Don’t be intimidated by a social media giant. Gavin Hammar, founder and CEO at Sendible, offers advice on how to tackle Twitter
Well before you hit the tweet button, it is vital to take a more strategic approach and firstly look at why and how your business and brand can benefit from using Twitter. At this point, it’s really about going back to basics. As marketers, we are constantly exploring new ways to use social platforms and striving for more advanced methods. Focusing on the basics such as how to use Twitter to reach your target market and researching what you can expect to gain from it will help you to set a strategic plan with specific goals.
Look at the fundamentals such as who will manage the account, should it be marketing or the CEO? How many users will you have – too many and you may lose the consistency of tone, too few and you may fail to make an impact. If you are a growing business and just starting out on Twitter research is vital. See what your competitors are tweeting about or search for industry keywords to gather market intelligence.
It’s an easy way to get insights to inform your strategy.
Setting up
Choose a suitable username. The @username is what the business will be known as on Twitter. Try and keep it short and memorable, so it doesn’t take up too much of the character limit and people can remember it.
Make sure the general header image is engaging, the finer details make a difference and basics such as colour schemes should be taken into consideration. Images and videos are also important for engagement, Twitter studies have shown that including photos can increase the number of retweets by 35 per cent and videos can result in a 28 per cent rise.
Right from the initial stages get your brand integrated into the Twitter community. Follow what competitors are doing, follow customers, prospects, industry influencers and look at who is following your competitors.
Creating and sharing lists will ensure you keep up-to-date with specific groups and target audiences and will help to position your company as an authority in its field. These can be set to public or private, so you could monitor your competitors in a private list and demonstrate your impressive list of brand advocates in a public list.
Update your profile with tweets consistently, use your latest content and events, including any new images and videos to enhance your marketing message.
Content is king
It may sound obvious, but any content that is posted has to be engaging to encourage interaction from other users. Include links to articles, relevant news stories, special promotions and testimonials. The biggest mistake businesses make is by being too sales orientated – including interesting links and general thought-provoking content is far more likely to drive visitors to your website or landing page than a sales-y tweet. The same goes for retweets, make sure it is relevant content from other Twitter users (not your direct competitors).
Give the company tweets a personality and a real voice to avoid being a robotic-like tweet. Mixing a couple of ‘human’ tweets
in with your business related tweets will keep the balance and make it more natural and engaging.
You have the option to favourite a tweet – larger businesses and brands can favourite tweets to acknowledge everyone who mentions them, rather than responding to each brand individually.
Given the immediacy of Twitter it is vital to respond to any questions and comments in a timely fashion. Start replies with
@username if you want to limit the number of people who can see a conversation. Alternatively, if you want to shout about a compliment place the @username further into the text so the tweet reaches as wide an audience as possible.
Use hashtags to start conversations, make your tweet relevant to conversations, and try to get involved with appropriate hashtags that are trending, also add relevant keywords to your tweets.
Measuring success
You can measure engagement within Twitter itself via its own free analytics tool. This will provide you with basic, statistics-driven information – such as number of click-throughs and replies, and measure the reach of your tweets.
One method is to create landing pages specific to the campaign you are tweeting with a form visitors have to complete to download a piece of collateral, for example a whitepaper, case study, video or free trial. This will enable you to see the real ROI from Twitter to lead capture.
Add UTM tracking values to your URL’s and shorten them, this will enable you to track a visitor’s journey through your website and see its success.
Tools of the trade
There are successful social media management solutions that will allow you to monitor your brand, including any mentions and retweets. Rather than relying on multiple tools to effectively manage different elements of social media, you could use a solution to engage with your audience, monitor your brand and track results from one dashboard. For Twitter alone, it will enable you to schedule your tweets, auto retweet, auto follow when people mention a specific keyword and deliver relevant content from third-party websites and other sources. These types of solutions would also give you full reporting capabilities enabling you to measure the engagement of your tweets.
