10 Effective Twitter Strategies for Businesses

Twitter is an outstanding tool for individuals and businesses alike. With the passage of time, more and more businesses are turning towards Twitter to market themselves, get more exposure, generate leads, drive sales, ad provide customer support.

Here are a few strategies that businesses can use when it comes to building a strong social presence on Twitter, build more followers, generate leads and drive sales, and achieve the kind of results they want with this particular social medium.

 

1. Puts links to your Twitter on your website. At the start, it’s all about exposure, and getting the word out. You need to tell people about your presence on Twitter. Put a link to your Twitter and other social media profiles on your website and blog, and if you have a blog, do an ‘announcement’ post about it. Invite people to ‘follow’ you on Twitter.

 

2. Put links on all your business print and advertisement material. In addition to your website and/or blog, you should put your personalized Twitter handle (@YourTwitterPageName) on all your advertisement and print material.  On brochures, publications, on any business ads, and even on your Facebook/Google+ or other pages. Be creative here, and use an interesting line that attracts the attention of people reading it, and urges them to follow you on Twitter.

 

3.  Get some ad space, aka. promoted tweets: Twitter has a ton of advertisement and promotional solutions for small businesses that allow them to promote their tweets. You can read a great article on promoted tweets here, as well as this page for small business advertisement solutions, where you can also sign up for Twitter Ads. Twitter Ads are highly customizable – you start off by choosing a location, choose between promoting a tweet, an account or both, and set a spending limit (it’s quite similar to Facebook ads). Promoted tweets then show up on the Twitter timelines of people you targeted.

 

4. Keep Tweets short. The whole point of Twitter is 140-character messages that can be easily-consumed by your audience, either on the computer, on tablet PC’s or via cellular text message. Tweeting best-practices include keeping your tweets as short and concise as possible, and such short tweets are also said to have a much higher engagement rates.

 

5. Keep your tweets to-the-point. Tweets need to be bang-on-target, since you really don’t have a lot of space to work with in the first place. Remember that the concept behind Twitter is simplicity, and this needs to resonate in your tweets. The format that works best is A short tweet, 100 characters or less, which includes a link, a photo, etc. followed by a hashtag.

 

6. Write tweets that will be useful for your audience. Twitter-best-practices suggest that you should write Tweets that are engaging and interesting, and tweets that your audience can connect with. Put hashtags, useful links and resources, images, videos, etc. within your tweets that you think your audience will find useful. Target your tweets to your audience’s precise interests. Give them what they want; if you do, your tweets will get tons of retweets and favorites. For instance if you’re the first one to break big news in your niche, your Twitter users will find them useful and interesting,

 

7. Use hashtags. If you’re new to Twitter, here’s all you need to know about Twitter hashtags. Basically, Hashtags are certain words or terms, usually preceded by a # symbol that are used to categorize certain tweets, which allows (a) people to search for the said hashtag, and (b) follow hashtags and the trends and events that they represent. Use hashtags with your tweets, so that potential customers can find you, and your existing followers can follow hashtags related to your business. If enough people use a hashtag, it will soon start to ‘trend’ which means it will appear on local and/or worldwide trends on Twitter’s homepage.

8. Tweet frequently. You should use Twitter as frequently as possible. With Facebook and other social networks, putting too many updates within a short span of time – or bombarding your followers with updates – will only make you look like a spammer. But that’s where Twitter (and other Microblogging websites for that matter) comes in. You can use Twitter to send out periodic updates, tweet about your products and services for instance as frequently as you like, tweet announcements, news and information about events every few hours, and so on. For instance I recommend business users to send out 10 tweets every day, but it depends on the nature of your business and your objectives. You could always change this frequency with the passage of time. But refrain from spamming your followers. Pro-tip: You can use something like Buffer or HootSuite to easily schedule tweets.

 

9. Be active on Twitter; engage, interact, communicate. To be successful on social media, you’ll have to be an active part of it yourself. Other than sending out updates, use Twitter to interact with your customers, people interested in your products, people involved with your business, and other stakeholders. Reply and respond to tweets, acknowledge retweets, and most importantly, follow hashtags that are relevant to you as a business, and be a part of those trends by including said hashtag in your own tweets. For example an organization working on women rights should be an active participant in the #WorldWomensDay hashtag that trends throughout the day on 8^th March. Follow other relevant Twitter accounts, and engage with them on a regular basis.

 

10. Hold a contest on Twitter. Promoting and advertising a contest on Twitter will bring it to the attention of your followers, and create hype and excitement. To make things better – and to promote your Twitter simultaneously – you could ask your Twitter followers to ‘retweet’ your tweet, and announce that you will then choose a winner from the people who retweeted the tweet. This will also allow you to get more followers, as retweets will provide you with more exposure. Make sure that what you’re giving away is valuable enough for your customers.

 

What innovative, out-of-the-box Twitter technique do you suggest for businesses and owners?