Twitter is an incredibly powerful social media platform to build your personal brand as well as to strategically market your products and services. The platform is easy to use and is one of the most preferred channels for social mediamarketing.
Wondering how Twitter is used for marketing? You are not alone!
Whether your brand is in B2B, B2C, or D2C space, you must make the most out of Twitter in order to acquire new users, provide customer support to your existing users, and build an engaging community.
While working with Hackr.io, I made Java tweet about Hackr.io. I have worked countless hours on social media platforms like Twitter so that you don’t have to.
These statistics about Twitter will only convince you of the incredible power social media possesses.
It may take a few days for you to get used to the platform, but once you get a hold of it, and start executing the Twittermarketing tips mentioned in the article, you will definitely make Twitter a part of your brand’s marketing strategy in the long run.
If your brand already has a presence on Twitter, enjoy reading this piece and take your Twittermarketing to the next level.
Creating content on social media may be easy, but Twitter is not just about creating content.
Let’s get started!
Table of Contents
Twitter Marketing
Always approach social media with a plan of action. Twitter can be a great marketing tool not only for raising brand awareness but also for creating a viral marketing campaign.
Create SMART goals – specific, measurable, attainable, relevant, and time-bound. Going viral on Twitter cannot be a goal. Here’s an example of a SMART goal for Twittermarketing – reaching an audience of 1 million in 3 months.
You may never need to run a Twitter ad or pay agencies for their Twittermarketing services if you get the basics right.
Think of your brand’s Twittermarketing strategy as a continuously changing document based on the experiments you carry out on the platform.
But before you start your experiments, work on the following:
Optimizing Your Profile
Whether you are just starting out on Twitter, or already have a presence on the platform, the first thing you should do is to audit your Twitter profile.
Your brand’s logo should be your account’s profile picture.
Upload a cover image that stands out visually. Keep changing the cover images based on your upcoming product releases, milestones reached, awards won, new campaigns launched, upcoming conferences, etc.
Your Twitter bio should have a short crisp description focusing on your unique selling proposition. You can even include hashtags in your bio for your brand to appear in Twitter search when someone searches for the hashtag(s) you mentioned.
If your brand has partnered with a few notable players in the industry, mention their usernames in your profile bio. Here are a few ideas for your Twitter bio.
Add a link to your brand’s website in the website field.
Having a short and meaningful username on Twitter is preferred. You may get more mentions if your Twitter handle is short as Tweets have a character limit of 280 characters.
In the location field of your profile bio, you may or may not mention your location (country or city). It totally depends on the type of business you run. A fully remote tech startup may not add a location whereas an eCommerce website shipping goods within a country should. Add your city as a location if you only serve customers of your city.
Have a look at Search Engine Journal’s Twitter account. Here’s what I like about their profile – an appealing cover image, usage of hashtags, and mention of the newsletter in the bio.
Twitter Profile Optimization by SEJ
Here’s a cool tip to get more clicks from the audience. Include a link in your Twitter profile bio. When a user hovers over your username, Twitter showcases the bio but not the website. Hence, include a link in the bio.
Try hovering on accounts to understand what exactly I mean!
Hover on an account on Twitter
Following Accounts
A brand with a large number of followers is generally perceived as valuable and authoritative. But how do you gain followers on Twitter?
You can gain followers on Twitter by following key influencers in your niche, engaging with their tweets thereby adding value to the conversation, sharing unique insights or research with relevant accounts for them to consider your brand an authority in the niche.
Mention brands, influencers, and other stakeholders in your tweets so that they engage with your tweets. This way you can leverage their audiences. This is another way to increase your followers on Twitter – a useful technique when you have just started building your audience.
The Twitter community loves threads (a combination of tweets related to each other or on a particular topic – threads will be discussed in the “Create Content” section of this article). Curate content in the form of threads to get the most out of the Twitter platform.
Follow key influencers in your niche, members of your team, your partners and collaborators, and other stakeholders of the ecosystem you provide value to.
When users follow your brand’s account, go through their profiles to see if they are relevant and important to your business. Follow back relevant accounts. It’s easy to collaborate with the accounts that follow you first.
If you have followed many users already, use a tool to unfollow users that unfollowed you after you followed them. As a brand, do not follow every account that follows you. You do not want your Twitter feed to be cluttered.
