Our Twitter marketing agency would love to hear more about your business. We hope this blog helps you navigate the platform but if you do have any questions. Please let us know.
First things first… Why are you using Twitter? Is it to chat with your friends or to build your business? If you are just looking to tweet about your choice of breakfast and pictures of kittens you are reading the wrong blog!
This blog is a guide to using Twitter the correct way. It will contain information that you have not heard before – often because I trial and test and examine results, whereas many work on opinion and heresy.
Everything you read here has been tried and tested. You don’t need thousands of followers to be a successful tweeter. Ten real connections are better than a hundred flimsy ones. This blog has been written with companies, affiliates and freelancers in mind to teach you how to create and run your own Twitter campaigns that actually work!
Why Tweet?
Twitter is not just a great way to connect with people, share your opinions and build relationships; it is also an invaluable way of showing off your business. A shop window if you will.
Throughout this blog, we will be covering how to use Twitter effectively to boost sales and increase your website traffic. Many businesses view Twitter as a waste of time. When you consider the time it takes this is not surprising. If you don’t know how to make Twitter work for you then there is little point using it. Twitter is a form of marketing, like any type of marketing there is a way to make it work and a way to waste your time and money.
The same foundations you currently use for marketing should be used in your Twitter campaigns. We will cover this later.
All in all, Twitter can be a very powerful marketing tool IF it is used correctly, I’m going to show you how.
What is your goal?
When you start using Twitter you should have a clear goal. What do you want to achieve from this exercise? Customer Service? Brand Recognition? More Sales? Can you break that down even further? Some of these examples may be useful.
1. To grow an engaged and relevant following
2. Generating brand awareness and business leads
3. Helping customers and reducing customer service enquires via traditional channels
4. Expanding reach and creating news
5. Sharing thoughts
6. Participating in industry conversation
7. Attaining competitive intelligence
8. Monitoring your brand’s reputation
9. Building connections with the community/industry
10. Distributing rich SEO content
11. Offering special discounts
12. Obtaining customer feedback on prospective new offerings
13. Beginning relationships with journalists
14. Recruiting
So why are you online? If the main motive is to increase your website traffic you need to rethink the path you are walking to reach that goal.
Twitter users appreciate contact with genuine people. If the only value you are giving them is a hard sell or a link to your website, you are going to have a very poor reputation and no real relationships. Of course, there will be those that follow you and click your links, but you’ll be ignoring many unique opportunities.
Some ill-advised people think they need to be on social media because “that’s where our customers are,” and don’t realize the potential that Twitter has. It is a tool that enables your business to realize goals.
Is the business developing quickly, and you need new staff? Is one of your problems customer service? Do you need to improve internal communications? We will help you address those issues and many more
Who are your customers?
Any good marketing strategy takes social media demographic and psychographic profiling very seriously –and so should you! Demographics explain who and psychographics, why. There is no point sending a message out if you do not know who you are sending them to.
Demographics are the bread and butter of audience-based targeting. They are statistics, indisputable facts describing a person. This is very important because there are many behavioral elements used in targeting that are not fact, (like psychographics, lifestyle, or purchase intent.) These are suspicion and admittedly often correct but demographics are a total statistic.
They are black and white– your age, sex, culture, salary, if you’re married, if you have children, and if you own your home.
Although these characteristics can change over time, they are mutually exclusive – you can’t be aged 18 and 40 at the same time.
When you comprehend these facts you can learn how to make your messages productive.
For example, companies who sell bath foam understand that the people that buy the most bath products are often married women. These women also tend to have children between the ages of seven and sixteen. Similarly, a luxury sports car manufacturer knows that single men aged 25 – 35 are the most attentive and open to their marketing. However the people that buy the cars are married men age 45 – 55, who also make more £100,000 a year.
When you are in possession of all the facts about your target audience you can start planning, but you still need a deeper understanding. Even the most sophisticated demographic target is broad, so how do you take the next step and zero in who you really want and need?
The solution is usually within the intricate world of psychographics.
Psychographics are typically used to explain why people buy merchandise and the attitudes, opinions, and personality traits that drive them to do so. Psychographics are fundamentally more intangible than demographics because they are multi-dimensional by nature.
Consider trainers. From a demographic point of view, almost everyone is interested in them, from young to old, men and women. From a psychographic viewpoint, some consumers care most about performance, while others want something that looks good and perhaps holds status. To take full advantage of sales, the shoe company needs to recognize this so they can market in the right way, to the right people.
