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A textbook on Twitter marketing

Twitter is used by millions of people. Some privately and others for business purposes. Business users use it to monitor the conversation about their brands, promote offers or share rich and high-quality content in the form of images or videos. Each tweet (post on Twitter) can be only 140 characters long. Research has shown that 64% of users will be more willing to buy a product from a company they follow on Twitter.

twitter

The first thing you need to do when you sign up for Twitter is to choose a username and create your profile. Choosing a username is very important as it becomes an integral part of your profile address. You’ll put that address on all your other marketing materials to direct people to follow your Twitter account. The name should be short and easy to remember. Usually, for business purposes, use your company name or abbreviated name. That means you need to type

“building maintenance company istanovastarigrad”

you will already use in that case

“building maintenance”

etc. In that case, your Twitter profile address will be

www.twitter.com/odrzavanjezgrada.

The name of the profile is important because it will appear high in search when people search for words in its name.

You have the option in Twitter to write a short biography, 160 characters long. As long as the profile is private, you can enter words separated by commas, e.g.

“entrepreneur, wine lover, internet addict”.

If it is a business profile, try not to sound too corporate, but more like a private profile. People prefer to communicate with other people rather than with some kind of corporation. As many places as you have, you can mention other related profiles in your biography. If you sell branded clothing, you can mention the profile of one of the brands by typing

@profilbrenda.

 

Profile design

 

Twitter profile should be well designed. The profile picture must be effective and clear. The company logo is usually inserted here, but care must be taken that its dimensions are 400 x 400 pixels. This is a recommendation from Twitter and using this rule you should get maximum image clarity. Profile header image is also important. It should be 1500 x 500 pixels in size. It’s up to you what you fill this space with. In principle, this space should be used for branding, highlighting promotions, etc. You also have the option to choose a background photo. When you choose these three images, you have created the visual identity of your profile. It is recommended that you entrust this work to an experienced designer who will fit all these elements into a harmonious whole that will appeal to people.

Don’t share tweets on Facebook

 

In your Twitter settings, you have the option that when you tweet, your tweets are instantly shared on Facebook. We do not recommend turning this option on because it is assumed that you will be tweeting much more often than you will be posting on Facebook, so Facebook users may feel as if you are spamming (harassing) them. The methods of communication and the type of audience on Twitter and Facebook are very different, so we recommend that you keep your accounts completely separate.

Answer quickly

People often choose to contact companies via Twitter when they have a specific question or problem related to a product they bought or a service they received. Because Twitter is a place where constant and fast conversation takes place, users expect a quick response from you. According to research, a response is expected within 30 minutes or even faster. Therefore, if you decide to use a Twitter profile, it is important to tell the users who follow you when you are available to give them answers. Whether it’s 24 hours a day, seven days a week, or just Tuesdays or Wednesdays, it’s up to you. It is only important that you are there for your followers at the agreed time. You can include this information either in your bio or as part of your profile design, within one of your photos.

Content strategy of Twitter marketing

Only 140 characters for the perfect tweet. The first thing you should keep in mind if you have a business profile is to put the initials of the person who is currently communicating with users at the end of each tweet. You can put photos and initials of people from your company who communicate with followers within the image in the profile header. In this way, the follower knows who he is talking to at all times. The most difficult thing is how to conceive that perfect tweet that will provoke a positive reaction from followers.

You should not continue one message through multiple tweets because this form of communication is invisible to the people who follow you. Over time, you’ll gain the experience needed to fit everything you wanted to say into just 140 characters. The basis is to focus on the quality and consistency of tweets as well. This means that in addition to tweeting often, the content of your tweets should be useful and interesting. You don’t need to tweet every minute of the day. It annoys those who follow you and they simply stop following you at one point. People from Twitter did a research and found that those people who tweet 3 times a day for seven days are noticed by the number of people who represent 30% of the total number of people who follow them. Not all tweets are of equal quality. Some go viral and some don’t. In any case, quality always wins over quantity in the long run.

Don’t be afraid to post the same content several times during the day as long as it is of good quality. In theory, Twitter displays the content you post to all the people who follow you. However, in practice it is very dynamic and the movement of content is very fast. Therefore, many people who follow you may miss the content you have posted. That’s why it’s not a bad idea to set the same content to be published a few more times in the span of a few hours. When repeating the same content, experiment with nals, tweet text and hash tags.

What types of content are best for posting on Twitter and other social networks?

 

Ask people a question and start a discussion. The questions can be related directly to your product (Do you prefer white or dark chocolate?) or it can be a kind of mini-quiz (Opened a new store. Guess where?). On social networks, always ask the question at the end of the posts, because there is a 15% higher chance that someone will join the conversation. This is mostly true for Facebook because Twitter is all about short posts.

You can tell your story to people who follow you. It can be something interesting from everyday business or you can talk about what motivates or inspires you. Encourage people to share their story with you. The goal is to get them emotionally invested in your brand and share information about you with their friends.

