An Actionable Twitter Marketing Strategy for Small Businesses

For small businesses, your Twitter marketing strategy is an important channel.

For a small business, a social media plan with Twitter marketing strategy might be the best way to engage with your target audience. It all starts out on social networks and doing some social listening before you can really develop a Twitter strategy.

Don’t let its logo fool you–Twitter is not just for the birds. In fact, with 313 million monthly active users, Twitter is one of the social media networks that your customers will most often use to discuss your brand. 

The best social media marketers understand social media platforms and how they can generate sales leads and customer engagements.

Read on to find tips and tricks for businesses who are looking to sharpen and improve their presence on Twitter.  If you’re a startup company be sure you have a Twitter handle both for the organization and personal. The company Twitter account should have a Twitter chat and Twitter Analytics set up so you can manage your goals and expectations.

Twitter has always trailed behind the leading social media networks. That’s okay, we’ll let Facebook pull in more active users. As a growing business, you’re reading this because you’re looking for unique ways to grow a social presence, not the common ones. 

The micro-blogging platform continues to grow with users becoming more active, big brand activity, and social influencers. Learn how to develop a Twitter marketing strategy that rocks!

Did you read the above paragraph and think, “Twitter isn’t growing, they’ve been dying on the vine for years.” While Twitter might not be growing in the sense of new users, they do show strong chops for user dedication. Not to mention they’ve been striving to find out what they’ll be when they grow up.

Today, it is not enough just to write and push out content. Social media is not just another marketing channel you can use to reach your target audience. The biggest mistake a company can make is to use social media as simply another marketing outlet to sell a product. It’s much more than that.

With social media popularity is growing, it’s time to find a way to reach users without disturbing them.

Increasingly, businesses are joining the ranks of adding Twitter as the main way of communicating with customers and building brand recognition. They see an opportunity to use Twitter to accelerate sales and growth for the business.

When done right, a Twitter marketing strategy is a great lead generation tool, although it takes time and dedication.  Your Twitter marketing strategy is essential to most overall marketing plans.

Use the following Twitter marketing strategy to boost your social media efforts.

Drive people to your company’s website.

We’ll start with the obvious first, Tweet about interesting content you’ve posted on your blog or website. Don’t just use auto-generated titles, make your Tweets quick and snappy. 

If the content on your website is valuable to the reader, people may start tweeting about it on their own and sharing your resources to their followers on Twitter. Just be sure to follow the 70 – 30 rule. 70% of the posts you make should be relationship building, and only 30% should be promotional.

Add value to your audience. Include Tweets from industry material that doesn’t belong to your business. You can even use link shortening tools that allow you to create CTA links back to your own website after a user has clicked through.

Monitor your business mentions.

Using the Twitter Search tool or third party social media management tools, you can search and track what people are tweeting about your company, products, competitors, or any other trends in your industry. If you find someone tweets about your products or a person who is looking for a solution that your product provides, let them know.

It’s funny, oftentimes people forget that the key to social media is social. The best people know how to engage, help, and by doing this might lead to some engagement and sales.

Listening, monitoring, and scheduling content.

It doesn’t matter if you are a big or small business it’s always a good idea to monitor brand awareness and industry-related news. Businesses can use Hootsuite to listen, monitor and manage their content all on one dashboard.  Full disclosure here, HootSuite is one of the social media platforms we use here at Matrix Marketing Group.

Hootsuite offers user-friendly navigation and features that make it easier for users and businesses to leverage and maintain their social media channels. By linking your social media accounts on Hootsuite, businesses can schedule content posts, monitor what others are saying, engage with customers, and even look at the analytics from different time periods.

Use the Twitter “Favorites” to list company testimonials.

When you hover your mouse over an individual tweet in your Twitter stream, you will see a few options appear, including the option to ― Favorite the tweet. When you click the little star that appears, it turns yellow, and that tweet gets added to your ― Favorites tab.

Organize who you follow with Twitter Lists.

People who follow you can range from customers, businesses, industry influencers, and even competitors. To make things easier to monitor and view the conversations that are happening, you can create Twitter lists. 

By creating lists, you can group important and key followers and make it easier for you to listen and engage with the conversations that are stemming from these followers.

Strategize your follow back process.

