With the growing number of active mobile users online, using different social media avenues can greatly help in marketing your business online. Most consumers nowadays are glued to their mobile devices scanning through social media networks to find new things and to search for information. It’s almost common knowledge that Facebook and YouTube are the leading social media networks with the largest number active users worldwide; while in Singapore, WhatsApp and YouTube ranked with the most number of users last year.
But what many people and entrepreneurs are not aware of is the fact that there’s another social media platform that they can use to market their business. No, it’s not Instagram nor LinkedIn. It’s actually one of the pioneers of social media networks. It’s called Twitter.
Twitter has over 300 million active users worldwide and a niche audience demographic, which makes it a great avenue for most marketers. For those who aren’t aware of how it works, Twitter is actually a social media platform that is solely focused on interacting or communicating with other users. You can post and share links to websites, photos, and videos same as other social media networks, but what separates Twitter from others is the short-length status updates. You can only post a tweet of about 280 characters per tweet.
But don’t consider the short tweets as a hindrance. It actually makes the social site more unique. Twitter is like a chatroom for everyone and creating an account is very easy: you just have to come up with a unique Twitter handle, upload a profile photo, and fill out the bio. After that, you can already send your first tweet. It’s the same with businesses; creating an account is pretty simple.
One of the challenges, though, when using Twitter is growing a legit and authentic set of followers. Here’s how it works: you can set your profile as Public so everyone can look through your profile and see what you tweeted, but only those who follow you can see your tweets in real time. Thus, building followers is really essential.
How Is Twitter Different From Other Social Media Platforms?
Just like your target market and audience, every social media site has different personalities. Thus, every marketing strategy should be different. Before we point out the unique selling proposition of using Twitter, let’s first understand how this social media site is going to be used for business.
You can share your business’ information and content through Twitter using links and images. More than the usual contents from your website, you can also drive engagement by doing promotional activities such as quizzes. Through that, you can directly interact with your consumers and share feedback about your products and services. But most importantly, Twitter is a great venue for building your brand and creating a network of projected audience or customers.
The activities mentioned above, if you will notice, are focused on interactions. And that’s the unique aspect of Twitter: it thrives on communication and not just pure content broadcasting.
Twitter Hashtags And Chats
One of the challenges of businesses when using Twitter is gaining popularity and inviting followers. The answer to it? Twitter chats!
Through Twitter chats, you can grow your followers and you can engage with your audience at the same time. Twitter users are mainly interested in interacting through social media networks, they aren’t online just to distribute or consume information. These people are those that are highly active in communicating. They are the ones who reply to tweets and retweets your contents.
So, how does it work? Twitter chats begin with a question and a hashtag (oh, and make your post public).
From there, people will start to participate and communicate with each other which can make your brand and topic a viral discussion online. That could be the start of your brand’s online popularity.
Tweet Planning
Regardless if you have a team that helps you manage your social media networks or you’re handling it on your own, it’s better to plan your contents ahead of time. For instance, if you are going to launch your Twitter page in October, you should have already planned what to post on the last quarter of the year. It’s just making sure that your page will be active and you will always be visible to your users.
Ok, so how about jumping to trending topics? Well, that’s one of the best things about Twitter: you can tweet as many as you want within a day. Through active tweeting, you can keep your audience more engaged. Oh, and make it a habit to include hashtags when planning your content.
But the most important aspect of all is to make all your tweets conversational; make people want to reply to your tweets. It’s not enough that you will share statements and facts. Every tweet should open the door for communication and conversation.
You should also remember that you can do video marketing on Twitter. Well, it might not be your first platform for publishing videos but it’s a feature that you can also maximise. You can use original videos of about 140 seconds and upload them directly to your feed. You can also use other apps to edit your videos to make more enticing to the users. There are also some applications that can help you upload live videos. This feature is functional if you are conducting events and would want to share latest updates to your followers.
To help you craft daily tweets, you can consider some of these tips: (1) use questions instead of close-ended sentences; (2) reply to other users and tag them; (3) don’t just share links, always include your insights about the link that you will share; and (4) always engage your audience when sharing links by knowing that they think about it.
Quantity Matters
As mentioned above, it’s essential to tweet as many things as possible to keep your Twitter presence intact. You can’t just tweet a link to your blog and expect to people to react to it. On average, there are around 6000 tweets per second on Twitter, 350,000 tweets per minute, and 500 million tweets per day. Which only means one thing: tweet once and you will be buried.
To become visible, you have to come up with various creative ways of sharing or expressing a single idea or concept. For example, if you are going to promote a public service ad for your company, you have to create different executions. You can start with the link of the ad to your website, then you can follow up with a tweet containing an image related to it, and, lastly, you can create a short video that’s talking about your campaign. And, before we forget, create a hashtag and a simple tweet with an engaging question about the topic.
That’s already a solid four tweets for a single topic. But, this is just the basic formula. You are free to innovate and create more ways to tweet your idea.
The Road Less Travelled
If you will come to think of it, Twitter is a marketing road that is less travelled by many brands and businesses; it’s a less travelled road where a lot of companies are missing out. Marketing through Twitter is something that you should prioritize. It will help you learn more about your customers; it makes your brand more human; it can help you promote new products and services; and you can shake the World Wide Web through viral posts.
With Twitter, you have the opportunity to build a brand while encouraging a healthy customer engagement. To be honest, Twitter has gone a long way since their launch in 2006. This platform has proven itself to be a powerful avenue to build relationships between consumers and businesses. Start using Twitter; be brave to drive your way to success on the road less travelled.
