How Does Twitter Make Other Social Media Tools More Effective

Twitter is an essential component that helps to make other social media tools more effective. Show how the different types of social media sites work together by comparing them to a sports team.

How Does Twitter Make Other Social Media Tools More Effective

Twitter, it is every marketer’s favourite social network, but at the same time, it has become harder and harder as a small business to make it work for you.

With over 330 million monthly active users it could be a traffic goldmine for your organisation. However, there are also 500 million tweets send out every day, so how can you get your tweets seen? Should you still invest in it?

Just like LinkedIn and Facebook Groups, there are lots of different ways you can use it for your business, but at the same time, there are lots of companies struggling to make Twitter work as effectively as it used to be in the past.

So what is Twitter marketing?

The beautiful thing about Twitter is that it is whatever you want it to be.

Want to learn more about your customers? Bring a human touch to your brand? Build buzz about your new product? Provide super-fast customer support? Start cleaning up after a PR disaster? Hold a group chat, and educating your customers?

It doesn’t matter what your marketing goals are; there is a pretty significant change Twitter has got you covered.

There is no question that Twitter can be a very potent tool to help you achieve your marketing objectives.

The problem though is that it might sound a bit overwhelming, you’ve got no idea where to start, or maybe you’ve already started, but you’re having trouble getting your business objectives.

No matter at which stage you are, this guide will help you either get started from scratch or guide you to the next level of using Twitter to grow your business, traffic and sales.

What is Twitter and what makes it so unique?

First things first, if you’re new to this whole social media marketing thing and you might have heard the name Twitter sometime before on the news but you never really used it before, what is Twitter and what makes it so unique?

At its origin, Twitter is a short message communication platform that allows you to send out messages (or Tweets) up to 280 characters (it used to be 140, but that officially changed in November 2017) to people who subscribe to you (the followers).

Your Tweet can include a link to any web content (think of your blog posts, pages on your websites, etc.) or a photograph or video. Just like people can follow you, you can follow other people as well. This allows you to read, reply to and easily share their Tweets with your followers (retweet).

However, next to this basic use Twitter has grown to so much more over the more than ten years of its existence. Twitter can be anything you want or make it to be. But before you can do that, you first have to create an account.

Setting up Twitter for your business success

Step 1: Creating an account

In an always-connected mobile-first world, of course, you don’t need to use your desktop computer to create a Twitter account (Twitter is even used for 80% using mobile), but if you want some ease of use setting up your account, choosing the right pictures for your profile, etc. we still recommend using your computer.

Your Twitter account and profile are the foundation of your Twitter experience for your followers. It’s your chance to tell your business story to the Twitter community and will most of the time be one of the first contact points when someone is figuring out if they want to follow you (or not).

As a result, It is important that your Twitter presence have the same look and feel as your other presences online. This helps people identify your business and builds trust. So, as part of your social media strategy, choose an account name and images consistent with your other online presences and your brand.

Basic account setup

Let’s start by going Twitter.com where you will be greeted with a blank page, where you can give your email address, come up with a password and leave your real name.

After that first step, you will be asked for your phone number as an extra layer of security for your account (optional):

And to come up with a Twitter handle or username. On Twitter, your username, or handle, is your identity. If you can, sign up for Twitter by using your name or a variation of it as your username (assuming somebody else isn’t already using it).

That’s it your done; you just created your account. Twitter will now ask you for topics you’re interested in and will give you the opportunity to start already following suggested accounts or accounts of the people you already know by connecting your Gmail or Outlook email accounts.

We suggest you skip these for now. People will get a notification when you follow them, and it is better to show a full, interesting profile to them when they figure out who is following them instead of the empty profile your profile is still right now.

At a later stage, you can always still use the “Find people you know” button located on the right side of your profile page. This will give you the option to find people you already know using your address book from either Gmail or Outlook.

Profile image and background image

Now that you’ve created your account (don’t forget to hit that confirmation email), it is time to make your profile visually more appealing and in line with your brand…

Twitter uses two different images to make your account represent your brand. It’s essential that you take advantage of both of these images to tell your business story.

Your Twitter profile photo is a circular photo that appears next to every tweet you send. You can use either your company logo or your headshot for your profile photo.

