How to get the best out of Twitter
Setting up a Twitter account takes minutes; discovering how to use it most effectively can take a bit more time
Twitter is a great tool for raising awareness of your brand and driving traffic to your website. According to digital marketing strategy consultant DMR, 47% of people who follow a brand on the micro-blogging network are more likely to visit that company’s website.
While there is plenty of advice to be found from digital marketing specialists on the internet, through blogs such as this one, the only way you can really hone your approach to Twitter is through constant experimentation and trial and error. Even the most experienced users are constantly adapting their techniques.
Here are five suggestions to help you get started.
#1 Set your objectives
Before you set up a Twitter account (or if you are looking to revisit your Twitter strategy), you need to have a clear idea of exactly what you want to achieve. Whether you are trying to build a large number of followers to increase brand awareness, drive more traffic to your website or create more targeted leads, your strategy will affect your approach as to how you gain followers and use the platform.
And these objectives may gradually evolve over time or change on a week-to-week basis.
#2 Define a strategy to achieve your objectives
Once you have decided what your aims are, these will define not only whom you want to follow and whom you want following you, but also the content that you produce and share. If you are a financial services content marketing agency, which wants to engage marketing managers of financial institutions, then those are the types of people you want following you and you should create targeted content for.
If you are purely trying to build a large, untargeted follower base to raise awareness of your brand, then you can take more of a scattergun approach and follow any Twitter users who will follow you back and create and share more generic content.
#3 Make your tweets relevant to your objective
The content of your tweet, whether that is a link that you are sharing or the hashtags you are using, will be defined by your objective and strategy. For example, a tweet that uses the hashtags #financial #marketing is more specific than simply using the hashtag #marketing.
Therefore the #marketing tweet may get retweeted more and drive more traffic to your blog about financial services marketing.
Yet, if your aim is to drive quality leads to your website, rather than just get traffic levels up, then #financial #marketing is more relevant. It may result in lower traffic, but those reading the blog are more likely to have an interest in financial services marketing, rather than general marketing.
Neither approach is wrong as long as it is in line with your objectives.
#4 Engage with your followers
There are a number of tools that can enable you to tweet on a regular basis when you are developing a Twitter campaign. For example, Hootsuite allows you to schedule up to 350 tweets in advance in one go, whether you want to send ten tweets a day for 35 days or one tweet a day for 350.
Twitter’s retweet function also means that you can share any interesting tweets instantly.
It’s worth taking the time to be a bit more hands-on, as well. For example, if you’ve read an interesting blog that someone has shared on Twitter, it’s worth composing an original tweet. Acknowledging the author, such as “Have just read this informative blog from @LoveLettersPub”, means that they are likely to retweet your tweet.
They are then promoting you to their followers because you have promoted them. That’s 30 seconds well spent, particularly if they have a high number of followers.
#5 Analyse and repeat
All of the above tips have been unearthed through constant trial and error and seeing what works and what doesn’t. Through analysing our weekly tweeting activity (using Hootsuite and Google Analytics) Love Letters now has a better idea of what times of day to send tweets, which types of hashtags and tweets help to build up generic followers and get a higher volume of retweets and favourites, and what gets fewer retweets and lower traffic, but higher-quality leads.
As a result, we are then able to decide what our objectives are for the coming weeks or months and achieve them.
If you would like to find out more about the services offered by Love Letters, click here. To contact us, click here.
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