With an audience nearing 300 million active users, the Twitter microblogging platform lets you send quick, concise messages to your marketing campaigns, maintain better engagement with your clients, and find new leads that can be converted to clients. These simple facts cannot be ignored. If your Twitter strategy is bland, it is time to spice it up with these 10 ingredients.
1. Complete your Twitter profile: A complete Twitter profile will contain all your contact information and relevant data. This helps followers find you when they're interested in your professional services. An incomplete profile could make it look like you don't care or need to improve at following up on what you start.
2. Send tweets regularly: The nature of tweets means they come through and are read quickly. If you tweet regularly, you'll avoid losing your followers' attention. Send tweets daily when possible, but make sure the content is relevant and valuable to recipients.
3. Ask for retweets: Ask your followers to retweet helpful content or other material you've sent to them. This helps expand your network and increase exposure. At the same time, be willing to retweet material and favorite appropriate tweets. This will help create friendly reciprocal relationships with those you've retweeted or favorited. Also, tweets from businesses with a URL placed in the middle of the tweet are 26% more likely to get retweeted than those with a URL placed at the beginning or end of the tweet. [SocialBro]
4. Follow industry leaders: Follow the tweets of prominent industry figures, thought leaders, major manufacturers, prominent journalists and bloggers, and other important people in your sector. Interact with them via Twitter and work to create a solid and cordial professional relationship with them.
5. Add visual content: Unless you’ve been hiding under a rock, you know visual content is a hot commodity. Tweets from businesses containing images are 34% more likely to get retweeted than tweets from companies with no image. [SocialBro] Create a fresh visual look and feel that is consistent with your firm’s brand. The design should also be supported with content your target audiences will love.
6. Use hashtags#: Hashtags are great for tapping into conversations surrounding an event, conference, webinar, or campaign. In addition, it is a way to discuss a specific topic and generate a conversation. The popularity of a hashtag topic sources Twitter's trending topics. Tweets from businesses that include hashtags are 33% more likely to get retweeted than tweets without hashtags. [SocialBro]
7. Incorporate direct messages in your campaign strategy: Direct messages are a much more casual alternative to the lengthy sales pitch; some prefer DMs to email pitches. Develop a short, witty direct message pitch that prompts a dialog and measures effectiveness. Also interesting to note, Twitter direct message campaigns get, on average, a 300% higher click rate than one-off email campaigns. [SocialBro]
8. Use Lead Generation Cards: According to SocialBro, businesses will, on average, lose 15% of new Twitter followers within three weeks unless they try to engage early. A Twitter Card allows marketers to connect with leads directly within the tweet. As an added benefit, followers don’t have to fill out a form in exchange for content - their contact information is automatically pulled into the card. The follower simply clicks "Submit" on the Card's call-to-action. You will find the lead generation card available through promoted tweets.
9. Integrate Twitter with your other social media efforts: Integrate your social media effort with your Twitter activity—link to your Twitter page from your blog and Facebook site. Tell your email list subscribers when there is a Twitter promo to drive more engagement to that channel.
10. Identify what is working with performance analytics: Analyze your tweets' performance to gain a wealth of knowledge and insight into the effectiveness of your Twitter strategy. Export the data and sort and analyze your best-performing tweets. If you want to expand your reach, you can learn some lessons from popular retweets. Aim to replicate what seemed to work. Identify what did not work. Also, strive to spark engagement by analyzing the tweets that received the most replies – gain insight into what worked with these messages. Ultimately, more data will provide greater insight and enable a sharpened approach.
Contact Colosi Marketing today for more information on how to use Twitter to market your business, produce more leads and increase opporunity.