When you’re just starting out building your audience on Twitter, you need followers who will engage with your tweets. Let’s reverse-engineer what I just said – the users who engage with your tweets are more likely to follow you if you engage with their tweets or follow them if they are influencers. Hence, engage with the ones who engage with your content.
Do not follow many users in one go. Your account will get rate-limited.
Avoid the follow-unfollow strategy. Your account may get suspended if you unfollow a lot of accounts after following them. Twitter is all about community building, and such a follow-unfollow Twitter strategy will not help build a trustworthy community. You will be losing a lot of your potential customers.
If you somehow come across a message that states, “You are unable to follow more people at this time.”, then it’s time you stop right there and do not follow more users at this point.
This usually happens when you follow many accounts in one go, or you have reached your daily follow limit (400 for non-verified accounts and 1000 for verified accounts), or in the worst case – your account is locked or limited.
Read more about Twitter rate limits and rules for following accounts here.
Creating Content
Twittermarketing isn’t easy, and definitely not a piece of cake. It mainly revolves around creating brand awareness and building a community using the content you create.
Creating Tweets
When you’ve just started building your presence on Twitter, you do not need to tweet multiple times a day. Tweet once or twice a day till the time you grow your followers to a decent number.
Twitter allows 280 characters per tweet. Create crisp valuable content, tag relevant accounts, include images and links.
Add value to the community by replying to tweets posted by influencers, brand advocates, news publications, and other brands. That’s how you will reach more users without paying for a promoted tweet.
Here’s an example, check out the below tweet by Elon Musk:
Our biggest challenge is supply chain, especially microcontroller chips. Never seen anything like it.
Fear of running out is causing every company to overorder – like the toilet paper shortage, but at epic scale.
An amazing strategy to make users engage with your content on social media is to mention/tag them in your post. This works well on Twitter as well.
Mention relevant accounts in your tweets for them to engage with your content. Once they engage with your tweets, their audience will see (on their feed) that they have engaged with your tweets.
Mentioning accounts is one of the best ways to get genuine engagement and increase your followers on Twitter.
To increase the reach of your tweets, use relevant hashtags. Use 1-2 hashtags per tweet. Tweets with 1-2 hashtags get 21% more engagement than those with three or more hashtags.
Use hashtags in your tweets
Tweets with hashtags are 33% more likely to get retweeted than tweets without hashtags. Note that Tweets containing only one hashtag are 69% more likely to get retweets than those with two hashtags.
Here’s Another Tip – Find the most important hashtags for your business. Check out the top tweets for these hashtags. Replicate key characteristics of these top tweets.
Use Hashtagify to find the best hashtags for your tweets before you even tweet. Here’s the data from Hashtagify for the Twitter hashtag “#growthhacking”. Use hashtags that are fairly popular and have a +ve percentage for the monthly and weekly trends. The Twitter tool also tells you the audience demographics of the accounts posting in the hashtags.
Stats for #growthhacking via Hashtagify
When you’re attending a conference or an event, use their branded hashtag for additional visibility. For Example – #DigiMarCon is a branded hashtag for the DigiMarCon conference. Other users posting in the same hashtag are more likely to engage with your content, and maybe even follow your brand.
Using Images in Tweets
Now that you know what hashtags to use, make yourself aware of the fact that tweets with images get 89% more likes. Make sure to use relevant images only. If you don’t have prior design experience, you can use online tools like Canva and Piktochart for designing stunning visuals.
Use images in your tweets
Using Videos and GIFs in Tweets
Images outperform text, but videos and GIFs outperform images. Tweets with videos are 6 times more likely to be retweeted than tweets with photos and 3 times more likely to be retweeted than tweets with GIFs. Videos increase the lifespan of your tweets. The lifespan of an average tweet is 18 minutes (in case you wanted to know).
Use GIFs in your tweets especially when replying to tweets posted by other accounts. I love using GIFs when replying to other people’s tweets. Meme marketing work well on Twitter.
That’s why you must optimize your tweets for conversions! But how to increase the CTR?
Here’s a tip – Place your URL in the middle of your tweet. Not at the beginning and not at the end. Tweets from businesses with a URL placed in the middle of the tweet are 26% more likely to get retweeted than those with a URL placed at the beginning or end of the tweet.
