How to Make the Most of Your Business’s Twitter Account

Twitter is an amazing platform for growing your business and spreading your brand’s visibility. Many large and highly popular companies are present on Twitter, publishing content daily and growing their audiences rapidly. However, more and more small and medium-sized companies are trying to acquire new customers, drive traffic to their site, and generate leads while using a powerful social media platform — one that has around 330 million active users per month.

To make the most out of your business’s Twitter account, utilizing different marketing strategies is a must. The strategies we mention here can be separated mainly into two categories. The first one is for planning, such as getting new ideas, brainstorming, researching your competitors, and so on. The other one is partly about the implementation of the plans you’ve made and the content strategy as well, so let’s begin.

Identify Your Target Audience

This is the first and main thing you should do if you want to get more followers and higher engagement on your business’s Twitter account. Identifying your primary target audience is the most important step in having a successful business Twitter account. If you have already identified your primary target audience, then it may be a good idea to do the same for your secondary target audience that is interested in your product(s) or service(s). While identifying your target audiences you can include your current and potential clients, bloggers in your field, journalists and editors, suppliers, and so on.

A simple and easy way to identify your target audience would be to research your competitors and check out their followers. There are many tools on the web that you can use to find out more about the people your competitors are engaging with, as well as their interests, likes, dislikes, and so on. These are the people that you want to turn into customers, so knowing more about them is essential for the success of your business Twitter account.

Set Objectives

You’ll never reach your goal if you don’t know exactly what it is that you want to accomplish. If you don’t set your goals or objectives for your Twitter account, then you are aiming at nothing (or everything). Either way, you’ll have a hard time getting the most out of your target audience.

Solidifying your short-term and long-term goals is something you need to think about. One of the most useful goals to have in the beginning is to grow your following and get your target audience engaged. Building relationships with influencers, getting competitive intelligence, generating brand awareness, and obtaining customers’ feedback (while watching your brand reputation in real-time) are examples of other important goals you can set for your business Twitter account.

Plan Ahead

Planning ahead of time can make you a better marketer, save you valuable time, and make your brand stand out. Planning 2-3 weeks in advance for special events and holidays can have many advantages. That way you can take advantage of the trending hashtags that are popular on those holidays, make plans and schedule posts while promoting your products, or offer a special discount for the holiday in question.

You can also plan a series of blog posts in advance that you’ll publish every day of the week. Another idea is to do a weekly poll, so you could interact with your audience. While interacting with your followers, you can get useful information that you can use to improve your products or services, so have this in mind.

Test and Learn

Every audience is different, and so is yours. Some brands and companies are popular with younger people, and some are with families. Some target mainly females and some are more focused on males. Your company may want to get and engage with people that are interested in web design, fashion accessories, or some completely different industry. Since every brand’s audience is different it would be of great benefit if you test (post different kind of content at different times) and learn from the analytics about what your audience wants, when they want it, and how they want it.

Tweeting at the right times will increase your reach and make your tweets more visible. There are certain times when Twitter users are most active (around 12 p.m. and from 16 p.m. to 17 p.m.), but that may not be the case for your target audience.

You can also test with different types of content and see what works best for your followers. One week you can publish more videos or gifs, the other week more images or infographics, and so on. Afterward, you can use Twitter Analytics to get a sense of what is more engaging for your followers and optimize the future content based on that.

Use Visual Content

When sharing information or entertaining content on your Twitter account, it would be more engaging if you do it in a way that is visually appealing for the users you’re trying to reach. If you use images, gifs, and videos your posts will get more visibility, engagement, and probably more retweets. That way you’ll have a chance to get more followers and drive engagement to the products or services you are trying to market.

Gifs are great for higher visibility since they last only a couple of seconds and there are more chances for them to be seen in comparison to videos. They grab people’s attention and users are tempted to click the play button (they don’t autoplay).

Images with text are great for engagement for two main reasons. Firstly, posting an image with text adds context (since you are limited with words on the tweet) which saves you characters in the tweet, and secondly, it grabs people’s attention in a way that they slow down scrolling in order to read parts or the full textual content on the image.

Other than images and gifs, videos are immensely popular and you should use them whenever you can. They autoplay (on mute) and that is greatly beneficial for making your tweets highly engaging. If your video is short while funny or informative on a related topic to your brand, people will accept it even if it’s low-quality. Also, keep in mind that Twitter videos drive at least double the usual replies, retweets, and favorites in comparison to videos from third-party video players, like from YouTube for example.

Interact With Customers

One of the most popular and effective ways to get more engagement out of your followers is to interact with them. Interaction with potential customers can be very useful, get you more conversions, therefore more revenue.

Twitter chats are a good way to get rush of traffic. While utilizing Twitter chats, in most cases it’s better to represent yourself as a person, instead of as a brand/company. Writing personal responses while answering a question and giving useful information can be extremely positive for your company. Hosting (and joining) a Twitter chat will increase your engagement, get you more retweets, and potentially increase your following while generating valuable feedback. That way you can make new connections with relevant users and establish your company as an authority in your area of focus.

While hosting a Twitter chat it’s useful to organize the discussion so it revolves around a given topic by using the standard hashtag for your brand’s chat. It’s only a plus if that hashtag (that you’ll be using in every Twitter chat) is catchy and original while promoting your brand, so have this in mind.

80/20 Rule

This 80/20 rule means that at least 80% of your tweets should provide value to your followers, help them in some way, solve some common problem they have, and so on. Meanwhile, the other 20% of the tweets should be used to promote your brand, product(s), or service(s).

Twitter Cards

If you have a website, make sure you set it so that when someone shares a blog post, an image shows up below the textual content of the tweet. That way those tweets will stand out and have higher visibility.

There are a couple of different Twitter cards you can use. There is summary card (contains description and thumbnail image), summary card with large image, photo card (photo with more prominence), gallery card (displayed 4 photos), app card (contains information related to the application), player card (includes video and audio), product card (contains information about the product), and lead generation card (can contain sign-up button, you need advertising account on Twitter).

Post, Post, Post

Posting frequently and regularly is definitely recommended do if you are looking to increase your number of followers. Posting around 5-10 times per day is the minimum you should do, but you can post as often as 20 times a day.

The best way to know how many times you should post is to test and see how many followers and engagements you get weekly from posting 5 times (per day) the first week, 10 times the second, 20 times the third, and so on. There are many thoughts and topics you can share, so there is no stopping you from scheduling your posts for the next few days.

Final Words

There are many steps you can take in order to get the most out of your business Twitter account. Utilizing different marketing strategies is an absolute must if you want to get the most out of the social media platform you’re on. To get an idea of some additional tips & tricks regarding Twitter marketing, we recommend checking out this guide to learn about more strategies you may be able to take advantage of for your business.