A little birdie might have told you about Twitter and it’s many benefits. The concept is simple enough, you can “tweet” short messages to your followers. Great right? Except you might be a little bit confused about how to use Twitter for business. What’s a retweet? How will you get followers? And how on earth can you sell something in just 140 characters?
Let’s break it down.
1. Setting it up
The set up is actually really simple. Just go into Twitter and sign up. The step by step feature will walk you through the process, even suggesting people you should follow. Be sure to use a great profile picture and header image so that everything looks sharp, attracting people’s attention. Oh, and don’t forget filling in your bio with something catchy and a link to your website!
2. Tweet Tweet
Now that everything is set up it’s time to get tweeting. Why not try something friendly as your first one? Perhaps a shout out or announcement about having joined the world of Twitter!
3. Hash Tags
# <—- This little thing is going to become your friend, but first you have to learn how to use it! Hash tagging is a way of categorising a post. So if you write #AwesomeBlogPost then anyone who searches using that hashtag will find your post. Great right? So when writing your post consider including a ‘#’ before particular words. Twitter helps you out by suggesting other tags people are using. For example #SocialMediaMarketing could also be #SMM (which saves you characters).
We can’t help but remind you that while hash tagging is great, it should be used sparingly. You’re representing a company, not an overactive teenager, so #writing #a #post #like #this will get you #nowhere. Think it through, picking out 2-3 keywords related to your brand and leaving it at that!
4. @… ?
What’s the deal with the ‘@’ sign is what you might think. That’s a very simple way of tagging, or mentioning, someone. However, there are variations to it.
If you want to speak to someone directly (though still publicly) you can simply start off with @switchmalta……….[your tweet]…..
This means that @switchmalta (which is us by the way!) will get a notification with your message. This isn’t a private message – everyone can see it, the only difference is that it won’t turn up in your follower’s feed like normal tweets.
If you want it to turn up in your feed for all your followers to see then there must be text preceding the ‘@’ sign.
You could try “We love your blog @weareSWD keep up the great work!” or, for something subtle simply put a fullstop. “.@weareSWD keep up the great work!”
This allows those following you to see what’s going on, and perhaps follow the discussion.
5. Retweets
A Retweet is, quite simply, when a follower ‘forwards’ your message to his own followers. This gets your message out there, so retweets are great for your company. Create content which people will want to share in order to boost your engagement.
Don’t forget to reply someone who retweeted you with a simple “hey, thanks for the retweet!” to let them know you appreciate it.
6. Keeping it simple
Brevity is an important part of twitter. Take time to compose your posts, including a call to action at the start, 2-3 hashtagged keywords, and allow for a few unused characters at the end incase anyone retweets you and wants to add something on. Remember to shorten your links with Bitly to save on space!
7. Use Images
We’ve said it enough times for you to have learnt by heart that images will always attract attention. However, they do take up some of your character count, so plan your posts properly.
8. Schedule them in
Using something like TweetDeck allows you to schedule in twitter posts. This means that you won’t ever be caught off guard and will always have your next tweet ready to go up.
9. Frequency
Unlike Facebook, on Twitter you can post quite often, even 4-5 times a day. So while we recommend posting to Facebook once a day, we also recommend that you go ahead and tweet to your heart’s content. Just don’t over do it and always make sure your tweets are interesting and relevant to your brand.
10. Be friendly!
We cannot stress this enough. If you want people to follow you you’ve got to be friendly. Retweet, reply, and favorite posts by followers and fans. Show your human side and show you care, people will respond to it with great enthusiasm and become more loyal to you.
We hope this helped you out in your quest to improve your social media presence. Don’t forget to drop us a line if you’re ready to find out more about what we can do for you!
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