Just like the rest of the social media platforms, Twitter is swiftly adapting to the ever-changing social media landscape. Some features have been done away such as SMS accounts, but there are some other new interesting features such as control over who can reply to your tweets. They have done a good thing to also implement changes to improve the platform’s problem of fake news and bullying. Along with all these changes, Twitter best practices for business must still be observed for success.
One of the top social media networks, Twitter gathers about 368 million users as of Q4 2022 and 237 million monetizable daily users across the globe. That’s quite an effervescent activity that offers opportunities to engage and expand your audience.
No matter your industry or sector, Twitter marketing is a valuable tool that can help you reach your goals and interact with your existing and future customers.
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In order to gain visibility among your customers, following the best practices for Twitter is compulsory. To successfully launch and manage your Twitter account, check out the following to-do list:
Your Twitter Account Should Be Optimized
Like anything else in the online marketing world, your profile and account for Twitter need optimization. The essential Twitter best practices for business rely in their majority on visibility. So, aim for visibility.
Ease for others the task to find you, set your account to be searchable and become visible to more people.
Since visibility has a great pay-off, pay attention to:
Your Handle: Keep it simple and short, it needs to have a connection with your brand, to be identical if possible. Avoid adding supplementary characters or numbers to your handle to make it unique. If you absolutely need to differentiate from other names, try adding letters.
Your Bio: Optimizing your Twitter bio is paramount, especially when speaking about Twitter for business. Conceive a rockstar profile that will attract users to your profile. Your bio is the first thing on your profile that users will check on and one of the most important pillars of your Twitter marketing. Insert relevant hashtags for your industry, a link where users or followers are able to find you.
Hashtags you employ: There is no secret anymore that hashtags increase reach. As such you have to use appropriate hashtags for your industry or trending topics. Count on a hashtag analytics tool to support you in deciding what hashtag to use. And use a maximum of two hashtags per tweet.
Pinned Tweets: Make sure your display a pinned Tweet on your feed. It is recommended to be a popular and engaging piece of content. As people are more likely to engage with already popular content that others already interacted with.
Profit on Twitter Search Operators: Use Advanced Twitter Search, to identify mentions about your product, service, or company. Or simply to join conversations related to your industry.
Cross-promote your Twitter account on other platforms: On your website, on your email list, on other social media networks, or within PPC campaigns. Encourage your followers from other platforms to follow you on Twitter also.
Get Verified
This is one of the most important Twitter best practices for business, whether you are a small or large business, you should apply for your account to get verified. They accept requests for verification of fashion, music, government, acting, religion, media, sports, and business among other key interest areas.
Once your request has been accepted, your account gets verified and you get a checkmark next to your business handle. This is the symbol of authentic accounts.
Why is this an important best practice? There are many rogue people out there who may try to impersonate your brand in order to benefit from it. To avoid such risks, you need to get authenticated.
Verifying your account also gives people confidence that you are indeed a trustworthy brand.
Build a Relevant Twitter Following
When you are just starting with your Twitter account and you see accounts with hundreds of thousands or millions of followers, well that becomes instantly overwhelming and thoughts like “I will never be able to achieve such a level of reach…” is teasing you. But be patient, everyone started from zero at a certain moment. Start by following the influencers and most prominent personalities of your industry.
Refrain from unproductive methods like buying followers. If you want a relevant, truly engaged following that could convert into customers at a certain moment, build it from scratch.
As mentioned above when starting follow all your industry leaders.
To increase your Twitter following, approach tactics like:
Use helpful tools like BuzzSumo to identify prominent personalities in your industry. BuzzSumo allows you to see the most shared content in your industry, who wrote it, and which companies are generating pizazz. Follow them all.
Follow leaders’ followers. Tools like Tweepi or ManageFlitter can help you with this task. The advantage here is that these users are already interested in your industry and expertise area, so more likely to follow you.
Exploit Twitter directories. Tools like About.Me and Twellow empower you to find other influencers and users connected with your industry. As you start to build relationships with these leaders, your audience will grow also.
Recommend followers. As you do this for others it’s a high probability that others will return the favor.
Follow users that mention you – your products/services, your brand, or your industry/niche.
Tweet famous and inspirational quotes – People, in general, enjoy greatly inspiring quotes and they share them with their following. So, this is a simple strategy that will get you retweets and increase your reach.
Organize or promote a contest. If you want to expand fast the number of your followers, this is a proven way. Even if the quality of the acquired followers might not be the best, it’s recommended to award a prize that is interesting for your buyer persona. (Do not decide on a smartphone – as this will be of interest to anyone, try a paid course or a subscription to a relevant tool).
Test promoted tweets. If you consider you need some extra exposure, you can also try the promoted tweets to expand the number of persons you reach. Twitter offers various targeting options to select who exactly will view your tweets.