Going Live on Twitter
You can also go live on Twitter. The live streams are automatically posted as tweets when the stream ends.
Creating Polls
Polls work well on Twitter. Create polls and Fleets (Instagram-like stories that disappear after 24 hours) to engage with your audience even more.
Once you have attained a few followers (say 50 or 100), increase the frequency of your tweets.
Your peak posting times will depend on your audience. Test how your tweets perform at different times and days. According to the time zone of your audience, tweet between 12 PM and 6 PM for maximum reach and engagement.
Another study by CoSchedule reveals that tweets posted during working hours for B2B businesses get 16% more engagement. Have a look at the below infographic:
Source – CoSchedule
If you wish to know the best times to post on Twitter for various types of businesses, have a look at the below infographic by CoSchedule:
Best times to post on Twitter for various types of businesses
Use a social media management tool like Buffer or Hootsuite to schedule your tweets. Scheduling makes your life easier especially if you have to schedule the same set of tweets again and again routinely week on week.
Follow the 80-20 rule of content creation. Only 20% of your tweets must be salesy and promotional in nature.
Creating Twitter Threads
Last but not least – create Twitter threads. A thread is a combination of tweets related to one another or that are on a particular topic. Threads are perfect for telling a story, curating content, sharing step-by-step tutorials, repurposing blog content, giving advice, sharing your knowledge, and more.
Create a tweet thread to make the audience aware of your previous tweets related to a topic. To create a thread, simply click/press the comment button on your previous relevant tweet and post your content.
Here’s an example:
1. Tell a general and surprising story
this idea from @paulg and is the framework of every good thread
in this example
General = the story of a normal guy obsessed with a cookbook
How to engage with content posted by others on Twitter?
As a marketer, now that you know what type of content works best on Twitter, it’s time you also learn how to engage with content posted by influencers, your customers, and other brands.
A brand must engage strategically with tweets posted by industry influencers, customers, and other brands!
Strengthen your bond with the ones you follow by retweeting their tweets. Only retweet relevant tweets. Don’t forget to add your quote when retweeting. It increases the chances of your tweets getting retweeted.
An amazing twittermarketing strategy is to comment on relevant tweets posted by industry influencers showcasing your expertise. Make sure to comment as soon as the tweets get posted to have maximum impact.
It’s always a fun thing to engage with the tweets of your competitors. IndiGo, India’s largest private airline, started the light-hearted conversation by poking fun at Vistara and other airlines hopped on to have some fun!
Airlines having fun on Twitter during Lockdown
Last but not least – be funny with your tweets! Here are a few brands that are nailing their Twitter engagement by just being funny.
Another strategy could be to engage with recent and top tweets in relevant hashtags. Your goal should be to provide value. Do not like, comment, or retweet many tweets in one go. Your account may get rate-limited.
Please do not use bots and other automation services for liking, commenting, and retweeting. Why would you risk losing your account?
How to use Twitter search for marketing your brand?
Let’s say the target audience for your brand is an SEO executive (like Semrush).
Search the term “SEO”. You’ll see something like this:
Twitter Search
Just below the “People” section, you will see some tweets. Comment on these tweets – only relevant ones. Don’t comment something generic (like – good content, like it, etc). Add value to the tweet!
Why I’m asking you to comment on these tweets is because these tweets are getting more visibility as they are Top tweets for the term “SEO”.
If you want your target audience to check your brand out, like relevant and valuable tweets from the “Latest” tab.
Latest Tweets in Search
This is one way of increasing your twitterfollowers. Do not like many tweets instantly. Twitter will think that you’re using automation for liking tweets and could possibly restrict your account from engaging with tweets.
As tweets containing photos and videos are retweeted more, make sure to comment on tweets from the “Photos” and “Videos” Search tab.
You can even filter accounts and tweets based on filters like – exact phrase matches, language, location, mentioning certain accounts, and more using the advanced search.
You can even find tweets containing links, posted within a date range, and having minimum k likes, comments, or retweets. Advanced search is powerful, isn’t it?
Ideal for finding partnership/collaboration prospects.
How to leverage Twitter lists?
