Social media
17 Helpful Tips for Marketing on Twitter
Filed under: Social Media, Twitter
Marketing on Twitter is essential for oh so many businesses and individuals, yet there are almost always room for improvement when it comes to marketing. I’ve compiled some tips for both starters and advanced users. Be sure to improve your efforts!
1. Follow people back. No, not everyone but you should be definitely seeking a healthy following:follower ratio. You should follow back those who’s bio and recent tweet suggest you have something in common with them. WHY? To establish connections and make a good first impression. There’s something weird about having 10,000 followers and only 3 who you follow.
2. Quality beats quantity. There is no point having tens of thousand followers yet none of them are interested in what you have to say. This is why I suggest you stop adding people at random. Yeah, big numbers look great but don’t get carried away.
3. Use a profile picture unless you really are an egg, of course. The best bet is to use your business logo or if you’re posting as an individual, a portrait picture of yourself will do the trick.
4. Use a branded background. Twitter is already in the process of launching a new re-design, regardless the point stays the same. You should be cleverly using the background space. Mashable‘s custom background is a great example of what you should be aiming for.
5. Don’t post about topics that your followers are not interested in. Posting links to your puppy pictures is cute and all but unless it has something of value, it’s considered spam. Stay on topic!
6. Copywrite headlines. You have only a few characters to draw attention and make people click on your content. Using a distinctive headline will make the users undestand what they’re getting when clicking on your content. For some ideas, read our guide – 9 Simple Formulas to Create Killer Headlines.
7. Use call-to-actions while tweeting. Call-to-actions make people act and this is what you want your followers to do. “Please retweet”, “click”, “read” – these are just a few of the call-to-actions that you should be posting.
8. Ask questions to engage your followers. A bakery shop could ask “what’s your favorite pie flavor?” and a social media marketing company could ask their followers about social media tool preferences. The key thing is to make sure the questions you’re asking are related to the interests of your followers. Moreover, incorporate questions, call-to-actions and suggestions with your article headlines and try to spur some interaction.
9. Write a bio that describes who you are. You have 160 characters to tell the story about who you are, what you’re doing and why should anyone follow you.
10. If you’re an individual who’s tweeting, use your real name. If you’re sticking to just an username such as rockstar998 you will be not found on the search engines while searching for your real name.
11. Stop posting automated messages. Most of us consider them spam. Moreover, not many people check their private messages – mostly because it’s filled with spam. Get it?
12. Use Twitter tools! Tools make your life easier (duh) and also open up some new possibilities such as tweet scheduling, keyword monitoring, follower analysis, etc. These tools include HootSuite, FollowerWonk, timely, TwitterCounter, etc. I’ll be writing an in-depth post dedicated for Twitter tools later this week.
13. Monitor what’s being said about you, your brand and the topics of interest. Your aim is to find conversations, jump in and contribute. You can do this easily with Twitter Advanced Search functions that can be streamlined to a third party application such as HootSuite. More about monitoring and Twitter Advanced Search in my next post.
14. ReTweet and converse. Don’t just hit the RT button. Add a few words about why you retweeted such as “great post” or “I agree completely”.
15. Make your tweets public. Unpublic tweets are not getting indexed by the Search Engines. Also, Twitter is a social media site and social media is all about communication, not hiding what you’re trying to communicate. The purpose of public tweets is also to give your potential followers some insight into what you’ve been tweeting about in order to make a decision whether they should start following you or not.
16. Tag your links. In order to clearly understand how your tweeting efforts are effecting your website’s analytics, you need to tag the links that are directing back to content on your own site. Read more about tagging social media links in our post here.
17. Go beyond self promoting. Aggregate and create content about your industry that people are interested in, don’t just plainly promote new campaigns and sales. For example, if you’re marketing a task management software, you could be talking about time efficiency and productivity. Now share your knowledge with the rest of the world.
Posted on: January 9, 2012
Great tips- Thx so much!
Thank you!
Great content – thanks !!!!
Thank you, Christine!
Great tips—will definitely implement 7 and 8!
Thanks
Thank you, Dorothy!