Tweet Your Way to the Top: How to Maintain an Effective Presence on Your Company’s Twitter
Twitter is a powerful resource for your company; it offers the most immediate connection between you and your followers of any of the major social platforms. Establishing a Twitter presence is key for any company involved in digital marketing, but there are right and wrong ways to utilize the platform. How can you ensure your business is getting the most out of its 140 characters?
Many companies have no idea how to use Twitter for business, so they take the wrong approach and are clueless as to why their efforts result in such low engagement and views. The 140 character limit forces content to be concise and direct. This can make it difficult to use the language you might usually employ in your marketing efforts, and requires a slightly different approach to ensure your efforts pay off. But don’t worry, an advertising agency knows the tricks of the trade and can optimize your Twitter to and maximize your return-on-investment.
Conveying Brand Image and Personality
The key to a digital marketing campaign is to avoid using Twitter only to promote your business or sell a product. When it comes to Twitter, the most successful businesses operate just like an individual user. Consider the “personality” of your business and brand—if it were a person, what would it tweet about? Treat Twitter as a means to reinforce your already-existing brand instead of a bulletin board for your current marketing campaign. Twitter users expect to engage with others in their timeline, not just to be broadcasted at. Engagement between you and your followers should be a two-way street.
Take a look at what some of the most successful businesses are doing on Twitter within your industry. Consider Nike, which posts daily motivational tweets, or JCPenney, which offers style tips or the American Cancer Society, which shares inspirational stories. Neither of these strategies sells their products directly, but both align with their brands and reinforce their respective images as the clothing company for competitors, or the store where families shop. Giving your followers a reason to look forward to your tweets is the most effective way to keep them engaged and create a supportive, passionate fan base.
Encouraging Engagement
Be sure to mix in fun posts with your promotional material and business-related engagement like customer service. This doesn’t necessarily involve retweeting all of the latest meme crazes, but maximizing your Twitter presence does mean giving your audience a reason to follow you beyond staying up to date on your product. Share content that you think users will enjoy seeing and engaging with, even if it doesn’t directly market your business or product. As a platform, Twitter is very casual—people are there to relax, enjoy themselves and engage.
The immediate customer service potential is extremely valuable, though. Twitter’s search function allows you to see every tweet with certain words—such as your company’s name—the instant they are posted, which means a company can immediately see and respond to any praise, criticisms or concern. Many companies even have dedicated customer service Twitter accounts. For example, Spotify uses the Spotify Cares Twitter handle, a separate account from the primary Spotify account, to address customer concerns, retweet positive comments and report status updates on technical issues. Keeping these accounts very active shows users you care about them and will result in even more quality engagement among your followers.
Rewarding Your Followers
Knowing how to use Twitter for business means having a well-defined social media personality that will allow for a more developed relationship between you and your followers. If your company offers a good product or service, your customers will want to support you, and following you on Twitter is a low-risk and convenient opportunity for them to take action. An easy way to reward them is to provide them with quality content they enjoy seeing; master this and you’ll see your follower count and engagement rate increase.
Giveaways are a very powerful way to incentivize your followers as well. Offering real life rewards and prizes for followers who participate in calls to action (such as liking and retweeting a post, or tagging your business account in a photo) is a sure-fire way to motivate your followers and increase engagement. Giveaway rewards also have the second benefit of creating a tangible, real life connection with your followers that makes the relationship extend beyond digital. Strengthening those connections is what produces the most loyal followers and long-term clients.
Consider a marketing agency for maintaining your Twitter and other social media presences. Full-service agencies can help develop brands from the ground up, putting them in the best position to continue marketing their image. In order to truly get the most out of your company’s Twitter presence, work with experts who can hone in on your brand image and maintain an active presence on your behalf while you focus on what matters to you: your business.
Agencies conduct the research necessary to define and realize your brand identity, and then assist in content creation that aligns with that identity. Scheduling and management services like content calendars then help to visualize the timeline and proper pacing of a digital marketing plan. Most agencies will also continue to monitor ongoing digital marketing campaigns and optimize them to maximize your return-on-investment.
Get the experts you need to handle your social image and learn how to effectively use Twitter for business. Appleton Creative is an award-winning, full-service online marketing and advertising agency located in Orlando, Florida. Appleton works with local, national and international clients to deliver custom content, persuasive online ads and expertly crafted campaigns. By implementing valuable and shareable digital content strategies, Appleton can create the perfect social and digital marketing experience for your brand and audience. Your Internet advertising goals are worth a conversation: contact us at 407-246-0092 or info@appletoncreative.com
