Gone are the days of waiting for slow and impersonal marketing messages. Twitter offers direct communication between consumers and brands, gathers real-time feedback, addresses customer concerns publicly, and fosters stronger, more trusting relationships.
The question is: are you doing it all correctly?
If not, stick with us.
Whether you’re a small business owner or a social media agency wanting to make the most of Twitter marketing efforts, this blog is for you.
This guide will explain how to use Twitter for business and provide tips on improving your brand personality and connecting with your audience on a more personal level.
Full of character.
280 or 4,000, you can count on SocialPilot.
The only Twitter management tool
you’ll ever need.
Why Should Businesses Use Twitter/X?
Nowadays, conventional marketing techniques can feel impersonal, especially when digital real estate is crowded. Every day, consumers are bombarded with countless marketing messages, making it easy for your brand voice to get lost.
Twitter gives businesses a way to directly engage with their target audience, spark conversations, and build genuine connections.
Wait, that’s not it.
Here are some of the key advantages businesses have often spoken about:
Organic reach on other platforms can be limited. Twitter’s fast-paced nature allows businesses to display their brand personality in a way that is more humane and relatable for the audience. With viral potential, brands can easily trend on Twitter, reach new audiences organically, and connect with them on a deeper level.
Gather real-time feedback and build relationships
Unlike other platforms built on curated feeds and polished visuals, Twitter prioritizes real-time interaction. This lets you gather valuable real-time feedback, address concerns publicly, answer questions through tweets or DMs, and build stronger consumer relationships.
Spot industry trend
With close to 666 million Monthly active users (MAUs), Twitter functions like a giant conversation platform. Hashtags, trending topics, and discussions allow you to see what issues, ideas, and events are gaining attention in your industry right now and quickly identify trends.
Promote products and campaigns
Based on the trends, you can identify potential product opportunities and create high-quality content to market them. Beyond the 280-character character limit, Twitter offers multiple content types to create awareness about your products and campaigns. You can utilize visuals, informative videos, and engaging text to grab attention and encourage clicks, as well as run polls, Q&A sessions, and paid ads.
Now that you know the advantages, it’s time to get started with the real deal.
Creating a Twitter Business Profile
Pretty basic, isn’t it? If you want to figure out how to use Twitter for business, first and foremost, you have to create a Twitter business profile. It’s true that consistently posting on Twitter is very important.
However, if your Twitter profile is not optimized in the right places, your tweets won’t get the exposure you expect.
An overall profile aesthetic with complete information is equally crucial for branding. It creates a lasting impression on your profile visitors and becomes a major deciding factor for connection building.
So let us see what are the important elements you need to consider while creating your account:
Useful Tips for Creating Your Twitter Profile
- Display image: Use your official company logo as your profile picture.
- Name and username: Use your company’s name and the same username for these fields to avoid any confusion.
- Twitter bio: Your Twitter bio should be unique and have your business’s brief summed up within 160 characters, so be very specific and to the point.
- Website link: Add links to your website and blog as this will help drive traffic to your domain.
- Optime with Keywords: Add brand-related keywords in your bio so your business profile becomes more discoverable.
- Additional images: Add background photos that match your brand concept and color palette. This image can be changed according to your current marketing strategy and promotional activities.
Doing all this will further aid potential customers to know more about your offerings.
Apart from increasing website traffic, Twitter links also add credibility to your profile, opening avenues for better business opportunities.
Have a look at the SocialPilot handle. There’s a Bitly link for the latest updates and offers. The brand logo helps the target audience to identify SocialPilot’s profile quickly. The official website is also linked here. This might give you a concrete idea of how to use Twitter for your business.
Once done, you need to do the next step.
How to Use Twitter for Business – 6 Steps to Get Started
We have broken down the entire process of using Twitter for businesses into steps. Go through each of them and start implementing them.
