With over 554 million active Twitter users, and more than 58 million tweets going out each day, Twitter is an important component of all your social media marketing campaigns. But, with that many tweets going out each day, you need to learn to use Twitter effectively to make a difference.
Know the Voice of Your Business
Every business has its own voice, even if you don’t know it yet. Is your business serious, funny, organized, or something else entirely? You can have several voices if you want for your business. Even if you use your company name as your handle, let a person or persons be the voice for the name. People like hearing from and knowing real people. Let the profile explain the people behind the Twitter profile.
Define Your Purpose
If you don’t understand why you’re on Twitter, it’s hard to develop good messages that resonate with your audience. What is the purpose of your business, and what is the purpose of your expansion to using Twitter? Do you want to drive traffic to your website? Do you want to communicate with your customers and fans? Remember that your purpose should take into consideration that social media is “social” and requires engagement. Don’t just go on Twitter and push people to your site. It won’t work.
Develop Achievable Goals
As you work on the goals you want to achieve by using Twitter as another marketing channel, write them down. Look at Twitter statistics and research what other companies have accomplished using Twitter as a social media marketing channel. Then try to develop goals that you can reach considering the size and purpose of your own business.
Outsource Strategically
You can’t be everywhere at once; it’s true. You may need to consider outsourcing most of your Twitter marketing campaign. If you’re going to outsource, you need to pick people that you can trust. You need to select people who understand that social media is about engagement and who understand your business enough to truly engage with followers in a real way.
Automate Carefully
There is a lot of technology out there to automate some of your Twitter experience. However, it’s important that you are very careful how and what you automate. Many people are turned off by some of the automation available. You need to understand and know your audience enough to know that they probably know automation when they see it. And remember, you can’t really automate engagement.
Follow with Purpose
The saying that quality is more important than quantity is true for many things, and that includes social media when it comes to following people and people following you. You want targeted followers who really want to see what you have to say. And you want to follow people who can connect you to others who are movers and shakers in your industry or who happen to service the same audience as you but in a different way.
Finally, social media marketing all comes down to two things: engaging and interacting with your audience. If you skip this crucial element on Twitter, you’ll find that your audience becomes very unresponsive to anything you send out. It’s because they’re not paying attention to you because they don’t see you as “real”. Be real, share other people’s tweets, comment on information, share a variety of content (from your own blog posts, to images, to videos) and be sure it is relevant to your audience.
