Winning Twitter marketing tips for your small business

Twitter is undoubtedly a powerful social media platform to improve brand recognition, drive more sales, and expand your business’s online reach.

According to research, the purchase intent of users increases by 2.7x when the potential customers are exposed to tweets from small businesses.

But how exactly can you use Twitter for marketing your small business?

The answer is simple - any way you want to.

Twitter is that rare social media marketing platform that allows you to build hype around your new product, provide instant customer support, and make your small business brand a little more human among many other things.

What makes Twitter a unique social media marketing platform is a number of things?

Twitter is:

• Completely free-to-use platform
• Helps you expand your reach
• Allows you to share and promote content in seconds
• Works as a search engine tool to find potential customers
• Allows you to analyse competitors’ marketing content to identify their strategy
• Helps you to provide instant customer support
• Lets you engage with your followers and share the latest news about your business.

In short, whatever your marketing goals are, Twitter has got you covered.

And if you’re just starting out, these Twitter marketing tips will definitely help you in crafting a winning Twitter marketing strategy.

But first…

What is a Twitter marketing strategy?

A Twitter marketing strategy is basically a Twitter content marketing plan that is centred around creating, publishing, distributing, and marketing your branded content for your business’s followers, potential customers, and buyer personas.

The main goals of a Twitter marketing strategy are to attract potential followers and customers, increase conversions, and boost brand recognition. Now when it comes to creating a Twitter marketing strategy, the majority of small businesses don’t know how to get started.

But in reality, creating a Twitter marketing strategy is fairly simple.

Here are the five simple steps to create Twitter or any other social media marketing strategy for your business.

1. Research your target audience
2. Create unique and branded content
3. Organise a concrete publishing schedule
4. Analyse the results and post more of what performed best
5. Repeat

Now that we’ve reviewed why Twitter is a unique social media platform here are 10 Twitter marketing tips for small businesses to boost conversions, improve brand awareness, and increase online reach:

1 - Write a strong profile bio

Having a strong, professional, and memorable bio for your Twitter business account is crucial.

For starters, every profile visitor will surely read your Twitter bio as soon as they land on your business profile and your bio will have a huge impact on whether these profile visitors follow you or not.

So, write your Twitter bio keeping that in mind. And remember, you have only 160 characters to write your bio, so choose every word thoughtfully to get the most out of it.

2 - Interact with your Twitter followers

You can easily increase your follower count on Twitter by simply interacting with your Twitter followers regularly.

In other words, interacting with followers will help to keep them coming back and engage more with the posts you publish in the future.

If you don’t know how to do it right, just begin with responding to people who comment on your tweets and thank everyone who retweets your posts. Twitter users always appreciate when brands respond to their comments or even like their retweets.

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3 - Analyse competitors’ Twitter activities

Apart from interacting with your followers, you should also keep an eye on your competitors’ Twitter activities to identify their marketing strategy.

To do this, you can either simply follow them or check their profile from time to time to see what they’ve been posting recently.

And, while doing so, you should also check their basic engagement metrics such as likes, retweets, and comments to identify which type of posts are working for them.

This will help you get a better idea of your competitors’ marketing efforts and identify what is working and what is not.

4 - Focus on followers’ needs and interests

If you want to increase your followers, boost conversions, and improve brand awareness, then you’ve to make sure that your content is resonating with your target audience.

Remember, you can only achieve these Twitter marketing goals if you meet your target audience’s needs and interests.

So, study your buyer persona carefully before creating a content strategy for Twitter marketing.

5 - Use images and video more often

This Twitter marketing tip might fall under the common-sense category, but I’ll still explain for the sake of its importance.

You must start using images and videos in your tweets more often.

Multiple research and studies have already proven that tweets with images outperform simple text-only tweets.

Tweets with videos, on the other hand, can get six times more engagement than simple text-only tweets.

And the reason is obvious too.

For instance, images and videos add an intuitive and engaging element to your tweets, which help to catch the attention of users and target audience while they’re scrolling through their feeds.

So, start creating and/or including engaging images and videos in your tweets.

6 - Use hashtags

Use hashtags in every tweet you post. Hashtags basically help to expand your post’s reach on Twitter.

According to a study by Buffer, tweets with one or two hashtags receive twice as much engagement.

So, create memorable and relevant hashtags that are unique for your business.

Apart from this, you should also research commonly used hashtags in your industry and include them in your tweets on a regular basis.

7 - Use keyword targeting in your Twitter ads

If you’re planning to advertise on Twitter, you must take advantage of Twitter’s Keyword Targeting component, which helps to find different words to engage with your target audience by including them in your post content.

These are the words and phrases that are often searched by users on Twitter and can help to reach your target audience faster.

So, leverage the Keyword Targeting component in your Twitter ads to identify words, phrases, and even content that is most relevant to your target audience.

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8 - Create a content sharing schedule

As your follower count grows, you’ll have to post content on a more regular basis to keep them engaged with your business.

Although, just posting tweets more regularly will not be sufficient; you’ll have to post your content at the right time.

To help you get started, here are the best times to post your content on Twitter:

• On weekdays, you should post between 8pm and 10pm and 6pm and 9pm.
• You can also plan to post some of your content around noon and between 5pm and 6pm on any day of the week.
• If you’re a B2B company, weekdays are the best days to tweet your content.
• Conversely, if you’re a B2C company, weekends are the best days to tweet your content.

9 - Share all media mentions

If your small business often receives media mentions, you should definitely share it on Twitter.

Doing so will certainly help to make your business look more legitimate and it will also increase the chances of profile visitors converting to loyal followers.

So, make sure to broadcast all media mentions and tag the platform along with the URL of the original source.

This will not only boost your follower count and expand brand awareness, but it will also increase the chances of getting featured again in the future.

10 - Check your direct messages often

Similar to every other social media networking platform, Twitter also provides a feature to send private messages to other Twitter users.

All you need to do is locate ‘direct message’ and open to see if you’ve received any messages.

Make sure to respond to each and every direct message on Twitter to make your business Twitter profile a little more human.

And while you’re at it, you should also follow the practice of checking your inbox on a daily basis.

Twitter, as you can see, is a powerful social media platform to market your small business’s services or products. Twitter has the ability to expand your online reach, improve brand awareness, boost website traffic, and drive more sales.

So, create a Twitter account for your business right away and start using these 10 Twitter marketing tips to grow your business on Twitter.

(Edited by Evelyn Ratnakumar)