If you’ve been using Twitter to market your small business for any length of time, you probably already know the basics. Things like filling out your profile completely, adding a link to your website and not being overly promotional are the very basic rules of Twitter for business.
But what about businesses who already know these basics and want to do more with their Twitter account? Here are some advanced tips for those who want to do even more with the social media platform.
Provide Quality Content
You only have 140 characters, so you must make them count. That’s why many businesses are choosing to use professional writers to create their tweets for them. You want your tweets to be high quality, and that means grammatically correct, succinct and engaging.
However, that also means providing something of value for your customers, and that depends upon what instructions you give to a writer.
Whenever you tweet something, you want to make sure that it is as good of a tweet as it can be and that it provides a great deal of value to anyone who reads it.
Use Networking to Get Followers
Your ultimate objective when using Twitter is to reach as large of audience as you can, and that means building up your followers to as large of numbers as possible. When you have large numbers of followers, you get better results, you get better metrics and you get more engagement with your customers. If you want to build your followers even more, try networking with other users.
All you must do is engage them and they will want to interact which means that their followers could now become your followers, particularly if they are re-tweeting your content and responding to your posts.
Make the Most of Third-Party Software
Companies that use Twitter often do not find success because they simply can’t keep up with the demand that the medium requires. For example, if you want to have an effective Twitter account, not only do you need to post tweets regularly – and not just any tweets, but well thought out, engaging and high-quality tweets that are relevant to your followers – but you also need to respond to those people that are re-tweeting and engaging.
Besides that, you also want to be monitoring your customer’s conversations online and answering questions or addressing concerns. This requires a great deal of work and most companies just don’t have the time.
However, there are a number of third-party applications that can help with creating an effective social media presence. Tweet Deck, HootSuite and many more programs can help with everything from scheduling tweets to tracking metrics, and many are so comprehensive and robust that you can gain invaluable insight from them. Many of them are free, but some of them have both free and premium versions, with the premium versions offering more features.
Check out some of the third party applications that are out there and you’ll have much more success in your Twitter marketing efforts.
Use Hashtags to Make Your Content Easy to Find
If you want more people to find your content on Twitter, hashtags are a great way to do it. If you put a hashtag in your tweets that contain a keyword that you think people might search for, you’ll get your content in front of a lot more people. Hashtags can also help people know about your organization because when the tweet appears in the search results, they will see your brand name if you have included it in the tweet.
Hashtags are also very helpful if you want to find out what people are saying about a particular trend or subject and you can interact with those users and even find Twitter accounts that you can follow that will increase your own visibility.
Don’t Just Schedule & Leave
Finally, if you want to give your followers and potential future followers a good impression, don’t just schedule your tweets and not interact with people. Right after you tweet something is the perfect time to engage people and if they are attempting to communicate with you and no one is available, it can lower your brand’s value.