There are people who follow every user that follows them, but it’s not always the case for others.  As there are advantages to following everyone who follows you — there are some cons to doing so as well. 

The fad of bots and artificial intelligence (AI) has become increasingly popular in the last year, some providing useful information and there are others that tweet irrelevant content at their followers. These bots take advantage of users who automatically follow back and usually do not have any value to you as a marketer. 

On the up-side, following users who are in the same industry, customers, prospects, competitors, neighboring companies, and influencers you will be able to gain insight. Insight into what trends and news are happening within your feed.

Who are you following on Twitter?

Although it’s important to have a process involving following back users – it doesn’t hurt to create a set of criteria around who is worth following back. Industry influencers, media outlets, and journalists you want to build a relationship with, customers, prospects are great people to follow back. 

Keep it to the people important to you so you have easy access to their tweets on your feed. Look at who is following you, if you see users who seem like spam, bots, or users that don’t meet your criteria take them off your list. 

Cleaning up your followers and following relevant users in your feed will maximize the updates and news that are coming in and relevant within your business and industry.

Tweet relevant content 4 to 6 times a day with your Twitter marketing strategy.

Follow people who always find great stuff, subscribe to blogs that feature excellent work and reviews of new tools, scan weekly and daily email news digests such as AllTop. And check out our blog we have resources in content that people love.

Sources like these can be easily scanned once you have them set up. In a way, your Twitter stream can become that valuable filter for pointing out the best content, but do it consistently and watch your follower count grow.

Changing the look and appearance.

For new and current users, take the opportunity to update and refresh your twitter profile with branded company colors to create consistency with the business and your other social media channels. 

Header Photo: 1,500 x 500

Your header photo is the image that spans the top of your Twitter profile page. It’s quite a bit larger than your profile photo so make sure to save it at the highest resolution possible. Because you have more room to be creative with this picture and it will likely be the first thing your visitors see, make it something captivating.

Twitter’s Image Guidelines

• Recommended 1,500 x 500 pixels.
• Maximum file size of 5 MB.
• Image types include JPG, GIF or PNG.

You can use Canva to create twitter headers that highlight services, promotions, and branding for your business. Keep an eye on what size images work best for each social profile you are updating. Currently, Twitter’s header images are recommended to be 1500px by 500px and the profile image should be 400px by 400px.

There are only 280 characters, make it count.

Last May Twitter announced that they will be excluding @names, photo, video, GIFs and polls in the character count. 

This new change allows users to have more of an engaging conversation without being limited by video, photos, or polls. It’s essential to create and post engaging content that your followers want to see, learn, and listen too on top of retweeting valuable and relevant content from influencers.

Increase engagement with Twitter chat or TweetUp.

As a small business, you can either host or be a participant in Tweetchats. Being a participant, small businesses can reach out to influencers, bigger brands and ask them questions regarding advice and tips. 

Here’s a great resource of a list of Twitter chats.

Businesses who host a Tweetchat have an opportunity to market themselves and engage with current and prospective customers that follow them. 

TweetUps are another way to become more involved with customers and prospects. Hosting a TweetUp lets your business, customers, and others come together in person and discuss related topics and issues. Overall, it acts as an excellent way of networking with others. To learn more about the different Tweetchats are hosted check it here.

Twitter Videos.

HubSpot released the need-to-know statistics involving visual content and marketing for 2019. Key takeaways for general content, 37% mentioned visual marketing was the most important form of content for business and second only to blogging at 38%. 

By the end of 2019, video content will account of a total of 74% of internet traffic and will be one of the most prominent mediums to be incorporated into content for businesses. 

Although the trend and usage of Vine have ended, video sharing and content is more active than ever on Twitter. Twitter users (82%) watch video content on the app where users look to twitter for video discovery.

Need to know for Twitter Video.

• Twitter videos have a maximum of 140 seconds – more than enough time to capture and pull in viewers with your content
• Video can be used to host a one-on-one conversation to followers or to promote content
• Twitter Video is used for discovery compared to YouTube that is used as a search engine
• Native video drives engagement and receives more compared to third-party video players

Tweeting sparingly on your own promotions.

A habit that small businesses should do their best to break is – tweeting a promotion or a discount link from their website and then let it fade. 

Being the micro-blog platform it is, Twitter only allows 280 characters to express and share content to followers. Follow the 30 – 70 rule. 30% of the content you share should be promotional, the other 70% should be relevant content that you aren’t trying to sell.

