Is your business present on Twitter? If the answer is yes, you probably already know that just sending out 140 long character messages about how great your business is doesn’t help you achieve specific goals either in the short or long run. Twitter can be a really powerful tool for businesses and, just as with all other social channels, using it requires that you have a strategy , a content plan and some objectives to start with. Let’s say you’ve got a decent followership. What do you do with it? How about connecting with it in such a way as to build a strong community and to find your very own your brand endorsers who will keep your tweets rolling?
Twitter offers some best practices for success, but I’ve also put together a list of tips that, in my experience, can help you send your message across loud and clear across the sea of social noise out there
- Go visual! – but not with every tweet. As Twitter is becoming more and more of a visual platform, a new feature called image preview has been added. This means that images (and Vine videos) will appear without the user being required to first click on your tweet. As visually enhanced tweets have proven to generate more engagement, make sure you put your best creative foot forward and choose the right eye candy to go with your clever message 🙂
Don’t make it all about you! – You know you’re cool, but people need to hear about something else than just your products and news. Make sure your content calendar includes 3rd party content that brings value to your followers; you could for example, post news from your industry or just a really interesting blog post that you’ve come across.- Reply, retweet, reward (RRR) –your followers will retweet you but they expect you to get involved in a conversation with them , especially when they need help, an answer to a question or some kind of recognition. You could reward your fans by retweeting them, thanking them or just by organizing some #FF messages occasionally
- Hashtag your way to greatness –your hashtags are important, but make sure you increase your reach by adding a relevant and active industrys-specific # to your tweets.
- Events look great on Twitter– if you are participating in or organizing an event, don’t forget that live tweeting can help you increase both your followership and your engagement. Just make sure you plan for tweets to go out prior to, during and following the event proper. In this way, your audience has a complete view of the event agenda and topics, the unfolding of presentations or workshops and of your plans for similar future occasions.
- How about a nice Twitter chat? – Twitter chats, whether you organize or sponsor them, are the perfect opportunity for your audience, customers and prospects to connect with your business and have a say on one of their topics of interest. Before hosting a chat, make sure you actively promote its hashtag, get a team ready to respond to questions (and monitor activity) in a timely fashion and have a plan B to fall back on in case of a hashtag highjacking.
- Organize contests – contests will, undoubtedly, heighten your fans’ interaction with your account. For a true win-win situation, get your prizes rolling during your events, when celebrating a milestone in your business history or for the launch of a product.
- Haaaave you met…. promoted tweets? –when you want to reach a broader audience for your blog post, whitepaper, product message etc, you can use this tool that the platform offers; promoted tweets are great when you are sponsoring an event for example, and you want the audience that posts to the event # to interact more with your messages.
- Be creative – a brand’s coolness factor is best shown in real-time challenges. We love it when this and this happens, as these are examples of what awesome means in social marketing.
Looking forward to knowing your best practices for twitter engagement, do share them in the comments 🙂
