How to use Twitter more effectively for your business in 2017
Twitter still remains, for both myself personally and for the businesses I run, the most powerful lead generation marketing tool that I have. I have spent an awful amount of time studying and using Twitter from understanding follower engagement better to working out the best content to share in order to grow particular parts of each of my businesses. You can not say that Twitter has a stand alone feature to it for building the businesses that use it, in-fact it offers a large amount of marketing and sales opportunities that you’ll realise once you have understood the basics behind what drives it’s users to engage with you and your business.
Lots of positives are predicted for social media in 2017 and Twitter is amongst the top names that people are speaking about (I can not see the scare mongers amongst us being correct that 2017 will see the fall of Twitter).
So, how can we make sure that we take a share some of this positive marketing in 2017? Let us make sure that we have the basics in place first:
You user profile: So many accounts I still see that are not yet correctly set up from poor user images to not sharing websites or spelling mistakes in profile descriptions. Make sure you have a corporate looking header image that reflects your brand (do not use frequently used stock images), place a link in your profile to your website and spend time to word your profile description correctly and use hashtags on keywords.
Following: Make sure that you have a good following (this can take time if you have yet to acquire one) and that those who you follow are not crowding up your timeline with irrelevant content which might make you miss something important going forward.
Timing: Use the analytics feature offered by Twitter to study which of your tweets are getting the best engagement so that you can understand better what works best and importantly also, when it works best too.
Share on Twitter and outside of Twitter: Be social on social media, share other people’s content and also let them know you have read what they shared by liking and commenting. By outside of Twitter I mean by letting people know that you are using Twitter with a link to your user account ie on emails, on your business cards, on your website etc.
The above is what I see as the core factors you need to have in mind to have yourself a good Twitter profile for others to engage with, now let us view what you need to be doing for 2017 in order to get the return on investment that your efforts deserve:
Be alive: It was heavily featured via the social media news media outlets that Twitter had purchased Periscope in 2015 so that these two platforms could really bump up the ‘live’ factor of using social media. Facebook certainly is seeing an upward trend in people using it’s live video function and this will be the case also for Twitter for 2017 as people now not only want to read up on the latest, they also want to listen and watch the latest also so this really is a great opportunity for businesses to tap in to streaming live content via a tweet. For the two main business sectors I work in your could look at doing live viewings on property, live tasting reviews of wines or what about a live tour of your vineyard?
Take note that also via Periscope, as recently released by them, you’ll now be soon able to not only live stream on to Twitter, but now live stream in 360 degrees. This is an ever increasing in popularity way to broadcast which gives the viewer a chance to view not only directly to the subject being highlighted, ie the reporter, but also the scenery around them as well. Live 360 will be hit for sure once Periscope enable this feature for all users (currently it is available to a select few only, possibly in test mode still).
Repeated Tweets: Twitter is becoming busier so that means more people saying more things at the same time – So just how do you make sure that your message is seen? Repeat (ideally scheduled via softwares such as SproutSocial or Hootsuite) tweets can be good to make sure your content hits a wider percentage of your audience, make sure that what you share once you try and share again at another time, ideally twice during the day or spread out four times over the week.
Quality of content: Now this will become vital in helping you to stand out and attract engagement with what you share on Twitter – Think about using quality images on all your tweets, use videos (including live streamed), run competitions, hold polls and more to make sure that your Twitter feed is one that generates your business leads. As an example, quickly run through you Twitter timeline and stop at the Tweets which attract you the most and I am sure it will either be due to a catchy title or a catchy image. Original content is also important – What you say yourself and the photos / videos you have taken can be worth more than re-sharing other people’s content.
Twitter Conversational Ads: So, what exactly are they you may ask? An example here from Marvel on Twitter shows that followers can now interact with Tweets that enables the account holder to reach bigger and wider audiences thanks to viral style marketing. Currently this is locked to major international corporations using Twitter, but could be unlocked for general businesses to use. The idea is that a Tweet contains a call to action such as choose red or choose black and it delivers a results such as poll, pr-populated tweets or access to exclusive content such as a video or images of soon to launch items. Users who engage with the conversational ads will in turn automatically share the #hashtag or video etc via their reply tweets.
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