It is true that Twitter forces you into brevity but it has the potential to build your network and reach many people without spending a lot of money. Thus, the brevity has more power under its hood. Twitter is a good platform for discovering new articles, trends, videos, and people. Twitter can be leveraged for organic and paid marketing strategies. Let’s dive in briefly in the world of Twitter and explore how it might be able to benefit your business.
Twitter was founded in San Francisco in 2006 (that seems like a lifetime ago in terms of internet years) and has now offices all over the world. What can you do right now on Twitter to help your brand?
- Plan a content strategy: think about the kind of tweet. Mix it up! Use a mix of news, humor, retweets, questions, and some promotional tweets
- Have a hashtag strategy: Plan for at least a couple of hashtag updates per day
- Don’t make every tweet a sale: Have a balanced content strategy, for ex. post two sales tweets for every 10 tweets
- Don’t let every tweet be about your brand: Share non-branded ideas as well
- Ask questions: This shows the Twitter community that you are being engaged. Ask questions about news items, trending topics, and topics geared towards members in your community
- Share other people’s stuff: Share links to blog posts, images, trending articles, etc.
- Use Twitter together with other platforms: You can use teaser tweets to shine a spotlight on content that lives somewhere else online
- Use Twitter analytics for insights that you can apply to future tweets
Using Twitter correctly and consistently can definitely help build your brand. Digital marketing loves data so let’s look at some Twitter numbers:
- Twitter’s demographic skews male (70/30)
- 25-34 is the largest age demographic
- 500 million tweets are sent per day
- Barack Obama is the most followed person on Twitter with 128 followers
Below is a chart that gives a good visualization of the percentage of U.S. adults that use Twitter:
Above, I mentioned that you need to plan a content strategy. It’s all about content. What kind of content can you create? You could have blog posts, ebooks, whitepapers, guides, templates, webinars, and checklists for ex. To beef up some content you can create custom images in PowerPoint or Photoshop. Sproutsocial wrote an article on “17 Engaging ideas for what to post on Twitter“. We will all hit a creative roadblock and that can be a good time to think of something new, fresh, and inspiring. Here are some ideas:
- Tweet a poll: A Twitter poll can really engage your audience
- Start a Twitter contest
- Share humor or an inspirational quote
- Have a coffee chat with your followers in real time
After many years in the advertising world I have heard mixed reviews about paid advertising on Twitter. It’s challenging to scale and difficult to have solid ROAS (return on advertising spend). However, if the cost model is just based on completed video views for ex. (CPV, cost-per-view), it could be worth a try to see if a Twitter campaign can contribute to an omnichannel marketing strategy’s ROAS. Twitter has a business section where you can read about how to start a paid campaign. Click here. You don’t need a minimum budget to start a campaign. Before you start any campaign, research your competition first. This can also help you to find new opportunities in your industry. Sproutsocial has a tool for competitive social media analysis (they don’t sponsor me).
Twitter can be a great platform for an organic marketing strategy. It’s probably not yet the best choice for a stand-alone paid advertising strategy but could give your marketing KPIs a lift when used as a complementary marketing strategy implementation. I suggest that you get a feel for Twitter’s organic potential first before investing in a paid strategy. If you have any questions, go to our Contact page here. If you have any comments, questions, or funny stories, I’d love to hear them! For now, be good to each other and never stop learning. Cheers!
Photo by Alexander Shatov on Unsplash