If you’re a really small business, we might suggest using your business name as the name for your account, but using a personal photo for the profile photo, this adds a personal touch and might resonate better with your customers.

The second picture you need to upload is the Twitter header photo; this is a large background photo. The big-screen real-estate gives you enough space to tell a story about your business maybe. Similar to the cover you have on your Facebook company page, this visual will appear at the top of your profile page.

If you go to your profile, you will be greeted with a beautiful empty profile. By clicking on the “edit profile” button, your profile transforms into an easy way to upload the new profile picture and header photo.

Location

While you’re still editing your profile, don’t forget to add your location. Especially for a local business, this can help build a stronger connection with your potential audience. But remember, Twitter is a global phenomenon, if people from another city or country are visiting your profile, they might not recognise your specific neighbourhood or community name.

So go specific, but not so specific that people don’t have enough information anymore to be able to find you.

Website

Of course, you want people that visit your profile also ending up as visitors to your site. By adding your website or link to your blog, you make it easy for people to find out more about your business.

Maybe put a link to a special landing page for people coming from your Twitter profile? This is a great way to welcome those visitors to your site and make them feel right at home.

Bio

Next, to your visual brandings like your profile picture and your header photo, your bio might be one of the most critical items on your profile. It gives you the opportunity to tell the people viewing your profile precisely who you are what you do.

You’ve only got 160 characters though, so skip the mission statement and talk about the benefits you deliver. Why would someone want to follow you? And while you’re at it, add a little personality to help your profile stand out even more from the crowd.

Step 2: Five types of tweets to keep your followers engaged

Your profile is complete, and you might feel the urge to start following a lot of accounts to let the world know that you’re alive (and in the hopes of them following you back). But hold your horses a little bit longer, your profile is still empty on one important point, and that is the tweets itself.

If you’re used to communicating on Facebook or LinkedIn for your small business, you’re probably used to maybe sending out one post per day or maybe even every couple of days.

Talking on Twitter though is something completely different. It is a fast-paced place where people share ideas, parts of sentences, quotes from others, etc. At first glance, it might look a bit hectic, almost like a bar, but that’s where the charm lies with Twitter.

For a lot of people hitting that publish or Tweet button might feel a bit scary at first, give yourself some time though.

Try using the search function of Twitter to search for people talking about words that you use in your business as well and start engaging or Tweeting with them. Getting yourself familiar with sending out tweets.

So, how can you engage with your audience or how can you talk on Twitter? Well basically there are five types of Twitter messages:

General Tweets

Let’s first start with the basics; a Tweet is a message that you posted on the network. It can contain either some text, pictures, a GIF and/or a video or a combination of these.

@replies and mentions

When you see someone else posting something interesting you can send a reply to that person, or if you want to talk to people directly you can send an @reply to them. The @reply is a public message that mentions the Twitter username of the person you’re replying to or sending a Tweet towards.

Everyone who follows both of you will see this message in their streams, and it will appear on the notifications tab of the person you’re talking to.

If you want to say something to someone and you want the Tweet to not just appear in the timeline of everyone who follows both, be sure to start your tweet with a dot, and it also appears to everyone just following you.

Direct Message (DM)

Sometimes you want to send something in private to another person; this is where Direct Messages (DM’s) come into play.

A direct message allows you to send something to another Twitter user who appears in a special private place. Although it used to be that you could only do this to people who follow you, nowadays you can send a DM to everyone (unless they specifically blocked this in their settings).

Direct Messages are also a great way to form a group chat with your most loyal customers straight on Twitter. You can start a private conversation or create a group conversation with anyone who follows you.

Anyone who is in the group can send DM’s to the group, and everyone in the group can see all messages, even if everyone doesn’t follow each other. Lastly, anyone in your group conversation can add other participants, newly added members won’t see the history from before they joined though.

Retweets (RT) and Quoted Tweets

A Retweet (RT) or Quoted Tweet is a message created and sent by someone else that you think is relevant to your audience as well. You can hit the RT button, and it gives you the option to RT something straight away or add a comment and quote the Tweet of the other person.

This is a great way to share relevant content or endorse what your customers are saying about you.

