Is your Twitter marketing yielding the best results possible? It isn’t if you’re just using it as another one-way broadcast channel filled with your marketing messages. Best social media marketing practices have evolved and it’s time now to integrate your Twitter efforts with the rest of your marketing plan.
5 Marketing Strategies to Maximize Your Twitter Effectiveness
As a social media platform, Twitter requires a continual stream of targeted, fresh content and multi-directional engagement to attract and maintain an active follower base. Here are six strategies to boost your Twitter return.
- Show you’re human. Actively participate on Twitter with a human voice and emotions to show you’re interested and care, not just waiting to pounce with your marketing message. Actionable Twitter Marketing Tip: Put social media guidelines and a social media contingency plan in place so employees know how to identify themselves when they represent your business and behave as private individuals. Go one step further and provide tailored training to help them engage effectively on social media platforms.
- Offer participants information they want and need. Don’t push an automated feed of the same marketing content you’re delivering on other platforms. Build your Twitter following by creating a unique stream of timely, targeted information, such as special insider knowledge and offers only distributed on Twitter. Make your tweets stand out and be worth paying attention to by providing value to your perspective audience. Actionable Twitter Marketing Tip: Determine who you’re going to follow. For most non-media businesses, it makes sense to follow anyone who follows you so you can communicate with them. Also, keep your branding consistent across your accounts in terms of look and feel as well as content. Remember the content should be consistent with your brand. (To help you with your tweets, here are 5 Tips to create compelling content.)
- Be part of the Twitter community. Leverage unique Twitter conventions to expand your reach, specifically hashtags and Twitter chats. Use and promote relevant and unique hashtags to expand your message reach to a broader audience. Join Twitter chats covering your area of expertise in order to interact with others in real time and share your knowledge. This is a great way to build your Twitter following since people get to know you. Actionable Twitter Marketing Tip: Be a guest speaker on a Twitter chat. Participate before and after the conversation using the chat hashtag. Alternatively, if there aren’t any relevant chats in your category, start one to build an engaged following on Twitter.
- Promote your Twitter presence on other social media networks and owned or internal media. Like other marketing initiatives, continually publicize your Twitter presence. Use internal media and other social media channels to encourage people to follow you. Include the breadth of your options such as your website, email newsletters, offline marketing, packaging, billing, correspondence (like customer service emails), autoresponders, and blog. Actionable Twitter Marketing Tip: Incorporate a tailored call-to-action related to Twitter and your offering with a related promotional code for tracking. Also, wherever you have social sharing buttons, add a Follow Us on Twitter button since these readers are Twitter-savvy.
- Celebrate followers and customers with 15 seconds of Twitter fame. Like other social media platforms, Twitter is about the community, including your prospects, customers and the public. Twitter’s a multi-directional communication platform. Take advantage of this by participating in the conversation where appropriate and talk directly to others. Recognize others with retweets and shout-outs. Actionable Twitter Marketing Tip: Show your appreciation for your customers by mentioning them in your tweets using Twitter memes like #FollowFriday. Another option is to create a tailored communication (such as customer of the day) and integrate it with your brand to acknowledge customers on Twitter.
As you extend your marketing efforts on Twitter, use a combination of strategies to engage your target audience while laying the foundation to deepen your customer relationships. Integrate these efforts into your overall marketing.
Do you have any other recommendations to help make your Twitter marketing initiatives more effective? If so, please include them in the comment section below.
Happy marketing,
Heidi Cohen
Here are some related articles that you might find interesting.
- How to maximize your impact on Twitter
- Twitter Etiquette: 24 Guidelines to Tweet By
- 15 Ways to build your Twitter following
- Twitter ABCs
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