Without a doubt, Twitter has become one of the most valuable marketing tools available to business owners and operators. But knowing precisely how to best use this channel may not be as widely known.
Recently, Russ Laraway, head of SMB at Twitter, spoke with Inc. Magazine to highlight some of the most important guidelines and best practices you should follow when marketing your business through Twitter.
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1. Value Your Followers
This is probably the single most important of Laraway’s recommendations. Twitter’s platform is essentially based around the notion of followers, as these are the people who will see your tweets on a regular basis, and who may engage with your social media accounts directly. Every Twitter strategy must include a significant focus on gaining new followers and holding on to existing ones.
Yet despite all of this, many companies fail to fully appreciate and value their followers. This, as Laraway explained, is a mistake. After all, a company’s followers are almost by definition its best audience for marketing messages.
“When a Twitter user chooses to follow someone [or a company], it shows a pretty strong interest in what they have to say,” Laraway noted, according to the news source.
Laraway argued that businesses should look at their Twitter followers not just as a resource to tap, but actually as a responsibility. These individuals have decided to reward your firm with their time and interest, and your organization should feel obligated to reward this faith.
Consequently, there are two key, cardinal mistakes you should avoid when managing or overseeing your company’s Twitter account. First, don’t try to use this channel purely as a means of delivering sales pitches. It may be tempting to do so – after all, your followers are presumably your most loyal, eager-to-buy customers. But no one follows a business on Twitter just to be inundated with offers. They want to learn more about your company, to be informed and entertained and connected. Returning their interest with sales pitches will drive your followers away.
Second, don’t post useless, irrelevant content just for the sake of posting something. Regularly, frequent engagement is critical for Twitter success, but if you are careless with the content released, you will in effect demonstrate that you don’t really appreciate your followers and their interests. Valuing your followers requires you to put genuine thought and care into the materials and messages you share with them.
2. Repurpose and Schedule Content
Among the biggest challenges that businesses tend to run into when pursuing Twitter as a marketing channel is generating enough content. More so than Facebook, Google+ and virtually all other social media platforms, Twitter limits the length of all messages. However, it also requires frequent, consistent output. If a firm does not deliver content on a regular basis, its Twitter account will seem inactive and therefore unappealing, leading to a loss of followers. There are so many businesses on Twitter now, that any firm that adopts a too casual, laid-back approach will essentially be overlooked.
Laraway offered several pieces of advice as to how businesses can produce enough content to satisfy their followers, and therefore their greater marketing goals. Chief among these was repurposing existing materials.
For example, the Twitter expert suggested that firms turn to their existing marketing efforts, such as email campaigns, for material that can be redistributed via Twitter. There may be some audience overlap between these campaigns, but this will likely be minimal, and certainly not enough to discourage the practice. By repurposing email marketing content for Twitter, businesses can gain more value from previous efforts, as well as see a better return on investment for future content creation.
Of course, for such an effort to work, businesses need to take into account the inherent differences between Twitter and other content distribution channels. Obviously, Twitter’s 140-character limit may pose difficulties, but Laraway argued that these can certainly be overcome. Specifically, he recommended using varied content types, including video and images, to supplement the written word.
Additionally, Laraway recommended that businesses develop and abide by content calendars to improve their efforts in this area.
“Companies can create a recurring, weekly cadence of content that sort of takes the guesswork out of tweeting – which they might organize by day of the week and then make adjustments as needed,” said Laraway, Inc. Magazine reported. “That tends to be a pretty good approach to getting out quality content to users and retaining them as followers.”
Not only do content calendars help to ensure that firms produce enough content, but they also can improve the quality of that content, as firms must take longer to consider their long-term marketing plans and the best ways of achieving those goals.
3. Keep Up the Engagement
Last, but far from least, Laraway emphasized how important it is for businesses to engage with their followers consistently. He noted that many companies understand the need to attract followers, and so make this their single overriding priority for all Twitter activity. However, this attitude underestimates the need to actually hold on to those followers once they’ve been acquired. Businesses need to be just as committed to retaining followers as they are to attracting them if they’re going to see significant gains from their Twitter efforts.
Fortunately, as Laraway pointed out, this task does not have to be difficult. The key is engagement. Followers greatly appreciate it whenever a company’s Twitter account takes the time to respond to their questions or single out their comments. Such interaction can effectively reward their willingness to follow your brand and read your (hopefully) frequent tweets, and can turn a casual follower into a passionate advocate for your brand. Twitter is ultimately about both disseminating messages and encouraging conversation, and engagement is absolutely critical for this second objective.
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