Twitter Best Practices: Establish Your Goals for Twitter Marketing
Your marketing strategy should absolutely include a social media marketing strategy that details the goals for the social media networks you are present on. So, obviously, you should have some goals established for your Twitter activity, some measurable and realistic ones.
The goals you set are the ones that will determine your whole Twitter marketing strategy. They will help you identify the metrics to keep track of.
These goals may include:
§ Drive more traffic to your website.
§ Increase brand awareness by keeping track of the number of your followers and the reach
§ Increase conversions via sales tracking
§ Boost interaction and engagements by tracking retweets, comments, shares, or likes
§ Improved customer service support
These are only some of the major goals and yours could be different but, you must set clear goals. This means each content material you create and every comment or step you take in your marketing strategy must get you closer to achieving them.
Here are some examples:
Tweet daily at least once: Keep your feed active, tweet at least once each day. You may want to try posting 3 times a day for a month for example and analyze the results.
Establish a rate of followers’ growth for a six-month period. Input effort to see each month an advancement compared to the last month.
Be followed by 5 influencers. This will help accelerate your following development.
Engage your audience more. Take 5 minutes each day to engage on Twitter: to reply, retweet, and like. Establish clear goals depending on your purpose.
Get involved in Twitter Chats. 1-2 per month for instance. Twitter chats are events hosted by leaders and businesses and are very frequent. Make use of tools like Twubs or Tweetchat to find or host such chats.
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Check on Analytics to Keep Track of Your Efforts
Twitter Analytics is the tool that dictates the fundamentals of your decisions concerning your Twitter activity. Measure the results of your Twitter marketing efforts to see what’s working best for your audience and where you need to direct more resources. Measure the number of followers, impressions, likes, mentions, link clicks, etc. Use social media analytics tools like SemRush, Sprout Social, Followerwonk for supplementary insights.
How effective have your efforts been? Analyze your Twitter account to see the best and worst-performing content. This will help you fine-tune your future campaigns by offering your audience the kind of tweets that they’re more interested in and dropping the kind that failed.
Twitter for business provides reports on your performance such as customer care and competitive analysis among many more. For optimum results, you can look at the following popular metrics:
Impressions – How many times did your tweet appear in someone’s timeline?
Engagement – How many retweets, favorites, follows or replies did your tweet get?
Top tweets – Which were your most engaging tweets?
Hashtags – Which is your most popular hashtag?
Twitter Best Practices: Engage, Engage, and Engage
Engaging is the mantra of social media and Twitter is no exception. The basics of Twitter are the micro conversations and it’s among the first places to give feedback, ask and answer questions. Sprout Social Index reveals that 45% of consumers contact brands on social media to obtain a response or resolution.
Engagement is a pillar and paramount request of consumers on Twitter, so, search for the right balance between conversation and promotion. The recommended ratio is 80% versus 20%.
Some tactics to enhance your Twitter engagement might be:
Ask relevant questions and run polls. Don’t just ask questions for the sake of conversation, try to ask questions that uncover insights and different points of view related to your products or services. And as a bonus, this will revive conversations.
Respond immediately, retweet, and @mention others. Responding quickly shows others that you are active, retweeting content posted by others and mentioning other users creates the premise that others do the same for you. Curate carefully your retweets, as they will reflect on your business and should be in line with your core values.
Tweet trending events and breaking news. Use the “trendjacking” (association with a trend for awareness purposes) technique in your favor. Conceive a way to originally associate your company with the trend.
Join the conversation and tweet others daily. Comment on other users’ tweets, and build conversations as often as possible to expand your reach. If you’re going to send a direct message, it’s recommended to value bombing rather than cold prospecting. The person operating a company’s social media accounts is rarely the person who makes buying decisions.
Use just your best content for marketing on Twitter. People are more likely to share valuable, well-researched content. Preferably evergreen content. Use content research tools like Social Animal to find the top-performing content in your niche. Social Animal allows you to analyze top-performing content, find the best Twitter influencers, and with the View Sharers feature you can get a list of relevant audiences to whom you can promote your content.
Talk about industry events. Ask for details and opinions of those who were present at a certain event. You will gain insights, interact with industry influencers and brand ambassadors.
Count on visuals. Insert images, gifs, or videos in your Tweets to increase your engagement rates. Engagement, in general, is triple for visual Tweets, so exploit them.
Visuals are the first vector of sales.
Use Professional Styled Stock Photography to Promote Your Business.
Advertise with Twitter
Any business that advertises on Twitter must know the kind of tweets that stir the most engagement from users. It’s one of the best ways to increase your brand influence. Twitter advertising offers two approaches, Twitter Ads or Promoted Tweets.
