All You Need to Know About Twitter Marketing
Digital Marketing is changing the face of Marketing today. Better returns, a wider audience, and reduced costs are attracting even the most traditional industries to try it out. Twitter Marketing occupies a huge space in the Digital or Online Marketing infrastructure. Read this article till the end to make sure you are not missing out by ignoring the key points of Twitter Marketing.
Digital Marketing or Online Marketing has replaced traditional methods of marketing in almost all industries. Not only is it cheaper and more efficient, but it also makes the content available to larger audiences in shorter periods. The number of online platforms has gone up over the last decade. Apart from the normal ads that we see while browsing, social media sites are also a huge source of marketing today. Sites like Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, YouTube, and many more provide easy and efficient platforms for your online marketing campaigns. This article will talk in detail about Twitter Marketing in particular.
Check out more details regarding the Role of Social Media in eCommerce.
What is Twitter Marketing?
For those of you who know something about Digital Marketing, the term Twitter Marketing might seem clear. It is marketing using Twitter. But if you are new to the Digital Marketing space, it might take you some time to wrap your head around this concept.
The methods of marketing always change with technological and social advancements. Where advertisements were done with the help of magazines, newspapers, or paper posters, brands barely do that nowadays. Though they do have some presence in magazines or Television ads, a major part of today’s marketing campaigns is focused on online platforms. You might have seen direct promotional contents for several brands on Facebook or Instagram, or you might have seen influencers sharing these products in their accounts. These are all examples of digital marketing.
Twitter Marketing simply refers to the marketing strategy that is focused solely on Twitter. Whether it is gathering new customers or increasing existing brand loyalty, each step would be heavily dependent on the social media platform. This is one of the subdivisions of Social Media Marketing. Like every other Social Media platform out there, Twitter has moved away from being only a communication channel. It has the potential to build and manage entire businesses.
Learn the strategy behind Media Planning and Buying with the Best Digital Marketing Course
Why Twitter Marketing?
If you know anything about social media marketing, you know how efficient and effective it is. With more than 500 million tweets sent out each day, there is no better place to improve or increase your audience and reach out to them all at once. Given below are a few key reasons why Twitter is ideal for your marketing needs.
Cost
Twitter is an online platform that is free to use. You do not have to pay any fees to use Twitter for your marketing needs. This is essentially helpful if you are only starting out or if you have a small business that does not require a large scale of paid marketing, or you cannot afford it.
Quick Connect
Whether you are a business owner or a customer, Twitter provides an easy way to reach out. One simple tweet is all it takes for your updates to reach your customers, or you can directly tweet to the business if you have feedback or issues. Traditional methods of marketing do not provide these quick connect options.
Time-Saving
All it takes to share your content with millions of people is mere seconds. Your entire campaign can be shared at once, or you can make use of scheduling apps to help you time your content. This helps in optimizing the views and reach. You do not have to spend months perfecting the layout or spend an exorbitant amount of money to prepare a campaign.
Reach
Just as we saw about the quick connect feature of Twitter, it provides a huge audience to your content. The estimated number of Twitter users was around 330 million in May 2020, with 40% of regular users. It was also estimated that roughly 500 million people use Twitter daily without logging in. With these kinds of numbers, it is not a surprise that Twitter helps you expand your reach exponentially. Just one tweet can reach out to all your customers and vice versa.
Customer Interactions
The quick connect and better reach will lead to better interactions with your customer. You can join conversations, share your latest updates, and get effective feedback from the customers as well.
Building Brand Image
Each business has a brand. It is up to you to figure out your flavor and communicate it across to your audience. Twitter makes it easier for your business to do exactly this. You can avoid the costlier options of television and billboard ads, and opt for the simple strategy of showcasing your brand through your social media.
Learn how to create impeccable content for your brand with The Best Content Writing Course
Gauging competition
One of the easiest methods to measure the audience of your competitors is by checking their social media followings. Twitter provides an easy way to do this. You can check the follows, tweets, and retweets of your rival businesses to see not only how they are faring, but also to figure out what they are doing right in case they are.
SEO Rankings
Search Engine Optimization or SEO is the future of the content industry. Following SEO practices can increase your site traffic organically and also provide your content the boost it needs to reach a wider audience. The question here is, can Twitter help boost SEO? The simple answer is yes, of course. It has been shown that an optimized Tweet or Twitter account can and will show up in a Google search. And as we all know, your account or website is more likely to be visited if it shows up on the first page of your search.
How to Use Twitter for Marketing?
Now that we have seen what Twitter Marketing is and why it is important, let us see some methods to implement this in your online marketing strategy. These steps will help your business expand its reach and ensure that the right audience is targeted. Based on the level of your business and marketing strategies, you can choose to implement some or all of the below steps.
