Brands have a clear opportunity to take advantage of Twitter. It’s a place to generate genuine business leads. With over 555 million active Twitter accounts, and 400 million tweets a day, the social network has a significant presence in the business world. In fact, 42% of companies have acquired a customer via Twitter.
Twitter the concept
Stepping back, for those of you who are still living under a social media rock – Twitter is instant messaging made available to the public. The concept is simple, you can use a maximum of 140 characters to update news to your followers and turn those tweets into quality leads. When it first started, Twitter was mainly used as a channel for letting people know what you are doing. For businesses it opened up the door to start conversations and to build relationships.
Promotional tool
Today, Twitter can be a valuable promotion tool. It can help promote and develop your brand, interact with customers and prospects and give you the opportunity to follow (monitor) what people are saying about your business. It’s a strong promotional push to showcase to new followers exclusive offers that are relevant to them and that they can take advantage of instantly. Also, you can support those tweets with engaging images and videos to better illustrate your promotional offer and give your lead generation efforts even more potency.
Building Twitter traffic
Having a lot of followers is great, but it’s not a numbers game, not all followers will be profitable customers. Businesses need quality followers, people who are interested in what you have to say and like what you are doing. Those followers have the potential to become customers or advocates of your brand. These are the followers who will spread the word virally, create a ‘chain reaction’ that you started.
Content is critical
To grow genuine followers, you need to make sure you post truly valuable content, not simply spam about your product or service. Scheduling tweets is a step to help minimise the amount of time you spend scripting tweets each day, it builds a momentum of regular content. If you have a blog, tweet links to all your posts (which should have calls-to-action featured in them). This is an effective way to attract new customers. Don’t forget to connect your blog with Twitter so that a post gets tweeted the minute it’s published automatically.
Website synergy
Your website should work hand-in-hand with your Twitter account too. You can inform your existing customers and website visitors that you are on Twitter and encourage them to follow you. Announce it on your home page and indeed add as a sign off in your e-signature. Post links to your latest news and product development in your tweets too.
Perfect your Twitter profile
Your profile and background images visually represent your brand. Logos work, but you can also feature a person or character. Be better at branding than your competitors, the Twitter header is the perfect opportunity to show some more personality and confidence. By employing these sort of Twitter tactics, slowly but surely you will build brand equity and attract more customers.
SEO driven
A robust social media presence will enhance your SEO results. While you want your website to be the first hit – the key is to identify how to be response driven. To improve SEO, ensure to include at least one keyword in your profile that reflects your business and include a call-to-action (CTA), a link that directs visitors to a desired action you want them to take. For example, if you are running a specific product campaign, direct users to take action such as finding out more, accessing a download.
Focus on conversion
Drive potential new customers to convert or buy your product. If you plant calls to action in your tweet such as ‘please retweet’ please help’ ‘visit’ in your messages you will get a higher response rate. When hosting an event, create a hashtag so users can join the conversation and you in turn can aggregate a list of tweets from potential leads. To stay ahead of the conversion curve, offer followers interesting links, respond to tweets, post thoughts to stimulate two-way conversation regularly.
What next?
These guidelines should shape your Twitter strategy to help promote your business. Remember, Twitter plays just one part of the digital toolkit that can help you attract more customers.
Sources:
www.econsultancy.com/uk/blog/62910-this-week-s-finest-digital-marketing-infographic-8?utm_medium=email&utm_source=daily_pulse
www.copyblogger.com/grow-business-twitter/
