PART 3: How to Market Your Business on Twitter

November 8, 2017

Part 1: Where Should I Advertise for Books on Social Media?

Part 2: How to Market Your Business on Instagram

Part 3: How to Market Your Business on Twitter

Part 4: How to Market Your Business on Facebook

When it comes to social media, Twitter is the water cooler of the bunch. It’s where people go to have conversations with other like-minded individuals, share what they’ve been up to that day, or vent about pretty much anything that has been a source of frustration in their life. It’s also where you’ll find celebrities battling each other 140 characters at a time. But, Twitter fights aside, this platform is an incredibly useful way to engage with your customers and, perhaps more importantly, for them to engage with you.

While other social media platforms like Instagram are a great way to display your product, Twitter has the added bonus of also acting as a customer service channel. According to Forbes magazine, companies that use Twitter to address customer service issues saw a 19% increase in customer satisfaction. That is huge! More and more people are reaching out to businesses through social media, particularly Twitter, to ask questions and bring up problems they are experiencing. If you are not there to respond, you can bet that customer will move on to someone who will.

Deciding on a Content Strategy and Schedule

Once you’ve created an account and chosen an appropriate handle, it’s time to decide what type of content you want to post and how frequently you want to post it. The conversational nature of Twitter means you can have some fun with your posts once in a while. Although it’s great to post content that promotes your business, don’t be afraid to change it up by posting content you think your followers will find amusing (gifs are a great way to get a laugh), or educational like an e-book or infographic. Anything that will encourage your followers to engage with you in a positive way is always a good thing.

As for scheduling, because of the high frequency with which most Twitter users post, a tweet that you sent out this morning is most likely going to be completely lost in your followers’ feeds by the afternoon. This doesn’t mean you have to post every single hour of the day, but starting out by scheduling 3-4 tweets throughout the day is a good way to stay on your followers’ radar. As you develop a following and become more comfortable with the platform, feel free to even bump that up to 6-8 tweets a day. Also keep in mind that your tweets are capped at 140 characters, so you don’t have to worry about drafting a speech for every post. Just focus on keeping it short, sweet, and engaging.

When it comes to using hashtags, check out our previous blog post on the basics of Instagram and remember—space is limited, so if you use a hashtag make it a good one.

Advertising on Twitter

Now that you’ve created an account and have started posting content, you might be considering using Twitter to advertise your business. Similar to the way other social media advertising works, with Twitter Ads you can choose what you want to be the focus of your campaign. Some options include:

o   Tweet engagements

o   Website clicks

o   Attracting new followers

o   Awareness

Make sure to choose the right campaign type for what you are trying to achieve with your advertisement. If you just created a Twitter account and want to build your following, then creating a campaign to attract new followers might be best for you. Or, if you want help drawing people from Twitter to your website, then a website clicks campaign would be ideal to reach your goal. Depending on the campaign type you choose, you will be charged accordingly. For example, an Awareness campaign uses CPM (cost per impressions), whereas a New Followers campaign charges you per every new follower you acquire through the campaign. This helps to ensure that you only pay when you get your desired results.

When you are designing your advertisement, don’t forget that the 140-character limit still applies. This means that attaching an image to your ad is a great way to communicate important message details that won’t fit in your ad copy.

Targeting Options

Once you’ve chosen the type of campaign you want to run and have created your ad, it’s time to choose your audience. Like most social media advertising platforms, you can target based on gender, geographic region, language, and interests. However, one thing that makes Twitter Ads unique is its ability to target followers of specific Twitter accounts— if you want to target your competitors’ followers, all you need to know is their Twitter handle. Another great audience to target is influencers in your industry. There is no limit to the amount of accounts you can target, however it is recommended that the accounts you choose have an overall minimum reach of two million (a handy graphic on the right sidebar will let you know how close you are to meeting that minimum as you add accounts). Twitter also provides suggested accounts to include based on the ones you’ve already added, which can be useful if the accounts you are targeting have a small following.

Analytics

Like other social media advertising platforms, Twitter provides the usual analytics to help you gauge the success of your campaign. Depending on the campaign type you choose, you can see statistics like impressions, results (e.g. clicks, new followers, engagements, etc.), result rate, and cost per result. An additional analytic feature is the ability to see results per each audience targeting option. So, if you choose to target followers of your top six competitors, you can see the number of impressions and results (e.g. link clicks) each competitor account received from your ad.

These numbers are a really great way to help you break down your audience and determine if you are targeting the right people. It’s also a useful way to discover a particular audience that you didn’t realize was engaging with you. For example, when creating your ad you may skip over the option to target people who use a specific device platform. However, once your ad has run you might see that all, or most, of your engaged audience is coming from one or two different platforms, such as Android or iOS devices. If that is the case, then for your next campaign it would be wise to target those device-platform users in order to maximize your engaged audience reach.

All of this can seem a little overwhelming if you’re still trying to figure out what your Twitter handle should be. But don’t despair! Just take everything one step at a time and before you know it, you’ll be tweeting like a pro.

Author:

Erica Thorpe

Social Media Coordinator