Market your business with Twitter

As one of the big four social networks, Twitter is a valuable tool for taking your brand to the masses. With more than 300 million active users and 500 million tweets per day, it gives businesses a huge audience to pitch their brand to. The flipside however, is that with such a rushing torrent of information, businesses must be savvy with their social media strategy in order to stand out.

The success of any social media campaign depends on simple things done well and consistently.

Regularity

Twitter’s constant stream of updates and media means that maintaining an effective presence requires regular updates. Single tweets can disappear into the ether and people will forget your brand, or miss it altogether. Steady tweeting is a sign of an active and healthy profile, making it more likely that customers will take the time to engage with your brand.

Retweets and favourites

Your business doesn’t need to rely solely on content and updates that it create itself. Retweets are a great way to keep your brand your audience’s feed, with just the click of a mouse. It helps to build trust and engagement with your followers by doing more than selling and marketing to them. By providing informative links to other content, your business can build a community and grow its stature as an authority in the industry.

Favourites are another great way to build a network. Key influencers are a big part of social media and connecting with other users and business by “favouriting” their tweets is a good way to get your brand noticed. The reciprocal nature of social media means that once your brand is recognised as one that retweets and favourites others’ content, it will encourage those users to return the gesture.

Hashtags

Twitter lives and breathes hashtags. They’re designed to make topics searchable by linking tweets together, create interest and bring exposure to products, ideas and events. It has been shown that tweets with hashtags receive more retweets than those without, helping to take concepts and campaigns further than any traditional marketing strategy can.

Videos and images

The speed at which Twitter moves makes it imperative for content to be eye-catching and engaging. Twitter is a platform that is optimised for smartphones. The shape of the app, the movement of the feed, and the thumb-friendly nature of the format makes it more natural on a small handheld screen than any other device. With mobile data speeds increasing and the cost decreasing, video and images are becoming the way forward for engaging with content.

Bespoke video, photographs and graphics offer users something more than a standard plain text tweet. This makes it more likely that users will retweet and favourite your tweets, building a community and growing your credibility within the Twittersphere.

Track and analyse

Reacting to and reinforcing what is going right is just as important as adjusting and refining what isn’t. The Twitter platform includes analytics to track results and analyse what is resonating and what needs to be improved. It allows you to break down the demographics of followers and increase the precision of your targeting. This is a vital part of the social media process as it is a constantly evolving medium and there are no set-and-forget solutions. Staying up to date requires monitoring of trends and attempting to tap into what is gaining traction with audiences.

Coordinate with other marketing efforts

Twitter doesn’t operate in a vacuum and is designed to support a marketing campaign of greater scope. Using it in conjunction with other efforts, including other social networks, to promote website updates, blog and content creation, and promotions, will ensure maximum coverage across your marketing strategy. Using just Twitter or Facebook will take your brand only so far, but when implemented as a comprehensive plan, it can provide powerful engagement.