Step 1: Build a Twitter marketing strategy
The first step we all know would be to build an actionable growth plan for your Twitter growth. Here is how you should approach this:
- Identify your target audience: The first and foremost step is to define your ideal customer profile to tailor your content and messages accordingly.
- Develop a content calendar: Once you identify your ICP, understand what content would resonate with them, and create content that sparks curiosity and serves their needs.
- Go beyond generic posts: When developing your strategy, consider using different content types with different voices. For example, you can create tweet threads and live audio sessions (Twitter spaces) and partner with micro-influencers.
Step 2: Optimize your Twitter presence
Your Twitter profile is your main point of attraction, and you need to highlight important messages to drive attention. You can pin a strategic tweet on top of your profile to showcase an important tweet, product launch, or call to action. Create a Twitter/X list to organize relevant users into curated lists (competitors, industry leaders, potential customers) to streamline the flow of information and easily follow updates.
Step 3: Build a Twitter Community
Who doesn’t want millions of followers on Twitter? We all do. But this is only possible if we take the onus of connecting and engaging actively.
Now, it doesn’t imply that you start connecting with anyone. If you want to use Twitter for your business, follow the pivotal accounts to your niche. Furthermore, you can connect with your customers, friends, colleagues, competitors, relevant influencers, and those who provide you with exciting and valuable information.
Eventually, they’ll start following you back. But this doesn’t end here. A Twitter community is more than a bunch of people following each other. You must engage with them as well.
When retweeting, the best way to initiate a meaningful relationship on Twitter for business is to mention people in your posts.
You should also comment on other tweets that revolve around your niche. Besides adding value to others, don’t forget to tweet about your brand every now and then.
Here’s a thread of Heinz tagging Oreo for their thoughts on this unique combination. Postings like this often get more engagement from respective brand followers. Hence, it’s a killer strategy to build your Twitter community.
Step 4: Follow Conversations and Engage Proactively with Others
A conversation on Twitter is just like having a face-to-face meeting with your customers every day. Hence, you need to be careful and accurate with what you tweet!
Keeping track of what other people are doing on Twitter can be a great advantage. Observe the following:
- How are they leveraging Twitter for business?
- What are they tweeting about?
- What time are they tweeting?
- How are people responding to their tweets?
Experimenting with your Twitter marketing strategy based on these observations will add insightful perspective. Focus on building interactions with your followers in the forms of retweets, replies, mentions, and favorites.
When marketing on Twitter, brands should always respond to people who ‘favorite’, ‘reply’, or ‘follow’ them. This is a must for you to build a great image of your brand across the platform and grow your following even further.
The more you engage on Twitter, the more content you have on the platform to improve your overall visibility. If you are skeptical in the beginning, then start interacting with customers. It will benefit both parties.
KitKat ensures to reply to every mention and retweets them. Here’s an example of that. This courtesy makes a brand an instant favorite among customers.
Including relevant trending hashtags on Twitter can make your tweet viral. However, ensure that you only use hashtags that are relevant to your tweet and brand.
Another advantage of using trending hashtags is that anyone on Twitter for business can see them. If a person searches for that specific hashtag, they will be able to see your tweet, and you end up having a trail of new followers.
Before you start adding hashtags to your tweets, do thorough research while figuring out your hashtag sets. They should resonate with the subject and have a decent search volume so your tweet can reach a larger audience.
For instance, digital marketers should use #marketingtips to reach a more focused audience than #socialmedia.
Dior often uses branded hashtags to showcase its various products and collections. In addition to generic hashtags, you can create branded hashtags for your business and encourage your followers to use them.
Step 6: Schedule Tweets and Analyze Their Performance
If you want to reap the benefits of Twitter marketing, you must tweet often. The more you tweet, the more engagement you will see. So, you must tweet at least three times a day—in the morning, afternoon, and evening.
Also, it has been found that tweeting at 5 PM is the best time to get more retweets. On the other hand, tweeting between 12 PM and 6 PM will get you the highest CTR (Click Through Rate), especially at the end of a working day.
