerings but requires you to have a large enough customer and follower base to begin with at first.
6. Interact With Influencers
For your Twitter marketing efforts to bring positive results, you need to interact with the right people on the platform. You need to engage with your customers and keep them satisfied. You also need to focus on others, especially those with a large following on the platform and act as influencers to further promote your brand.
7. Advertise on Twitter
The last but not the least method of doing Twitter marketing is to run paid ads on the platform. There are several advertising options available on Twitter, as follows.
- Promoted tweets
- Promoted accounts
- Promoted trends
Be mindful of the budget you allocate for implementing your Twitter marketing strategy. Advertisements can turn out to be costly if you fail to target the right people.
You must also be sure to integrate your Twitter account with your brand website. We at Strikingly encourage our users to consistently incorporate the website they build on our platform with their social media accounts and pages. This keeps their overall marketing strategy intact and helps drive traffic back and forth among their marketing platforms.
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The tools and features available at Strikingly make it easy for you to integrate your website with any external site or platform that you want. You can integrate your Twitter account by adding a Twitter icon on any of your web pages, setting up your website’s social feed, or even on your footer, which will direct your site visitors to your Twitter profile. You should also write your website link on your Twitter profile so that your Twitter followers can come to your website as well.
Twitter marketing can drive new customers and sales for your business as long as you do it right.