When you understand psychographics you can appreciate what people enjoy doing in their spare time, their moral values and their musical tastes.
While far more complex in nature to first understand and then execute, adding psychographic fundamentals to a strategy offers a larger payoff when deployed successfully.
This is Social Media though and the rules are slightly different. You need to make sure your morals, interests, values, and opinions are matched to your target audience. People buy from people and they will know in a heartbeat if your content is not genuine. Twitter is selling YOU so you need to make sure what you are saying is what you really mean. If it isn’t you are setting yourself up for failure. When using these principles you need to be aware of how your target audience communicates with each other. Approaching teenage boys using Shakespearian English is not going to build any kind of relationship. This is much in the same way you wouldn’t tell a member of parliament you are LMAO. (Laughing my ass off, for those who don’t know!)
Remember when you were a child and your parents would say ‘it’s not what you said, it’s your tone of voice?’ Even then we were encouraged to think about the way we were speaking to an audience.
When you are creating content you need to consider how you will come across. No one can see your face so you need your tone to convey your meaning. This is why it is so important your values are aligned with your audience. You simply can’t fake this. If you are nothing like your target audience then I would suggest hiring a professional who meets the profile. This will help your brand and your relationships will stay solid. Remember Social Media is about trust. If you want to build a successful business you must make sure you are genuine.
Research Twitter’s Market.
Now you know who you want to talk to you must find them in the vast sea of Twitter. No one likes research and the temptation to dive in and get going can be overwhelming. However, putting the effort in now will pay dividends so try to be patient.
What we want to do is fairly basic. We want to find out where our target market is located and who they are following. What are they retweeting and why. Spend some time finding what trends they promote and what words they are HashTagging. Like I said at the start, it is better to have ten fans than one hundred semi-interested followers.
Now go right back to the start and revisit your goals. Do they still stand? At this point, I find it very helpful to write them down. If you do not have a concrete goal how will you know if you have achieved it or not?
Setting up your Twitter account.
Now you have decided to go for it you will need a good profile. Visit www.twitter.com and follow the basic steps to set up a profile (you will need an email address for this.) I have pasted Twitter’s instructions on how to set up a profile below to help…
1. Go to https://twitter.com and find the sign up box, or go directly to https://twitter.com/signup.
2. Enter your full name, email address, and a password.
3. Click Sign up for Twitter.
4. On the next page, you can select a username (usernames are unique identifiers on Twitter) — type your own or choose one we’ve suggested. We’ll tell you if the username you want is available.
5. Double-check your name, email address, password, and username.
6. Click Create my account. You may be asked to complete a Captcha to let us know that you’re human.
7. Twitter will send a confirmation email to the address you entered on sign up, click the link in that email to confirm your email address and account.
Now we can start working on the background design. Twitter automatically provides you with a background of clouds. On the right hand side there is a button for ‘design’. In there you can select your images colours and themes. Once you have familiarized yourselves with them you will need to customize your own. (There is an option for this on the design page) Don’t over complicate this, a simple image is much more effective than complicated design.
Lets get started.
Now your profile is ready for the public to see you can get your message out there.
Never ever mindlessly tweet. We don’t want to know what you had to eat and that you need the toilet. Even at this stage, when you don’t have followers – we need to think about engaging them.
Creating good Tweets is a skill in itself. You need to portray your message, values and themes in just 160 characters. You need to be strategic. Again – think about whom you are talking to….
Learning how to write effective tweets for your page is a must. If you do it right, you can boost your online presence by connecting with a wide audience and turning them into customers. Do it wrong and you can turn off a big pool of potential clients.
Keep it short – Research shows the most effective tweets are 80 characters long.
Questions work well to engage people. Lets pretend you are a florist. Some example tweets could be:
- When was the last time you received some flowers?
- For those of you getting married, what bouquet are you having?
You will then need to mix this up with general questions like – What are you doing today? What is your opinion on x in the news?
Make sure you’re enticing viewers to click through. Some of your tweets will likely include a shortened URL, so take some best practices from journalistic headline writing and make sure that your tweets pop so you get people interested in clicking your link. Nobody is going to click on your links if every other tweet has one so save them for interesting relevant information. Always mix up your content. If every single tweet is a sale or promotion, your followers are going to lose interest. Thus, make sure you’re spicing it up by keeping it varietal with blog posts, news articles, pictures and more – it’s a really great way to keep your followers engaged. –
Always use proper grammar.