Customize Your Profile to Create a Brand
Your profile is the first impression that customers will get to have. So be sure to customize it to reflect your brand identity. Add correct logos, business colors, and other details to ensure customers of the account authenticity. You can even create customized profile pictures, Twitter handles and eye-catching profile bios to attract more users to follow. You can also provide external links to your website or other social media profiles.
Some more professional Courses from IIM SKILLS
Promoted Tweets
Using twitter promotion is a great way to put your content across to a large variety of audiences. Promoted tweets will be shown in the feeds of targeted users who view and interact with similar content. You will pay for your tweets that are being promoted.
Twitter Ads
To complement your organic growth, Twitter ads will help you to spread your promoted content across your audience. It can be in the form of promoted tweets, accounts, app install, and so on. The payment depends on several factors like targeted audience, conversions, etc. Keyword targeting is an essential component of Twitter Ads. Users can engage with the content based on the keywords you have included in it and what they are searching for. This ensures that your content is delivered to the relevant parties at the relevant time.
See what Twitter themselves has to share about their Keyword targetting.
Twitter Verified Account
You have all seen those accounts with a blue tick mark near the account name. The blue tick signifies the authenticity of the account and will guarantee better following and interaction. It also ensures that the customers are not confused in case there are fake accounts or accounts with similar names. Learn how you can get your account verified.
Build Follower Count
Even though Twitter ads and promoted tweets can help you get more reach, organic interaction is what makes or breaks Digital Marketing strategies. It all comes down to the number of people who are following your account and interacting with it. When the follower count is more on Twitter, your website is bound to get more traffic and business.
Some easy tips to build follower counts are:
- Interesting and fresh hashtags
- Increase audience engagement by polls, Q&A sessions, etc.
- Take help from established influencers
- Make the links for your social media sites available easily
- Create shareable and relatable content
- Interact with followers regularly
Use Scheduling apps
Consistency is the key to setting up a successful online presence. Once you have a social media account like Twitter, you need to post at regular intervals to ensure that people are still interested and following you. Many studies have shown that people unfollow accounts that are not active or post content relevant to them.
But it might be difficult to come up with new content and share it in regular periods. One easy way to make this happen is to make use of a content-sharing schedule. Decide the optimal time at which you can post, and your followers are available to interact with the content. Create content beforehand, so that you have enough time for research and polishing your content.
You can also make use of social media management tools like Loomlu, TweetDeck, etc. These tools will help you not only to plan out your content but also in posting them automatically.
Check your DMs
Just like all the other social media sites, Twitter also provides Direct Messaging or DM features. Your customers, clients, or collaborators might drop a direct message instead of formal business emails. So checking them regularly helps you in improving your business relations. You might also receive relevant feedback from customers, and replying to or just acknowledging these can give you an upper hand in the customer care department.
Analytics
After you have put in all the effort, how do you know if something is working or not? You monitor the metrics. The same goes for Twitter Marketing as well. Just because it is helping everyone else does not necessarily mean that it would help you or your business. You have to keep an eye on relevant performance metrics to ensure you are getting the best out of your efforts.
Key metrics that would be relevant for Twitter are Follower Engagement, Likes, Retweets, Hashtags, follower count, and so on. You can use different tools available in the market for free as well as paid tools to monitor those metrics that are important to you. Twitter Analytics is a platform that was essentially built for only this purpose. This is a free tool that will give you details on all the above metrics. There are also other tools like Google Analytics, HubSpot, Sprout Social, HootSuite, etc., that will serve the same purpose.
Creating A Twitter Marketing Campaigns
A campaign is a business’s effort to reinforce information using any platform. Social media campaigns are gaining popularity due to their increased efficiency. When dealing with Twitter Marketing, creating Twitter campaigns is something that cannot be neglected. They should be strategic, focused on a measurable goal, and should be able to influence the followers to act a certain way.
The steps for creating marketing campaigns or strategies are pretty much the same across all digital platforms. We have gathered and outlined a few key components of a successful marketing campaign focusing on Twitter.
Audit
If your business already has a Twitter account, the first step in building a strategy is to audit all the accounts. Document the key findings like who is handling what, what are the popular contents, how much engagement is received from the users, and so on. You can use tools like Twitter Analytics to gather the required data. Go through other factors like the profile picture, bio, follower count, and the frequency with which the profile had been updated. Once you have all the data with you, figuring out what to correct and what to clear will be easier.
Goat Setting
As already mentioned, a campaign or strategy should have a goal. But having just any random goal would not suffice. You should have clear, concise, and achievable outcomes as part of your goals. You can even divide the outcomes into multiple periods and set out short-term goals, thus cascading to the long-term ones. Goals should be SMART – Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Relevant, and Time-Bound. Following this formula will help ensure that your goals are defined properly and there is no place for ambiguities.
Research the Competition
Though our ultimate aim should be to focus on our business literally, it does not hurt to know your competition. See what they are doing, learn more about the different kinds of strategies that they are using. This way not only do you get to understand more about the relevant customers, but you also get an idea of what is working and what is not working for the others. This can help you make your strategies better, by avoiding their mistakes.
