Founded in 2006, Twitter, over the years has grown tremendously, to become the social media behemoth it is today. As of the last quarter of 2021, Twitter had 206 million monetizable users globally.
With such an active and diverse user base, Twitter is definitely one of the best places to promote or raise awareness about your business, engage with customers and act on leads.
If you are a business starting out on Twitter, you must know that setting up a business account on Twitter is easy. With the correct strategies and marketing plan, Twitter can very well become a platform to boost sales, increase brand recognition as well as concentrate on providing great customer service. To effectively use Twitter , you must know that your profile has 6 basic parts- your Twitter handle, profile picture, username, bio, header image, and a pinned tweet. All of these elements work together to portray what your business is based on, and how it essentially functions.
In order to successfully use the platform optimally, you must also become well versed with the major twitter terminologies and signs - the @, the #, the features to block, retweet, bookmark, follow, or direct message(DM) someone. There are also provisions for you to like a tweet or make lists of users as per your interests. You also should keep yourself abreast of trending topics and trends.
Now, if you are indeed planning to use Twitter for your business, you should also be mindful of some etiquettes that are generally followed by business accounts. If you do not know they are, worry not, we have got your back. There are certain dos and don’ts when it comes to business accounts and they are as follows:
The Do’s.
1. Make use of Twitter lists.
This is probably one of the most useful features that Twitter offers for businesses. You do not have to follow profiles to put them in a list, and it allows you to organise users as per their content into easier to digest news feeds. This feature is not very commonly used by many businesses till date, but we can assure you it is one of the most helpful ones.
Some lists that your business can create are
industry influences
industry news,
customers,
competitors and
new leads.
Other users have also created lists that you can follow, for a better and more organised approach to ascertaining potential leads.
2. Crediting someone goes a long way
If you are using, retweeting or sharing content that was previously shared by another profile or was created by another profile, then give them their due credit by tagging them in the tweet. This creates a sense of good faith amongst mutuals and you will be surprised to see how many people credit you back when using your content for their benefit.
3. Personalise as much as you can
When you're retweeting something, add a comment to it, as per the specifics of your business. Customising a retweet with respect to your services draws more attention from your followers and also opens up the chance of a conversation with the original creator. Adding a meaningful comment does not take long, but it goes a long way to create more engagement.
4. Treat your followers like the potential customers they are.
You should not be posting just for the sake of posting. Make sure that your tweets add value to your followers’ timelines. It is only then that they will be interested in checking out your brand and your profile. Customer service is also an important part of this. Be mindful of the problems they are facing, the questions they are asking and try your best to answer them or discuss them. Make sure there are resources they can access, where your followers can find out more about your services. This will automatically raise your sales.
5. Be mindful of the trends.
With the rise of the hashtag culture, trending news, events, activities or challenges have become veritable gold mines from marketing. Stay ahead of these trends, keep an eye on the competitors and how they are dealing with trends. You also have to monitor the activity on certain trigger words which are important to your business to ensure that you keep your profiles approachable and there is some engagement or the other happening on it in the form of questions, answers or discussions or even giveaways and such. As they say, listen with your eyes and be aware of what is the hottest thing to do in your line of business.
6. Make sure your tweets are interactive and easy on the eyes.
A study by Twitter indicated that tweets with images and short videos tend to do much better than just tweets with alphabets and numbers. Statistically, adding an image increases your engagement by approximately 35%. There are multiple apps available now, which allows you to customise images as per your need very easily. In case you want graphics, which are more complex, investing in a graphic designer or a graphic designing team may also be a good idea.
7. See to it that your profile is complete.
Filling up all the information is extremely important if you're running a business. Your details should not be as well guarded as a private profile. Your visibility and rate of discovery also increases if the information on your profile is up to date and complete, in order to drive more engagement to your profile.