Promoted Tweets

The last type of Tweets that are relevant to your business is Promoted Tweets. Just like boosting a post on Facebook, you can also use Twitter’s Ad platform to promote a tweet to reach a bigger audience.

Step 3: Start following other people

Of course, if you’re not following anyone else on Twitter, your timeline could look a bit lonely. Now that you’ve got your Twitter account created, you know your basic on how to Tweet and how to engage with other people, it is time to start following them.

When you follow someone on Twitter, you subscribe to what they are sharing on the platform. Try finding relevant people using Twitter search or by connecting your Gmail or Outlook address book as described earlier to start following your first set of people.

To follow someone, all you need to do is visit their profile and hit that Follow button.

Although there are certain Chrome extensions out there that lets you automatically follow all the followers of another account (let’s say your competitors) be careful to use these since they are against the policy of Twitter.

Take it slow, start following relevant people and start engaging with the ones that follow you back. After all, you don’t want to get your account suspended in the first week because of violating their policies.

As a business there are a couple of categories of interesting people you might consider the following:

• Your customers
• Your business partners, suppliers, contractors, basically anyone who you work with
• Your competitors or peers
• Professional organisations linked to your industry
• If you’re a local business, be sure to follow business in your neighbourhood as well
• People from your existing professional network

If all goes well you should start to get your first sets of followers back by now as well, don’t be afraid if it is also people you’ve never met before, be kind to them, welcome them with a personal message to your online following and start engaging with them.

Step 4: Drive traffic to your website

Although the first line of business on any social network is being social, being helpful to your followers, it doesn’t sometimes hurt to share some of your content as well to help drive traffic back to your website.

Twitter is a great tool for this; you can do this by simply typing a good reason why your particular piece of content will bring value to the reader, add your link and don’t forget to add a Call-To-Action (CTA) in your copy that will make your readers want to read the entire piece.

When sharing yours and other links on Twitter it is always best practice to use a URL shortener because of the limited space offered in a Tweet. Next, to the added benefit of having more characters available in your Tweet for the surrounding copy, there are also URL shorteners available that give you some nice extra options.

One of our favourites is Pixelme; Pixelme gives you the option to automatically have everyone who clicks a link you share to be added to a retargeting pool on Facebook. They shorten any link, and they’ll include a Facebook Pixel, which in turns helps you grow your custom audience on Facebook every time someone clicks. Simple, but effective!

Promotional tools like Quuu, Hiplay, Buffer

Sharing a link to a content piece you created is a great way to start getting more traffic to your website. However, you might not be getting everything you can from each piece of content you’re creating and sharing via Twitter.

Twitter is a fast-paced medium, and with so much awesome content shared on Twitter every day, it is impossible to see it all. And the same is true of your content. There is a high probability that although your audience is enjoying reading your articles or seeing your tweets, they are likely missing out on most of them because they are just not online all the time.

If you’re serious about content marketing, then you also need to be serious about driving as much traffic as possible to these pieces of content. For us here at Inbound Rocket we do this in three different ways:

There is so much content shared on social media every day that it’s impossible to see it all! The same is true of your content. Chances are, as much as your audience might enjoy reading your articles or seeing your latest tweet, they are likely missing out on most of them. That is why it could be vital to re-share your content multiple times, to ensure the people who missed it the first time, might see it the second or third time around.

QUUU PROMOTE

The first one is easy and pretty straightforward. Quuu Promote lets you promote your content to an ever-growing highly targeted audience base.

Quuu promote is the business backend for Quuu, and Quuu gives their members content suggestions based on the categories that they want to share content about with their audience (a great tool in itself to find highly curated content for your audience to share).

By submitting your content using Quuu promote, they validate the quality internally, and if it is found like a great piece of content, it will be added to the content suggestions of Quuu. One submission gets your content easily get a couple of hundred or more additional shares; it is well worth the investment. (Starting at $40 per month).

HIPLAY

The second tool we love is Hiplay. Hiplay lets you create a list of your evergreen content and slowly adds those pieces of content one by one (on a schedule you create) to your Buffer profile.