You can also offer people a solution to a problem or your expertise in a certain area. Use the latest news and try to find a real or imaginary connection with your products.

For example, use the news “Opera singer broke a glass with his voice” to advertise soundproofing for the house. The glass remains whole on the table and next to the singer’s voice.

You can mark all important dates and holidays in the calendar and create content for your Twitter profile according to the theme of the holiday. Your content can also directly promote the content and services you provide.

Users of social networks are most often looking for useful and interesting content. On the other hand, you want to sell your product or service. The ratio of product promotion and quality content should be 20% to 80%. In that case, people who follow you will appreciate that you let them know about your offer.

It is not in the least commendable that most of the content is direct product promotion. Imagine a situation where you come to a store where the salesperson chases you every time you look at a product saying “Buy, buy, buy!!!”. Instead of such a seller, you would prefer the one who answers your questions like “What is the difference between these two cameras?” Why is this one more expensive?”

Visual content types such as images and video files are particularly popular. Posts that contain images are getting a lot of attention on social media. Twitter is primarily text-oriented, which is why you have people on it who are constantly complaining about something and constantly whining, while those social media where you can use the full potential of images do not have this to that extent.

Whenever you use photos on social media it’s best to take and edit them yourself. As this is a time-consuming process, people usually use stock photography (images that someone else has taken and is selling or sharing for free, with the intention of placing them on your website or adding them to a social media post).

Twitter, although text-oriented has an option to add images, so you can use this option, but be careful about the quality of the images you share, as well as copyright. You can also brand each image by adding a logo or a link to a website, social network profile, and the like. This is useful because when people share the content you deliver to them, they are also sharing your brand. Avoid branding only when it comes to holidays and historical events. When it comes to such events, people share more pictures that do not have the company’s brand on them because they feel a higher degree of ownership of them. As a company you cannot own Easter. He belongs to all those people who celebrate him. The content of the image is always important. It should be self-explanatory or explain well the content of the link it leads to. You can use images to highlight a special offer. They can be infographics, they can motivate people (motivational posters), they can be nostalgic or funny, etc.

Tweets

hash

Use #hashtags when creating tweets. Hashtags group tweets not on the same topic. On Twitter, you can see which hashtags are currently popular, i.e. which are popular topics of conversation. It has been shown that people respond to tweets that use hashtags twice as well as those that do not. Do not use more than two hashtags per tweet as it can be confusing for users. Try to use short hashtags because they are more readable. Do not use symbols. You can use capital letters to separate words and make the hashtag more readable.

For example. #DeepSea instead of #deepsea.

What are hashtags actually for? Hashtag highlights your brand. Create a unique hashtag to highlight your brand. Use it often in your tweets so that your followers get used to it. When you organize a promotion or an event that people who follow you will be invited to, they will want to tweet from your event. Encourage them to use your hashtag and you will get quality promotion for your brand.

The hashtag can be used to get feedback or information about the profitability of the investment. You can use services like http://hashtagify.me/ to see what other hashtags are related to yours. For example. at the moment of writing this #cocacola is very strongly associated with #love. This happens because hashtags are very often used by Twitter users today to express emotions. In this way, you can get information about what emotions your brand name evokes in your customers. This information is a very powerful tool for experienced marketing professionals and can be used for further promotion purposes.

The use of hashtags on other social networks and platforms can also be analyzed. If someone else mentions your hashtag in any context, on Twitter you can find information about when it was used, who used it and the content of the message in which it is used. You can engage in conversation with people who have used your hashtag in messages. Be of help to them, solve a problem for them. Don’t be pushy and overpromote the products. In this way, much-needed authority is gained.

There is also an option to pin some of your important tweets to the top of your profile. All other tweets will be below it. You do this if you want to put the tweet in the center of attention of your followers. These can be important notifications, event promotions, etc. You can summarize the mission and vision in that tweet.

When you tweet always leave some room for people’s comments. Many people like to add their own comment to your tweet that they retweet. For example if you tweeted

“New product on www.com”.

Someone retweets it and adds it

“New product on www.com Awesome @vasbrend.”.

Write tweets of up to 120 characters that you want people to retweet this way. In that case, you leave room for them to add their opinion with the help of Tweetdeck. Always strike a good balance of tweets, replies and retweets.

There is nothing worse than exclusively promoting your products and services on social networks. Reply to other people’s tweets. Encourage them to contact you. Later, you can also encourage them to take pictures of the products they bought from you and post them. Then you can retweet those images and thus provide other followers with “social proof”, i.e. to show them the popularity of your product, ie. that many people already use it and are satisfied.

Please note, if you address someone and use @personname at the beginning of the tweet, that tweet only appears on the feeds of people who follow you and the person you are addressing at the same time. If you mention someone in the middle of a tweet then all your followers see it. Retweeting is a good relationship building strategy on Twitter. Find a couple of Tweeters who are influential and post popular tweets in your industry and retweet them. Of course, you won’t retweet competing firms. When you first open an account, try to tweet and retweet equally. By doing so, you build good karma and the basis that when you show yourself as an interesting tweeter, those same people start retweeting your tweets and expanding your audience and influence in the best possible way.