Assigning Roles
Few of the points we have talked about earlier have covered quick-response and customer interactions. To make sure that these features are provided, there needs to be a team responsible for acknowledging and replying to the customer feedback. Whether it is tweets or direct messages, people need to be assigned to the role of replying on time. If there are other types of content involved, like polls, giveaways, etc., roles should be assigned properly so that the account is handled at all times, even in the absence of one person. This would require not only a central team but also a backup or standby team to join in case of emergencies.
Create content calendar and schedules
You have already seen how scheduling tools can help in better consistency in content publishing. In case you have a slightly larger team who is responsible for the content, it might be more efficient to create a common calendar so that everyone has access to the schedule and can work as a team to get the content out in time. There should also be a common decision on the frequency of posting, the time at which these posts should go up, and in some cases, the person who would be approving the content.
Decide on The Type of Content
The type of content you create decides the tone of your profile and the brand image of your business. Decide on the type of content and the way in which you want to deliver it to the masses. And make sure to communicate it clearly to your marketing team as well.
Content Promotion
Once the content is created and is available for the public, people feel that marketing stops there. But that thinking is entirely wrong. It is after the content is made available that the most difficult part begins, to promote the content and make sure that the relevant users come across it organically. Twitter ads and promoted tweets have already been discussed as means of promoting content through Twitter.
Measuring your growth
Once you have done all that you could, the next step is to monitor the results. Identify the key performance indicators you want and monitor them closely. You have several tools as well that we have already discussed. The growth has to be carefully aligned and compared to the SMART goals that you have set at the beginning. Any corrective measures required should be taken from this point on, with the help of these data.
Analyze your outcome and opt for corrective measures
The goals you set at the beginning should be flexible. You should be able to modify it to accommodate the changes that the world is going through. But at the same time, you should compare your growth and actual outcomes with the expected ones. Prepare corrective measures if something is not going well. At the same time, perfect those things that are flourishing.
Tools for Twitter Marketing
If you want to know more about Tools for Digital Marketing, here is an article that explains the tools in detail.
As in the case of all tools, Twitter marketing tools are diverse and numerous. Discussing all of them is nearly impossible. We have collected the ones that you should not miss. Needless to say, the choice of the tool depends heavily on several factors, like the kind of business you have, your budget for marketing, the strength of your audience, and so on.
Here are 8 Twitter Marketing Tools that can help you dominate the tweeting game.
AgoraPulse
It is a social media management tool that helps you in queuing and scheduling your content. It also has features for hashtag analysis, customized labels, saved searches, and many more. Though the tool is user-friendly and provides great customer support, the mobile version of the app has been observed to be lagging. The pricing goes from around 80$ to 400$ per month.
CrowdFire
In addition to scheduling your tweets, CrowdFire also helps in optimizing your account and determining the best time to post. Content curation, RSS feed customization, competitor analysis, social media monitoring, etc., are some of the features provided, along with its ability to integrate with other popular apps. It is easy to use and mobile-friendly, but the limit of users is restricted. The pricing ranges from 8$ to 75$ roughly, with a free version as well.
SocialOopmh
This tool helps you to schedule your tweets as well as monitor your activity. Using this tool, you can save drafts that can be reused later. You can also track your keywords, retweets, hashtags, and mentions using this tool.
Commun.it
It helps you to manage Twitter communities by tracking mentions, building relationships, and engaging with customers. This also allows scheduling and posting of tweets, along with content curation. You can also download progress reports for your real-time engagement and leads.
Buffer
Buffer is a social media management tool. Scheduling tweets and analyzing the performance of your tweets can be done efficiently using Buffer. It also allows managing multiple Twitter accounts.
Hashtagify
This tool helps you choose the right hashtags for your tweets to ensure you achieve your goals. You can also monitor your performance and analyze the reach of your tweets. Hashtagify also provides custom suggestions for your next tweets to improve your engagement.
Hootsuite
Twitter marketing is made easier by Hootsuite. It is yet another social media management tool, which will help you to find, schedule, manage, and even report your Twitter marketing strategy. It also allows search based on keyword, hashtag, or location filtering.
TweetDeck
TweetDeck is one of the most powerful tools that can make Twitter more effective in your marketing campaign. It makes handling multiple Twitter accounts easy and provides real-time tracking, organizing, and engagement.
Ready to Tweet Your Way to Success?
So far, we have discussed the basics of Twitter Marketing and how you can get started with it. Twitter is a great platform that will provide you with the best results when taken advantage of properly. But you also have to keep in mind that the lifespan of anything is reduced severely when it is on digital platforms. People get bored easily and they turn to the next best thing. So, while you are busy planning your next campaign, keep in mind the ever-changing dynamic of your customers. And remember the first rule of virtual media – Always expect the unexpected.