This way, you can automatically re-post your best content to the Buffer queue and make sure that even in months from the first release of your piece of content you’re still giving it the love it deserves.

BUFFER

When a new piece of content goes live, you want it to get seen by your audience. That’s why it is vital to re-share your content multiple times in that first couple of days. This ensures that people who missed it the first time might see it the second or third time around.

There used to be a time with Buffer that you could share on message multiple times using the Power Scheduler. Since the 3rd of April 2019, they decided to remove that option though.

So our final tip involves a little bit more manual work, see you don’t want to share the exact same message quickly after each other, but since Twitter is also a very quick moving medium it makes sense to not only share a (new) post straight after you’ve put your content online.

Share it 8 hours later, a day later and seven days after you’ve posted it for the first time online. This is a great way to make sure your content gets seen by all your followers, instead of just the once being online the moment you shared it first.

Never share the same message twice though. You don’t want your posts to become monotonous for your followers. The best strategy for doing this is to add some variety by asking questions or including quotes from the article itself.

So the first time you share it, it can be just the article title with a visual and designator that it is a new post. The second time you share it, you will ask a question, the third time you cite a fact, the fourth time you can share a quote, etc.

Step 5: Let the world know

You’re on the right track, your Tweeting, you’re engaging with your (non) followers, and you’re sharing great content. The next step is letting the world know that you’re active on Twitter.

You can do this in a couple of different ways.

Add your Twitter account information on your website and blog

Next, to the other social icons, you have for your other social media accounts. Most of the social follow tools and plugins for websites allow you to easily add this information to your website, or maybe the theme you’re using supports this out of the box, so it is even easier.

Twitter itself has a great little toolkit available as well that allows you to create follow buttons for your website quickly.

Include your Tweets on your website or blog

If you want extra exposure on the content you Tweet, you can also use the previously mentioned toolkit from Twitter to create an embedded box to showcase all your latest tweets on your website.

This is a great way to share your Twitter conversations with your website visitors, getting double exposure from the same effort. Before blindly adding all your Tweets to your website though, be sure that it makes sense from your business perspective and the goals you have for your site though.

It might be worthwhile to be selective about the tweets you share on your website, by for example only showing tweets that contain a certain hashtag.

Add sharing buttons to your website

You’ve probably already had a set of sharing buttons on your website, and in case you didn’t have a Twitter button with them yet, now it is time to add one. Don’t forget to include your Twitter handle in the settings, so that when people share your content, your account is linked to it and people know that it comes from you.

You can also use the Selection Sharer plugin on WordPress which allows people to select a piece of copy on your website and share it as they do on Medium as well.

Which way you choose, make sure that you allow your visitors to share a tweet about your content easily, share it with their followers and give credit to your Twitter account.

Step 6: Standing out

While Twitter is for sure an amazing social network, that can bring lots of value to your business, the amount of tweets getting delivered every second is staggering. Even if you followed the above steps, making your Tweets stand out from the crowd, from all the other accounts that your followers are following can be difficult.

So how can you get heard in such a fast-paced world, especially when everyone is trying to do the same?

Let’s focus on four different ways to make your Tweets stand out from the crowd.

Photographs

Why tell your followers, when you can also show them?

A lot of people on Twitter are ignoring the potential for sharing photos on their profiles. Sure, the original promise of the website is a microblogging platform, it wasn’t meant to be used like this. That doesn’t mean it doesn’t have the capability though.

People like visual content as much on Twitter as Facebook or Instagram adopters. By including relevant images, you can catch the eye of your followers and encourage engagement. Especially when sharing photos of people, for example, you can tag up to 10 people per image.

Video’s and Personal video messages

Just like with photo’s, the popularity (and effectiveness) of multimedia, in general, continues to grow on Twitter. A survey from Twitter in 2015 already found that 82% of their users are watching video content on Twitter and that they wanted to see more videos from celebrities, other users and brands. So why no offer your followers what they are asking for?

Wyzowl’s State of Video Marketing 2017 report, has similar video numbers as the one supplied by Twitter in 2015. They say that 79% of consumers are rather watching a video to learn about a product than learning by reading text on a page. Even higher (84%) of consumers were even convinced to make a purchase after watching a video by a brand.