Businesses who consistently tweet, “How To’s”, “The Best Ways,” and informative content should be pushing tweets onto their feed multiple times a day. Do this for a greater chance to be seen, clicked, and redirected to their website to see more content.

Incorporate effective hashtags.

The use of hashtags has always been an important factor in the social media world. Users of all backgrounds, small companies, and big brands incorporate hashtags into their marketing efforts including social media posts, contests, campaigns, or hosted events.  

Hashtags are used for categorization on social posts, making it easy for users to click on the hashtag and see similar news and trends that have been tagged.

Excessive use of hashtags can be annoying, and can actually drop a business’s engagement by an average of 17% if there are more than two hashtags in a tweet.

Differentiating content.

Changing up content is refreshing. Using different methods such as video, polls, photos and even statistics can pull in new followers and conversation onto your Twitter feed. Visual content is favored and used heavily across all social media channels. 

Tweeting a statistic about your industry with an infographic and a link can increase engagement and activity from your followers.

Direct Messaging: When is it useful?

Twitter’s feature of direct messaging allows users to message one another in the confines of their own conversation that is not seen by their followers. It’s common to see a new message when you pick up followers and they let you know about a product or service they want to share. 

These messages can soon become redundant and seem like a copy and paste template. Businesses should use direct messaging with their followers, customers, and prospects but you want to keep your voice in the messages. 

Here are some highlights on how to maintain your voice through this method:

• Be Human – treating DMS as a conversation keeping your brand and voice consistent when dealing with customers through direct messaging.
• Responsive timing – Write back to customers and prospects in a timely manner. This shows them you are active and genuinely thinking about resolving their issues or giving them more valuable information.
• Provide Value – No one likes to be spammed by meaningless messages. A business’s social media strategy should also involve marketing tactics for customer service. Use direct messages when it is necessary and leave a positive impression with customers about your brand.

Taking conversations offline.

Customers follow their favorite brands and influencers for a reason. Twitter can be used as a method of customer service and having a positive experience there is always an option to move conversations offline – whether that be through email or a phone call. 

Communicating through Twitter is a great way to get problems solved, however by moving conversations offline customers will be able to have a more personable experience through email and phone. Having the ability to talk to a representative on one is typically a more personalized interaction.

Give credit when needed on social.

Twitter is a fantastic source to follow industry influencers, customers, and other brands. Though, when retweeting or sharing content it’s respectful to acknowledge the source of content. Not only will the original source feel appreciated, but it will also be a relationship builder.

Trying something new on your social media channels.

Get creative! Find fun and engaging ways to get your Twitter engagement active for followers and for the business. Businesses do not have to default to the same repetitive methods that everyone is doing – being creative is a good thing. 

Here are a few ideas that can take and rework if needed:

• Pair up with Locals/Customers – Collaborate with a local in the neighborhood or customers. Create a campaign to show how your business helps them through their daily lives with a trending hashtag to be paired with each post.
• Work with Industry Influencers for a #TweetChat – Team up with an industry influencer to host a #Tweetchat for followers to participate in the discussion for specific topics and issues that are related in the industry. Participants have the opportunity to share their opinions and thoughts.
• #TwitterTakeOver – Have other employees/staff host a takeover on Twitter and share moments and news coming from different departments of the office or general company news. These takeovers should be planned and approved with content and information that will be shared on Twitter.

Using Twitter to solve business challenges.

Once businesses have established a consistent presence on Twitter and with their followers, businesses can work toward using Twitter to solve current challenges and obstacles that a business is currently dealing with. 

What are some examples businesses can look at for inspiration?

• Offer a ‘special’ – Discount or giveaway to your followers who can answer a question that was posted a day before?
• Result – followers see an opportunity to receive a discount from your business. Tweeting this out will grow engagement and conversation leading up to the day.
• Content/Reward – Host a contest or rewards for your followers to Tweet or Retweet content and messages from a blog post, or a memorable experience they had at your business.
• Organize a TweetUp – Are there customers and locals that engage with you a lot on Twitter but haven’t had the chance to meet in person? Organize a TweetUp or a Meet and Greet at your business to meet these people who interact with your business on a weekly basis to get to know them and network with one another.

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