Twitter is one of the most popular social media websites currently in existence. This microblogging website allows businesses, professionals, and consumers to connect easily with short 140 character tweets and messages. Companies can promote themselves on Twitter by connecting with their consumer base. But this isn’t always easy especially for businesses who aren’t very social media literate. So how can you take advantage of Twitter’s user base and promote your business? There are many, many ways you can promote your business on Twitter with Twitter marketing and in today’s blog post we’ll discuss just a few of the ways you can promote your business.
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Know that Your Twitter is Your Brand
Your Twitter account is another way to represent your brand to your customers and potential consumers. Your Twitter page should aesthetically and tonally match your other online sites to send a cohesive message to your customer base. Whether it’s your other social media accounts or the company website, you need to make sure the look and feel matches with each other. It’s essential with Twitter marketing
Make sure to build your brand on Twitter correctly. Not only should the look and feel match, but your Twitter username should match your business and be consistent. If you’re using an individual Twitter account in order to promote your business, use your real name and add part of your business to it. For instance, if your name is Jane Doe and you run “August Transportation”, your name could be “JDoeAugustTransportation” or “JaneDAugustTransportation” or even “JaneDoeAugustTransportation”. However, if you’re running your company’s official Twitter account, stick to the company name if you can, so in the case of the above, go with “AugustTransportation”. Don’t be vague with your username or else fans of your company may not be able to find your account. And if they do, they might not follow you because they’ll be confused and unsure if it’s truly your company’s official Twitter account.
For the profile image of your account, use something that will represent your company. Twitter has a profile photo and a header photo. If you run a transportation company, like the above example, show off one of the vehicles in your fleet in a professional photo for your header photo, and a headshot or your logo for your profile photo. There’s also an option to customize the background of your Twitter account. If you decide to do this, make sure it’s not overwhelming. Possibly just choose a simple color scheme that matches your existing branding.
In your Twitter bio, give a quick summary of the company and where you’re located as well as a link to your website (possibly by using a Twitter landing page). This bio is only allowed to be 160 characters so be concise and show some personality.
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Tweet Regularly
Speaking of tweets, you’ll want to ensure that you tweet regularly. People tend not to be interested in Twitter accounts that go silent for weeks or months on end. If you really do want to connect and promote your business, make sure to tweet at least a few times a week. There are services, such as TweetDeck and Hoot Suite, that allow you to pre-schedule tweets for certain times in case you’re schedule keeps your from posting at pivotal times. Using these services you can preset weeks of tweets to go out.
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Interact with the Twitter Community
Like nearly every online community, the key to using Twitter is making sure you’re interacting with the people on Twitter. Demonstrate that you know what you’re talking about by tweeting about these issues with others. Look through Twitter’s search engine and find tweets that have to do with your business and comment on them, giving sensible advice (avoid inflammatory or controversial tweets, however).
And, of course, make sure to check out replies, to see if anyone has tweeted at you so you can respond to any queries or comments.
Not only can you answer people’s questions, but you can also post your own. Twitter is a hub filled with professionals and experts and asking questions is a great way to connect with these professionals and experts.
One piece of advice is to try to avoid following EVERYONE. Follow your business partners, suppliers, vendors, loyal and/or interested customers, professional organizations, other local businesses, and businesses that are run by people you know. But make sure, even at the beginning, that your “Following” numbers aren’t completely outnumbering your “Followed” numbers.
And, of course, there are other ways to interact with the Twitter community without replying or following. You can always retweet and favorite any interesting posts you find. Retweeting allows someone else’s tweet to show on your page. While you don’t want to have your entire Twitter filled with other people’s comments, if someone’s tweet is relevant, interesting, and useful to your business, it would be a good idea to retweet it. Doing this demonstrates that you’re not focused solely on promoting yourself, that you’re interested in other’s ideas.
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Valuable Content, Images, and Hashtags
What should you post on your Twitter? Whatever you decide to do you’ll need to balance between your own interests in promoting your business and what your customers/target audience wants to hear from you. Give people interesting and/or useful information that is relevant to your business. With only 140 characters this can be difficult, but that makes choosing the right words especially important. Hashtags and images can sometimes help you elaborate in ways full sentences cannot on Twitter. When you use great, relevant, and popular hastags on Twitter, users who are searching for information on specific topics on Twitter can find your tweets. There are tools to help you find the best hashtags (as well as the hashtags that are trending) in your business’ industry. One of these services is Hashtagify.
Creating a custom hashtag for your website or a sale or other sort of event is also a great idea. Just try to make sure no one else is using it so your content is easily searchable and won’t get confused with another company or user’s posts.
Tweets with images, pictures and videos often get the best responses and the most retweets. People enjoy looking at images, it’s just a matter of fact. You don’t need to be a professional photographer, just use your smartphone or websites like Pixabay in order to take and find the best images for your tweets.
At digiTech Web Design, we know that promoting your business online is important for any brand. Twitter and other social media websites are a great place to start. However, social media interaction isn’t quite as useful if your company’s website is out date or not properly optimized to maximize conversions. If you’re interested in redesigning your website or increasing your conversions, contact us today!
