Using Twitter to grow as a business...
When it comes to promoting your brand campaign or sharing a piece of thought leadership, there is nothing like Twitter for consistent impact. The results that the platform can generate are amazing- from eyeballs on your site to warm leads and even direct sales. Twitter has a monetizable daily active audience of over 350 million internationally.
All of these results are, however, reliant upon having a decent following. With only a small audience viewing your tweets, you can be posting incredible content, but the algorithm will hardly pick it up.
For this reason, growing your Twitter audience is key. Not only does it give you immediate access to people, but connections of these connections will also be able to view your content if it is retweeted. This can have exponential results.
Though, like anything in life, there are no instant fixes to growing a Twitter audience, there are key principles to implement to set yourself up for success. In this article, we’re going to run through seven top tips that are going to accelerate your brand’s progress on the platform.
You can’t expect to grow your audience without a profile that clearly indicates why people should follow you.
Make sure to include a clear profile picture and cover photo and fill out your bio with keywords from your industry. Look at SpaceX for a clear example of how this works. You’ll notice catching imagery and a clear bio that explains what they do whilst enticing people in.
Defined by YourStory as “somebody who can get other Twitter users to notice and talk about a particular person, place or thing,” a Twitter influencer is someone who has a significant following on the platform. They will also, therefore, have the ability to push your brand out to a wider audience.
You can find Twitter influencers to start conversations with in a couple of ways.
The first way is to use Twitter search and to look for who is getting a lot of engagement when speaking about a certain topic or hashtag.
The second, and much more efficient way, is to use the Social Opinion follower intelligence dashboard. This taps into your existing following to analyse who they are speaking about and to, allowing you to leverage conversations that are already happening to boost your brand.
You might start to see results by tweeting influencers and engaging with your followers, but in order to build a real audience you need to tweet consistently.
Data suggests that the average viewer wants to see at least 5 tweets a day, but preferably up to 20. Without this, your page will likely get lost on the timelines.
However, even for brands with social media managers, this is incredibly demanding; it requires a lot of time and energy to continuously come up with new ideas and tweet them out.
A more effective approach is to queue content in bulk. This way, you can create buckets of content on certain themes and spread them out over time. You can harness moments of creativity and research your ideas in plenty of time.
Through Social Opinion, you can find out when your existing followers are most active and queue content for those times.
Our evergreen tweet feature takes this to one step further by auto filling empty slots with content you have created in advance.
With this, you’ll never miss an opportunity to make a connection and you can focus your time only on engagement.
As you attempt to put out a lot of content, remember that it’s ok to reuse your existing tweets. Your audience won’t remember seeing the same thing a few times when there is so much content on Twitter.
Our autoretweet allows you to automatically set up your content to be retweeted. By clicking “retweet a tweet after X hours,” you ensure that as many members of your audience as possible have seen your content. This is crucial for marketing campaigns, particularly those where you drive your audience to click a link- for example, to your site.
One way to get involved with existing conversations is to engage with Twitter during real world live events. Brands that do this can often get a lot of traction; those that post during sports events or award ceremonies, for example, are often awarded with positive recognition from their audiences.
Clothing brand, Lulu’s did this well during the Oscar’s a few years ago.
It’s also a good idea to engage in conversations around these events rather than just offering one opinion. 64% of people recently surveyed described wanting to connect with the brands they engage with on a more personal level. Twitter provides a great place to get involved in lighthearted conversations.
To get an idea of where you can add value to existing conversations, consider your audience’s interests.
An easy way to do this is through our social listening feature. Displaying the products and hashtags that they are most commonly using, it gives you an idea of where to focus your attention.
You can also search directly for a specific hashtag to assess the impact it would have with your followers. A strong hashtag strategy is critical to building a following; research from Twitter suggests that brands that use them see a 8% increase in brand awareness.
Another great way to use our social listening feature in order to increase your Twitter following is to look at the brands that your audience are talking about.
Whether these are competitors that you can model your strategy on or not, it will provide you an idea of your audience’s interests and give you ideas of conversations to get involved in.
To learn more tips for growing on Twitter as a business keep an eye on our page.
If you’re ready to learn more about Social Opinion, click this link to get started.