If you have quality content on your site that is worth sharing. There is an option to add a button to follow on Twitter or a button to share content on Twitter. This button allows readers to instantly share a link to the page they are on and the content they are reading with their followers. This way, there is a chance that more people will start following you on Twitter and reading the content of your site. It’s not just a point to place a Twitter share button on all pages of your site. Clicking on the button opens Twitter and automatically creates the text of the tweet to be shared. Most of the readers do not change this predefined tweet, so it is important that you create how the text of the tweet will look like. It should change depending on the page the reader is on. If he is reading the blog post it should read something like this

“Great write-up on this and that on the link.”

As far as the reader is on the product page the tweet should read

“I like the name of the product very much.”

In this way, you not only promote the sharing of content, but also predefine the reader’s attitude about your text or product.

Respond to @mentions and direct messages as quickly as possible. Many large companies do not do this, which threatens their credibility. Respond quickly to mentions in a positive context, and even more quickly to those in a negative context. The longer negative mentions sit in the air, unanswered, the more likely your customers will think you don’t care about them. When you want to thank someone for a tweet or mention, do so by fav (favorite) what they posted. Tweets from other users you’ve liked are displayed on your profile. Therefore, you should not do this too often, so that your faves have a “higher value”, ie. “emphasized” more. When someone just follows you, thank them with

“@korisnik thanks for following me.”

You can start by retweeting an interesting tweet of his and thus start an interaction.

We’ve already talked about pictures, but we’ll give you a few more useful tips. It has been shown that tweets containing an image have a higher chance of being retweeted. It has also been shown that tweets containing images from external sources (eg Instagram) are twice as likely to be retweeted as those containing an image uploaded directly to Twitter. The secret is that the images you upload to Twitter appear in the feed. Be sure to upload images with a 2:1 aspect ratio. If you put a dimension in a different scale, the whole thing will not be visible in the feed, but only a part of it in the mentioned scale. You can take advantage of this by intentionally inserting a “bad” scale image. At the bottom of the image you can write a link to download a voucher or a promotional code. Since there is an option to see the whole image, the tweet can read

“Click on the image to view the link to the voucher.”

for a blog

An example of a full image view

Also Twitter is in April 2014. made it possible to add four images to a tweet instead of one. In the feed, they are automatically displayed next to each other, so companies use this option to make collages, mini-tutorials for their products, and the like. With this option, you have the possibility to tag up to 10 people, winners of a competition, customers, business associates. Everyone you tag gets a notification that they’ve been tagged, and best of all, this all doesn’t fit into the allotted 140 characters for a tweet.

Through Twitter, you can organize mini-competitions, give real-time offers with discount codes. You can also receive orders via Twitter. Many companies also organize live chats for their customers. To create these chats, specific hashtags and external services are used that enrich the moderation of chats. Usually, companies organize them once a week. Such chats give companies a lot of authority.

Twitter cards

Another option that can be used well for marketing is Twitter cards. What are Twitter Cards? Whenever someone writes a tweet that contains a link to your page, your card appears below the tweet. In order for the tab to appear, you need to add a piece of code or one of the plugins for the CMS (Content management system such as WordPress, Drupal, Joomla, etc.) that you use to your site. There are 9 types of cards you can use, and their placement may or may not serve one of the following purposes:

  • Sign up for the mailing list
  • Registration on the site
  • Viewing and using coupons
  • Link to the landing page
  • Application download

All of these features can be useful in interacting with your followers and online marketing activities. It remains to answer the question of which 9 types of cards are available to you.

The feed tab is the default Twitter tab. On it, you can see a part of the text from your page in the extract and a thumbnail that goes with the text. This card contains a link that leads directly to the page where the text is located.

Excerpt

The next card is a statement card but with a larger photo. The extract from the website is maximally shortened and the photo occupies a significantly larger space. The purpose of this card is the same as the previous one, but the visual element is emphasized here.

extract image

A product card is, as the name suggests, intended to present your product. For the product description, it is possible to create a title, create a description of up to 200 words. It is possible to insert a product image, price and availability. This card is a very elegant solution for introducing products on Twitter.

product

There is also a website card designed for site promotion, then a card for application promotion, as well as a card for generating leads through building an email list. There are also three types of cards that promote visuals. These are the player tab in which the video player with the video is displayed. Picture and gallery tabs are used to display pictures individually or as galleries. There are tweeks to create each of these cards, which we will write about in one of the following texts.

We have shown you some of the ways to successfully run a Twitter account with the aim of promoting your products and services. Of course, this is not all. There’s a lot we haven’t covered on this occasion. It is important that managing a business account is part art and part science. The secret is to be likeable but not too pushy. Try some of these strategies yourself, we believe you will succeed.