8. First impressions matter
Your twitter profiles may be the first impression that a potential customer can have about your business. So Make sure your profile looks nice, tidy, aesthetically pleasing and interesting. The header picture, as they say, is the perfect place to show off whatever you're promoting and also to promote upcoming events, or activities. In order to be most effective, you have to adapt to the changing times of social media and tweak your bio and your pictures to reflect the ongoing trends across these platforms.
9. Keep an eye on your company name.
Everything is perfect when users mention your company with the @ sign before your name, as a result of which you get notified of whatever activity has taken place, but in case somebody forgets to put the @ sign, you will not get to know whether people are talking about your business or not. So, it is good practice to use the search section of Twitter and do a deep search on your name to see whether people are mentioning your business at all or not without the @ sign.
The Don'ts
1. Don't go overboard with the hashtags.
#Nobody #likes #a #post #like #this. Hashtags are supposed to make it easier to find relevant content and conversation about specific topics. When used efficiently, they increase your reach significantly, as well as your engagement. At the same time helping you find new leads. But adding a hashtag to every single word in your tweet, might become irritating for users to view and might eventually result in a fall in engagement. Three to five hashtags are the absolute maximum, where you have to ensure that the hashtags are relevant to the content that you're posting, and the audience that you want to target.
2. Do not retweet before reading.
Make sure to retweet only content that is pertinent to your business. If there are affiliate links make sure you check the links out before retweeting them because oftentimes it does seem that these links redirect to a competitor's page. If you retweet without opening them and ensuring the content of it, you can also expect your followers to do the same thing.
3. Trying to sell your product or service all the time is a bad idea.
Yes, promotional content and promotional posts are helpful and necessary, but in today's world where online marketing has become an integral part of your company’s marketing, just posting promotional content is generally viewed as the easy way out. You have to ensure that your followers do not feel bombarded with such content all-day. The experts in the industry swear by the 5-3-2 rule whereby the five represent content from others, three is the content which you post and two is personal or non-work content.
4. Don't engage with just your followers
It is pretty common for business profiles to engage with just their followers. And while there should be some sort of reinforcement or reward system for followers, you should also be interacting with other people because they might be your potential customers. Engaging with just your followers will lead to no new connections, no new opportunities for your business when it comes to Twitter. Join into conversations, share other people's content and monitor relevant hashtags, keywords and trends to make the best out of this experience.
5. Automated direct messages are not a good idea.
Automated messages tend to come across as impersonal. Nobody wants to go through that experience. It is fine to use automated messages to inform a person who has DM’d you that you will get to their query or concern in some time as you may be busy right then, but apart from that purpose, automated messages are generally best avoided. Manual, personal messages tend to go a lot further and do much better when it comes to forming long-lasting bonds and collaboration.
6. Business profiles should not be private.
Personal profiles might have a lot of sensitive information for which making it a private profile is generally considered to be a better idea. But if your business profile is private, then most people will not be able to access it at all and you will be at an unnecessary disadvantage when it comes to visibility. Nobody other than your followers will be able to see your tweets, nobody other than your followers will be able to retweet or like your tweets and you will have to accept every new follower manually which is a lot of time unnecessarily wasted.
7. Following just to unfollow is in bad taste.
It might look better for your business when your “follower” number is more than your “following” number, but sending a follow request to any profile, only to unfollow them when they accept your request and choose to follow you back is in extremely poor taste You ideally want to create a community of people who have trust in you because it is this trust that leads to sales, not the number of in Follow us.
8. Do not post all at once.
Running a business is not an easy deal. You might feel like opening Twitter and putting up all your activity intent leads back to back is a good idea in terms of time management but it does more harm than good. Distributing your posts throughout the day allows your business to reach different time zones, demographics and be on people's feed at all times. Posting 10 tweets back to back only takes away attention from your own tweets. Forcing followers to choose which post they should like or engage with.
CONCLUSION
So, now that you know what to do and what not to do, there is nothing stopping you from optimising your Twitter usage and designing your strategy in such a way so as to get the most out of this platform. Twitter algorithms are there to help you streamline and target your audiences, and curate your content in such a way that is enjoyable for your users. Well then, get to it, we say!
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