Develop A Twitter Marketing Strategy

The good news regarding Twitter is that although it went public in 2013, it didn’t jump the shark as many had expected. Instead the network has continuing to grow, with an magnified sophistication of its advertising platform. Let’s explore some tips for how to do that.

Why is this important?

• 175 million tweets are sent every day.
• 20 percent of internet users in the U.S. use Twitter. Of them, eight percent are active daily.
• Top Twitter users typically come from the United States, United Kingdom, Australia, Brazil, Canada, India, France, Indonesia, Iran and Ireland. If your business is based in any of these locations then developing a Twitter marketing strategy will likely grow the reach of your brand.
• Twitter does not pass link juice but your Twitter mentions benefit you as social signals for your website’s SEO.

Tip 1: Know the Followers in Your Niche

Planning a strategy for your brand’s Twitter marketing is easier and better organized when you get to know the followers in your niche. These may be your own brand followers or the followers of your competitors.

Use the following tools mentioned below to track the followers in your niche:

• Followerwonk.com: Gives an extensive comparative analysis of followers, and those followed by your competitor sites. Sign up with your Twitter account and follow them or tweet about the tool in exchange for free sign up.
• Mentionmap: Is a free tool that will help you track twitter users that mention particular brands/keywords. It also shows other followers in their network.
• TweetBeep: Gives you hourly updates of conversations that mention your brand/keywords.
• TweetReach: Lets you check the top contributors to your competitor brand mentions for free. This tool also gives you a timeline of tweets that shows how your competitor’s followers mention them on Twitter.

Tip 2: Gather More Followers

Having a large number of followers on Twitter suggests high authority in your niche. It also helps spread your tweets to a wider audience, thus bringing in more traffic. This may also lead to more sales.

Here are some ways to gather more Twitter followers:

• Create a good first impression: Upload a high quality picture of your logo as the profile picture of your Twitter brand page.
• Optimize your Bio: Use the Twitter bio section to describe your brand and add a link to a blog or an external bio, if you have one.
• Promote your Twitter Brand Page: Display links to your Twitter brand page in all your emails and offline correspondences.
• Cross Promote your Twitter Handle on Other Channels: Mention your Twitter handle in places such as forums, guest blog posts, blog comments and on other social brand pages like Facebook, Pinterest, LinkedIn and Google+.
• Share Content to Get Retweeted: Share valuable and inspiring content. People might be encouraged to follow you when your content gets retweeted.
• Reply Publicly: Reply publicly by using @username in the tweet, or click the option Reply under the tweet. This shows others that you are a social brand. See screenshot below:
  
• Optimize Twitter for Local Business: If you are a local business, mention your location in your Twitter page bio and mention your location with a hashtag (#) in most of your tweets. Follow other local businesses that are not your competitors, such as news sources or charity organizations, and mention them in your tweets when relevant.
• Follow Industry Influencers: Follow major influencers in your industry. You can find them using the tools mentioned in Step #1.
• Tweet a Comment: Instead of commenting on a blog, tweet about it on Twitter with the mention of the author’s Twitter handle. You can even strike up a conversation with others who mention the author’s name.
• Incentives for a Follow or Twitter Mention: Offer discounts or organize contests in return for tweets and retweets with your brand mention, or a Twitter page follow, as shown in the example below:
  
  Do not forget to announce the winners in a tweet publicly and always abide by the Twitter contest rules.
• Filter your Followers: Filter your twitter profile with the free tool ManageFlitter. Find out how many users you have followed but are not following you back. If any of these users are unrelated to your niche you can have them removed. This will comparatively increase your number of followers versus the users you follow. Twitter users tend to follow those with a higher number of followers compared to the number of those they follow.

Tip 3: Optimize your Tweets

Plan what and when you will tweet.

The following are some quick tips on tweeting for business:

• Plan the number of tweets you want to deliver on a regular basis. Tweeting too much risks looking like spammy behavior, while tweeting inconsistently may make your profile inactive. Once daily is recommended.
• Post tweets that are worth sharing. Blog posts, photos, videos, events and company announcements are some of the things that must definitely be tweeted.
• Start a conversation or ask a question.
• Respond to tweets containing customer feedback, both negative and positive.
• Keep your tweets short.
• Do not overuse hashtags. Keep it to one or two hashtags per tweet. Check WhatHashTag for hashtag suggestions based on your keywords.
• Retweet useful and positive messages for your audience.
• Tweet special promotions, offers and discounts.
• Make it a routine to tweet a business-related tip to your audience once a week. Highlight online news stories about your brand.
• Peak traffic on Twitter is generally from 9 am to 3 pm. Avoid tweeting after 8 pm. It has been found that tweeting for business is not effective during weekends unless it is a holiday-related tweet. Schedule the time of your tweets accordingly.
• Although posting tweets manually is preferred, it may not be possible for all businesses to hire a dedicated social media manager or in-house social media staff. In such cases, use third-party tools to schedule and automate your tweets, such as TweetDeck and Hootsuite.

Tip 4: Measure the Reach of Your Twitter Marketing Strategy

Measure your brand’s performance on Twitter using the following online tools:

• WooRank Website Review Tool: Woo Rank’s Website Review gives you a quick preview of the backlinks you have earned from Twitter, details of your Twitter account and the most recently earned tweets. The screenshot below shows Twitter backlinks data.
  
• Twittercounter.com: This free online tool gives you Twitter statistics on followers and tweeting data for three months prior to your start date. You can even compare your Twitter statistics with two other brands.
• Wildfire Social Media Monitor: This is a simple yet effective tool to quickly compare your Twitter performance statistics with two of your competitors.
• Socialoomph: This is a free tool that gives you Twitter statistics along with other social media data.

Twitter continues to be a powerful social media powerful tool. It’s important that marketers take more advantage of it because it’s used in many ways for your business.

What Twitter techniques are helping your business right now?

About the author
Ronak Patel has been involved in internet marketing and has interest in search engine optimization (SEO) and social media. He is the founder of web-revolt.