Twitter ads are a very reliable alternative if your goal is to build a large follower base or when you want to increase your brand awareness. You can use a large variety of targeted tweets to achieve this. The amount you pay for your advertising will be determined by the objectives you’ll set for Twitter ads. (for instance video views or conversions)
Promoted tweets show your tweet on users’ search results as well as users’ timelines. Via this option you will pay a monthly fee for the period your tweet is being promoted and Twitter will display the tweet on your targeted audiences’ timeline.
“Tweeps” are able to engage on Twitter ads just as they would on any ordinary tweet. Thus, you can leverage this to make the best return on investment from Twitter Ads.
Twitter Best Practices for Business: Use Visuals
280 characters can definitely not make a thousand words. So, why not use pictures and videos that say way more than that?
Visuals are a sure way of saying more with your limited amount of characters. They will hold your audiences’ attention for longer, and that way you’ll give more information. Statistics actually show that tweets with images get three times more engagement while videos rake up to ten times more engagement.
Gifs also add to the content mix and they improve our tweet engagement by 55%.
Twitter best practices for using visuals include the fact that you must optimize them for mobile because 93% of videos are watched on a handheld device.
Run Twitter Polls
Twitter polls are fun but a genius source of market data when Twitter best practices are observed while running the poll. Twitter gives the following guidelines:
Run the polls regularly – Create regular polls on a weekly or monthly basis, it kills 2 birds with one stone, you stay on top of your audience’s mind and you show them that their opinions matter.
Let them contribute to decision-making – this offers them validation that builds better relationships with the target audience. Letting them participate in business decisions of whatever level gives them the feeling that they’re stakeholders in the brand.
Get market research data on your business – you can get so much out of a simple Twitter poll in terms of insights.
Run a poll on relevant topics – think about the topics and ideas that are relevant to your brand and create polls around them. It could be information you’re seeking about your products or services or just a simple muse on the industry. Run a relevant poll and you can gain so much and strengthen your brand based on that.
Twitter Best Practice: Keep It Personalized
Instant gratification is the biggest order on the menu of social media. And people love to be acknowledged because it gives them the immediate satisfaction that a brand noticed them. Of course, every market has its “special” people, so you won’t miss one or two people just looking to cause a disturbance. But there are loyal customers who are just looking for someone to listen to their complaints or compliments.
You can also personalize by mentioning followers by “@ “directly at them. This brings the human side of the brand and people can relate more to you than when it’s all robotic. There are many instances in that brands have gone viral in a positive way just because someone responded to a tweet or reached out to someone on Twitter.
Use Hashtags Wisely
Hashtags are often used wrongly. But it’s one of Twitter’s best practices for businesses to use relevant keywords and key phrases in order for their visibility to be propelled wider. Stick only to relevant keywords.
When users click on the hashtag, they’ll be able to view all tweets that have included that hashtag. And when you get super creative with it, you’ll easily turn it into a trending topic.
Improve your vision on Twitter
Just like YouTube or Facebook, Twitter, too, customizes and sometimes limits the content it lets users see according to their location. If you have followers in different countries or just want to circumvent the limitations you might face because of your country’s laws, a VPN comes in very handy. You can check how your tweets look from a different country’s perspective and pick up on the subtleties of the local Twitter community. This will help you find the right voice and hashtags for tweets targeted at a regional audience.
You can change your country setting on Twitter as part of your account info, but only a VPN allows you to actually change your location by accessing a VPN server in a country of your choice so that you can experience Twitter as if you were really there.
Use a Social Media Management Tool to Schedule Your Tweets
Consistency is the basis for Twitter marketing and this is a core Twitter best practice. Tweeting can be a time-consuming activity, so in order to streamline, the best way is to use a social media management tool to help you schedule your tweets. Tools like Hootsuite, Buffer, MeetEdgar, CoSchedule offer you the modality to plan your tweets and stay organized. Thus, this activity will consume a few minutes a day or several hours a month, without even being logged on the platform.
Don’t forget to be authentic in your tweets! It’s your most original asset.
Tune In
Social listening is how businesses are using Twitter in 2023. It’s not all about saying something relevant. Listen out to conversations around your industry. Pay close attention to everything being said about your brand.
Thankfully Twitter enables this through its advanced search tool. It lets you know what’s being said about your products and services. You can get even more insights from discussions on trending topics. When you get this information, you’ll use it to refine your content and tweak it where necessary to build more trust and loyalty.
To get the most out of it, pay attention to what’s being said about your brand name, industry hashtags, your competitors as well as relevant topics.
Depending on the level of your Twitter account, you may have to do a part or even all of these tasks. Here is a synthesis, a checklist of Twitter best practices for business to help you tick them easier.
Twitter and social media are part of a still-young industry and they are continuously evolving. As a consequence, these Twitter marketing best practices change in time, so you have to keep learning and be up to date with the modifications that will interfere. And your following will continue to increase and probably generate more customers and business.