Why not make full use of this on your Twitter account? You can create your videos and upload them, create small video responses as a personalised thank you message to your followers, retweet relevant video content your followers might find valuable or even use things like Periscope (part of Twitter) to live stream events.

GiF’s

If you’re adding photographs, video’s, of course, you can’t go without using GIF’s as well. According to Twitter a 100 million GIF’s where shared on Twitter in 2016. When you are unable to record a personal message on video, at least use one of the little-animated GIFS in your communication.

With GIF support build in, right to the mobile client, it is easier than ever, so what are you waiting for!

Twitter Chats

The last item in our list to use to help your business stand out on Twitter is the use of hosting a Twitter chat. Hosting one lets you better engage with your followers and customer while at the same time build a community and get a higher reach.

As a result, Twitter chats are a great way to grow your social following, generate valuable discussions and feedback and help you to demonstrate your thought leadership for your domain.

All you need is a proper hashtag (more on that in the next item), a host (could be yourself or you could invite different people from your industry), a topic, and a date and time.

If you want to do it well, set a recurring date, like every second Tuesday of the month and announce it upfront to your followers and email subscribers to help generate buzz.

And if you’re not up for hosting one yourself yet, try figuring out relevant Twitter chats in your industry and join them to showcase your thought leadership.

Twitter Polls

Twitter polls are a super fun and easy way to connect and interact with your audience.

And no matter how many followers you have, Twitter polls are an excellent way to get into their heads. So you can know what they think, what they want, or what they’re doing.

This will, of course, help you to determine what you should be doing for your brand, for your business.

Twitter polls are super easy, all you need to do is come up with a question and up to four response options (but if you want you can also just choose two or three options).

And because it is integrated directly into Twitter, people don’t go to another page, they don’t need to fill in a form, it won’t take ages of their time. It only takes a second or two – at most to participate.

Setting up is easy too, just hit the “add poll” button in the “compose new Tweet” box:

what is one disadvantage of the mass follow strategy

On this page, we’ll discuss the advantages of social media, as well as the downsides of social media. If you want to learn more about social media marketing, call us today at 888-256-9448 to speak with a strategist.

Don’t forget, we provide our services to clients across the country, so whether you need social media marketing services in Columbus or social media services right here in Harrisburg, we’ve got you covered.

Let’s get started!

p.s. We also have a video on this topic if you’d prefer that format.https://www.youtube.com/embed/78pyw5N67Mw?rel=0

What are the advantages of social media?

Social media is an excellent opportunity for you to grow your business.

Here are seven benefits of using social media marketing.

1. You reach large audiences

There are millions of people using social media platforms. It’s a great opportunity for your business to reach a large pool of people that are interested in your products or services.

According to Pew Research Center, these are the percentages of U.S. adults that use social media sites online or on mobile:

• YouTube: 73%
• Facebook: 68%
• Instagram: 35%
• Pinterest: 29%
• Snapchat: 27%
• LinkedIn: 25%
• Twitter: 24%

U.S. adults use many of these sites, which creates great opportunities for your business to reach leads. You have numerous opportunities to reach leads and can engage them on these different platforms.

The ability to reach large audiences is a huge advantage of social media. It opens the door for your business to find more leads that want your products or services.

A coffee shop in Washington, D.C., for instance, could use social media to reach locals and tourists. They could target users within a certain radius or location when creating social ads or boosting organic posts. Both these strategies could help bring foot traffic to the shop.

2. You have a direct connection with your audience

Social media is one of the few marketing strategies that allow you to connect directly with your audience. You know who is interested in your business because they choose to follow your social media account.

This social media advantage helps your business in numerous ways:

• You get to know them better: When you know your audience better, you can deliver more valuable content to them. You make the content more personalized to their interests, which leads to more engagement on your page and with your business.
• You provide better customer service: A direct connection with your audience allows you to resolve issues easier. You can address them personally, deal with their issues 1-on-1, and build your brand in a positive light in the process.
• You gain valuable insight about your customers: The direct connection with your audience helps you get to know your audience better. You see who interacts with your posts and how they interact with them. It helps you adapt your strategy to make it better for your followers.
• You see how your audience perceives your business: It’s always good to know how others view your business. With social media marketing, you know what your audience thinks of your company. It’s a huge advantage of social media marketing because you can capitalize on aspects people like about your business and fix elements they don’t like.