Now that you’ve learned a few basic tricks to get the most out of Twitter, it’s time to deep dive into an advanced Twittermarketing strategy.
Let’s focus on how to use a Twitter List!
Here’s how lists work on Twitter – add accounts to a list and see their tweets in the form of a feed that updates in real-time as and when new tweets are posted by the accounts on the list.
My Twitter list comprising of marketing influencers
Lists can be public and private.
From your brand’s Twitter account, create lists to curate content posted by relevant stakeholders.
You can create one list for influencers and bloggers, one for users who actively engage with your content, one for competitors to keep a track of their activities! The sky is the limit!
When you add an account to your public list, they get a notification.
Do you know why lists are magical? Because they can be embedded.
You can embed a list containing industry influencers on your brand’s website.
Your website’s visitors would be delighted to see real-time content curated by you for making them aware of the latest happenings, trends, resources, and more!
Now you understand the power of user-generated content?
The advantages of using Twitter Publish
You already know that Twitter lists can be embedded on your website or blog.
Using Twitter Publish, you can generate HTML codes for embedding your tweets, a profile (with a follow button), twitter moments, tweets you’ve liked, tweets in a hashtag, and more!
Using Twitter Publish
If you visit my website from a desktop/laptop, you will see my recent tweets embedded.
It is common for brands to embed their tweets on their websites and blogs.
If you’re running a hashtag-based competition or discussion on Twitter, you can embed the hashtag on a relevant blog post or a relevant page on your website.
Semrush asks queries by tweeting them out mentioning #semrushchat. Others reply to the queries by commenting on Semrush’s tweets or quote retweeting their tweets. It’s just another way to engage with your audience and build your fan following.
Semrush’s query in #semrushchat
Semrush then retweets valuable tweets, curates top tweets from #semrushchat, and shares them with the audience as top tips for that particular query (like a roundup).
#semrushchat roundup
User-generated content is everywhere these days. As a brand, you must know how to leverage UGC.
Coming back to the topic. Semrush could embed its tweets in #semrushchat on a relevant page on their website or a blog post.
Do you now understand the power of UGC and embedding?
Just by embedding a Twitter list on a web page, I made a tool for viewing the latest tweets by Top Internet Marketers, Technology Influencers, and Serial Entrepreneurs in real-time. It’s called Tweet-Wall. Here’s how it looks like:
My Tweet-Wall
It’s a twittermarketing tool used to curate tweets for the purpose of learning and engaging with them.
The importance of Twitter Cards
As a twitter user, if you want your web page to be displayed as a card when shared on Twitter, you’d need to implement Twitter Cards.
It just makes your web pages look visually appealing.
Using Twitter Cards, you can attach photos and videos to your tweets thereby driving traffic to your web pages.
There are 4 types of Twitter Cards that you can implement – a Summary card, a Summary card with a large image, an App card, and a Player card.
The Summary card is the most commonly used card. It creates a card with a title, description, and thumbnail.
If you share my website on Twitter, this is what you will see:
Summary Card implemented for my website
Brands should implement Summary cards for all of their website pages to drive more traffic from Twitter.
The Player card displays video, audio, or media. Here’s how a Player card looks like:
A Player Card on Twitter
The App card lets brands drive installs to their apps from Twitter. It can even deep-link into the mobile app.
Note that App cards only show on mobile devices. Here’s how an App card looks like:
An App Card on Twitter
The App card shows the app’s name, price, ratings, and a short description. The call-to-action only shows in Twitter for iPhone, iPad, and Android apps – only if the user has not installed the app.
Let’s say you have added the HTML codes to your web pages. How do you check if they work or not?
Simply enter the URL (after implementing the card) in the Card Validator tool.
The Twitter Card for my website works fine
Wrapping Up
Twitter is an amazing platform to market your brand organically. Not only can you generate traffic from Twitter, but also leads and user-generated content. Not to forget, Twitter plays a significant role in online reputation management. Make Twitter a vital part of your brand’s marketing strategy in 2021.
About the author
Vikas Kalwani
Vikas is a product-led growth hacker and B2B Marketing Specialist skilled in SEO, Content Marketing, and Social Media Marketing. He is a mentor at 500 startups and Newchip Accelerator. You can connect with him on LinkedIn.