Even if you have a limited number of characters, it’s absolutely unacceptable for you to use misspellings and bad punctuation. So if you’re guilty of saying “U” instead of “you,” stop it! If you need to save space use different words rather than bad grammar. Try replacing problematic with tricky and influence with sway.
If you can, connect with people on an emotional level. Don’t overkill it but show your human side with some emotion. Again you will need to consider your psychographics. If your target audience are young brides they will not really want to hear the work you are doing with dying horses.
If you can, be humorous, but remember who you are talking to. Light humor is perfect but people can take offence at what you say. Don’t tell a joke aimed at an 18 year old male to a middle-aged woman.
Make sure you are on the ball. If something happens in your industry you need to talk about it to demonstrate your knowledge and authority.
Did you know that quotes are among the highest shared content on Twitter? Do you have a favorite author? Business, leadership, brand or life leader who inspires you? When you do quote make sure you reference the person that the quote comes from!
Good examples of quotes are as follows:
- “Attitude, not Aptitude, determines Altitude.” ~ Zig Ziglar
- •“Expect the best. Prepare for the worst. Capitalize on what comes.” ~ Zig Ziglar
- “Optimists are those who go after Moby dick in a row boat with a bucket of tarter sauce.” ~ Zig Ziglar
- •“A narrow mind and a fat head invariably come on the same person.” ~ Zig Ziglar
- •“The most important persuasion tool you have in your entire arsenal is integrity.” ~ Zig Ziglar
- •“Sometimes crazy just isn’t enough.” ~ Dr Seuss
- •“Well done is better than well said.” ~ Benjamin Franklin
- •“Success is not in what you have, but who you are.” ~ Bo Bennet
- •“The number of times I succeed is in direct proportion to the number of times I can fail & keep on trying.” ~Tom Hopkins
- •“You have everything you need to build something far bigger than yourself.” ~Seth Godin
Images are also a great way of attracting attention on Twitter. It can be anything from a picture of your office to a photo of your product. In general images get a better response rate so try to think of different ways to use them.
So now we know what techniques we can use, how are we going to make the most of it? There are a two Twitter specific words that you should familiarize yourself with. HashTag and Trending.
Trending: Trending topics are things being discussed more than others. An algorithm that attempts to identify topics that are being talked about more right now than they were previously automatically generates Twitter trends. The trends list is designed to help people discover breaking news from across the world, in real-time. The Trends list captures the hottest emerging topics, not just what’s most popular.
Trending topics become popular either through a concerted effort by users, or because of an event that prompts people to talk about one specific topic.
You will often find television programs make something trend. If you can get your word trending you are doing very very well.
HashTag: HashTags look like this – #
A hash tag is basically a way for people to search for tweets that have a common topic.
For example, if you search #friends, you’ll get a list of tweets related to the TV show. What you won’t get are tweets that say “Spending the day with my friends” as a HashTag doesn’t precede “friends”.
The great thing about HashTagging is that if someone wrote a tweet without putting the word ‘friends’ in the main message, it will still show up in your search because of the tag. Eg. “Who is funnier? Ross, Chandler, or Joey? #friends”
The flip side is that if you search using the HashTag, and someone wrote a tweet about the show without including it, that tweet won’t show up in your results, even if ‘friends’ appears in the text. Eg. “Do you think friends should make a film?”
In a way, hash tags allow you to create communities of people interested in the same topic by making it easier for them to find and share info related to it.
Another tip – To send someone a message on Twitter you need to put the @ sign before their handle. For example @Verriberridigital
So now you need to start tweeting. I find the best thing to do is take a few hours out of your month. Sit down and plan one tweet a day. The rest can be spontaneous, but there should be at least one point of contact that follows a plan. What I usually do is every time I think of something, funny, relevant or hear a quote I tweet it straight away. This gives you a really good basis for your content.
My last word on the subject – Twitter isn’t about advertising, it’s about conversation. Great tweeters don’t try to sell to their followers; they try to engage them in a personal way. They share information, they help followers with problems, they make business competition personal, and sometimes even funny. Each tweet should be a window into the life of the company behind the marketing, which will make the marketing stronger as a result.