The direct connection with your audience is a great way to improve your overall marketing campaign. You’ll get insight from your followers and be able to adapt your social media strategy better to meet their needs.

3. You can create organic content

The ability to post organic content for free is an incredible benefit of social media for business. This opens many opportunities for your company to connect with valuable leads at no cost. It’s one of the reasons why companies love using these platforms.

You can post as much content as you want to engage your audience too.

These platforms enable you to post photos, videos, and more, depending upon the social media network. It’s a great way to put your brand out in front of people interested in your business and help them get more familiar with it.

4. You have access to paid advertising services

If you want to go beyond organic posting, there is an option to run paid advertisements. Each social platform offers its own form of paid advertising. Your social media advertising capabilities will vary depending upon your platform.

Paid advertisements offer your business the opportunity to connect with interested leads that haven’t found your business yet. Social media platforms allow you to tailor your ads to appear in the feeds of people who are looking for your products and services.

This creates a great opportunity for your business to expand your reach and obtain new leads. You help more interested leads find your business, which results in new followers, as well as conversions for your business.

5. You build your brand

One advantage of social media marketing is the ability to build your brand. When you connect with interested leads, you expose them to your brand. The ability to post organic content for free allows you to build brand recognition repeatedly with your audience.

This builds brand loyalty. The more people get exposed to your brand, the more they become familiar with it. Brand familiarity leads to more conversions down the line because people tend to buy from brands they know well.

Social media also helps you build your brand because it enables sharing. You can share, retweet, and re-pin content on these platforms. This means that followers can share your content with their friends and family, which helps expose your brand to more people.

It’s an excellent way for you to gain new leads. You can reach leads that you wouldn’t reach otherwise. It helps you grow your followers and earn more leads.

6. You drive traffic to your website

Social media is a great catalyst for driving traffic to your business’s website.

Most social media platforms allow you to post content with a link to your website. When you create compelling content, you can entice your audience click on the link. This directs them to your site, where they can learn more about your business.

It’s a great opportunity for you to help your audience get more familiar with your business.

They can check out your website and learn about your products and services.

Depending on your business, you can even let people use your site to book appointments or pay bills. A dental social media marketing strategy, for example, may direct people to the practice’s website to book their first appointment and complete any new patient forms.

More traffic on your site also helps your other marketing efforts because you’ll drive more relevant traffic to your page.

7. You can evaluate your performance

The last advantage to social media marketing is the ability to assess your performance. Whenever you run a marketing campaign, you want to know how it’s performing. Social media platforms make it easy for you to track your campaign to see if you’re driving valuable results.

You can determine how many people see your posts, comment, like, share, and more. If you run an advertising campaign, you can view metrics for that, too. You’ll see metrics like impressions, clicks, and conversions.

When you can evaluate your social media strategy’s performance, you can optimize it and improve it to drive better results.

8. You can join social media networks for free

One of the biggest advantages of social media marketing is that it is entirely free to start. None of the largest platforms have signup fees of any sort, so the only investment you’ll need to make is in the form of time.

That being said, there are paid advertising options on most social media platforms. These can be a great tool for growing your following and reaching more users, but are by no means mandatory for businesses.

9. You can create viral content

Perhaps the most unique advantage of social media is the ability to get help from your followers. People love to share things with their networks, from photos and recipes to interesting articles and hot deals.

Unlike other forms of Internet marketing, like your site and paid advertisements, content on social media is often shared. However wide your reach, your followers can share with their followers, who then share with their followers, giving you a wider reach (with lower cost) than a traditional marketing campaign.

10. You can uncover valuable insights

You can also use social media to gain valuable information about your customers that will help you make smarter business decisions. For example, social listening allows you to discover how people feel about your company and brand. With social listening, you can uncover conversations about your business and answer questions about your offerings.

What do people like about your business? How can you improve your products and services to better meet the needs of your target audience? Understanding the answers to these questions can your business stand out from the competition and reach more people.

Conclusion

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