Twitter can be a little confusing for new users, but when harnessed correctly can be an extremely powerful business communication tool.
Twitter is a great way to connect with fans or potential customers. It allows you to promote your brand and have conversations with customers or fans. Although without any followers, Twitter is like shouting into a pillow, which can be cathartic, but it’s not really promoting you or your brand. Twitter should be a part of your brands greater social media presence or digital marketing strategy.
1. Content is king
Twitter is a microblogging site, therefore thoughtful, engaging content is incredibly important. The best engagement with followers happens when you blog about something that is useful and interesting to them. Don’t just post about yourself or what you’re doing at that time. Share interesting articles you’ve found or retweet interesting tweets you’ve found.
If your business account has a topic, it’s best to keep most of your content on that topic. This is what your current followers are interested in and helps potential followers find your account.
2. Engage, engage, engage
Twitter is all about conversations and engagement. Follow the accounts that follow yours and interact with them. This shows your follower that they are important to you, which encourages them to keep from unfollowing your account and shows potential followers that you will engage with them. Favourite or retweet a post from followers.
Share tweets and articles written by influencers in your field, or ask them questions. This will help get a conversation going and even show your account to people following the other account.
3. Consistency is key
Nobody wants to follow an account that doesn’t post seems inactive. However, they also don’t want to follow an account that spams them with a hundred tweets an hour, unless it’s a live tweet event moderation is important. Keep to a reasonable tweet schedule, you can even use a social media scheduling tool, such as Hootsuite or Buffer.
4. Optimise your bio
Your bio lets people know about you and what you are going to post about. There are only 160 characters to explain who you are in the bio, so keep it short, simple, and to the point. Use relevant keywords or minimal hashtags to make it easy to find for users searching for that topic. Change your bio to reflect new achievements or just change keywords to better suit your target market.
5. Hashtag research
Hashtags are basically keywords with a # symbol at the beginning, which anyone can search for and find posts that contain that specific hashtag. They are how you show your posts to people who aren’t following your account.
You can check out what is trending and use that hashtag in a relevant tweet if it seems like your current followers would be interested. There are many apps which allow you to find popular hashtags in a particular topic.
