6 Easy Steps to Skyrocket Your Twitter Marketing

Does your brand have a Twitter strategy? There are various benefits of using Twitter for business, such as increasing awareness, engagement, website traffic, and lead generation. However, some brands may have a difficult time accomplishing these benefits and getting decent exposure on Twitter’s busy timeline. Because of this, I am going to give you an actionable 5-step strategy that is guaranteed to:

• Attract new people to your brand
• Engage your followers
• Generate interest and leads

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1. Implement a Brand New Twitter Design

I’m sure you have heard that “you only get one chance to make a first impression”. On Twitter, the first impression begins with the design of your Twitter page. If people do not like the presentation of what your brand has to offer, they are likely not to follow or engage with your brand. Here are some quick tips to help you implement a brand new Twitter design:

• Use the correct dimensions (Profile image: 200 x 200 px. Header Image: 1500 x 500 px.)
• Write a bio that appeals to the interests of your desired followers
• Pin a relevant tweet to the top of your profile page
• Incorporate real people in your profile image or header
• Make quick designs with a free photo editing and design software, such as PicMonkey or Canva

A great example of an effective Twitter design would be Dove. Their bio reads “Dove is committed to helping women realize their beauty potential by creating products that deliver real care”. To supplement their bio, they have an image in their header of a woman. It's also worth noting that the entire color scheme of their logo matches the background in the cover image.

2. Follow Hundreds of People

When you are a small business with a limited advertising budget, generating followers is tough. A surefire way to generate more followers on a consistent basis is to follow hundreds of people. Though, the people you follow should be relevant to the type of audience you are aiming to attract.

For example, LYFE Marketing is a social media management company that targets businesses (B2B). They have attracted nearly 30,000 Twitter followers by adapting this strategy of hundreds of people who follow business-related pages.

3. Post Visual Content

Tweets with images get 2x more engagement. And now that Twitter has introduced video, this is expected to increase even more. If you want to maximize engagement and capture more attention, use captivating visuals in your images. Here are a few tips:

• Use correct dimensions (440 x 220 px)
• Tweet with hashtags to reach more people
• Create unique images

Dr. Gater of RYSE Wellness does a great job using images in their content to increase engagement. In the example above, they incorporated images in their tweet to showcase the message they wanted to communicate about health to their audience. Bright images attract users attention and can prompt individuals to reshare or retweet the content.

4. Join the Conversation

The beauty of Twitter is that is completely public. Brands have the opportunity to directly interact with people without having to earn their “like” or “follow” first. Here is how your brand can join the conversation:

• Use Twitter’s advanced search to find tweets related your business
• Reply to those tweets with a relevant message
• Try to add value to each individual that you engage with

A good small business example of this would H-Massage, which is a small, “mom and pop” massage spa. You can geotarget people tweeting about a massage near their location and interact with them.

5. Start Twitter Chats

Joining the conversation is great, but leveraging Twitter chats will bring the conversation to you. A Twitter chat is essentially an event that takes place at specific time on Twitter. The purpose of it is to organize a conversation around a specific topic in which many people can share their thoughts. For businesses, this topic should be related to your brand and the interests of your target audience.

Do you think you’re ready for your first Twitter chat? Here’s all you need to do:

1. Select a relevant topic
2. Create a hashtag
3. Pick a date and time
4. Promote it to your email list and followers

There are also a few tools that you can use to gain real-time insight into your Twitter chats. A few popular tools you can use are Tchat, Tweetchat, and Nurph. Each of them will allow you to live-stream your Twitter chats and adjust the speed of how fast new tweets appear. This makes reading the tweets in your Twitter chat easy and allows you to focus on what your audience is saying.

6. Leverage Twitter Advertising

Finally, to make your Twitter marketing efforts a complete success, leverage Twitter advertising. It is fairly new to the marketplace of social media advertising and extremely cheap. Here are some good tips to follow:

• Promote posts that are getting high engagement
• Use “Twitter cards” to drive traffic directly to your website
• Target the followers of brands in your industry (such as competitors)
• Target keywords that a potential customer might tweet

On my first attempt with Twitter advertising, these are the types of results I got. With just $12.00, I reached 2,270 people and over 20 people engaged with my content by sharing it with a friend. When you’re pushing a new product or promotion, Twitter advertising a quick way to gain fast engagement and conversions.