But tweeting multiple times a day can be quite difficult. So why not make things easier for yourself? You can use a Twitter scheduler like SocialPilot to schedule your posts on Twitter and simplify your tasks.
Scheduling not only saves you time and effort but also helps you increase engagement. You also know which tweets are getting more engagement so you can retweet them. Monitor such metrics to accomplish more.
6 Best Practices to Use Twitter for Your Business
With the competition upgrading their social media game, especially Twitter, you need expert advice to master the platform.
Here are some of the tips you need to follow:
Tip 1: Become a thought leader
Twitter is not just about random tweets. If you want to use this as a platform to drive business, you need to position yourself as an authority or thought leader first. Share industry insights, analysis, and original research.
People follow those who add value and educate with their content. Run Twitter polls and Q&A sessions to engage your audience and collect their feedback directly. Jump into discussions that are relevant to your niche and offer your unique insights, helping you become a thought leader within your niche.
Tip 2: Interact with your audience
To become a thought leader, you need to engage with your audience consistently. Participate in relevant chats and discussions. Promptly respond to comments, questions, and brand mentions to build trust and a lasting relationship with your audience.
Tip 3: Redefine your Twitter marketing strategy
Twitter is a social media platform, and like other platforms, it constantly evolves. New trends emerge user behavior changes, and features are added or updated. You need to adapt to these changes to stay relevant and effective. Analyze your current strategy and track whether you are getting the desired results.
To understand your current performance, look at metrics like impressions, engagement rates, follower growth, click-through rates, and website traffic. Analyze what content types resonate with your audience.
Set SMART (Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant, and Time-bound) goals for your Twitter growth. What do you want to achieve with Twitter? Brand awareness, lead generation, website traffic, or customer service?
Remember, redefining your Twitter marketing strategy is an ongoing process. It won’t happen overnight, but you need to put in continuous efforts
Tip 4: Leverage the best time to post
If you’re thinking of using Twitter for your business and reaching more people, it is important that you factor in the time. Your audience won’t stay up and active on Twitter all the time. You need to find a sweet spot where you get high engagement rates.
By using Twitter analytics from tools like SocialPilot, you can identify the best time to post that is specific to your business profile. Make practice an integral part of your routine activity to drive sales and ROI.
Tip 5: Advertise on Twitter
Twitter ads are a great way to reach your targeted demographics and turn them into potential customers.
Looking to increase the reach of your tweets, you can run Twitter Promoted Ads. Your tweets will look like normal ones but will have “promoted” labelled on them and will show up in the feeds of people who might not be your followers.
If you’re just starting out, consider running a “Follower Ads” campaign to grow your audience and quickly expand your reach organically.
Tip 6: Make use of CTA’s
Last but not least, CTAs (Call to Action) are powerful ways to nudge your social media visitors to take specific action especially when you are running Twitter ads. Having clear, short, and to-the-point CTAs helps people decipher what action you want them to take. You can use strong verbs such as “Download,” “Subscribe,” “Buy Now,” or “Learn More.”
For time-sensitive offers, consider adding a sense of urgency by using phrases like “Limited Time Offer” or “Don’t Miss Out.”
Source: AppleTrack
AppleTrack has used a clear and to-the-point CTA, making it easy for people to know the outcome.
Summing It Up
Though Twitter has umpteen benefits, even the best marketers get overwhelmed by the daily tweeting frequencies. Even though 75% of businesses use Twitter, if you do not know how to use Twitter for your business, your efforts will go to waste.
Marketers are trying their best to harness Twitter for business opportunities. Thanks to Twitter’s stellar speed of making posts trend, giving them a chance to be an overnight sensation.
However, it takes months of effort to be consistent for that one tweet to go viral. A proper Twitter marketing strategy is all you need to make your business a huge hit. Couple it with a tool like SocialPilot and witness a dramatic surge in engagement.
Start your free trial today and see for yourself.
