Social media marketing is a valuable tool to market your company and create brand awareness. It allows your brand to directly interact with it’s audience. The goal of social media marketing is to get your audience to engage with your company or brand. So, how do you do this across multiple social media platforms? More specifically, how do you do this on a platform such as Twitter when you only have 140 characters to work with? I believe Twitter is an invaluable marketing tool if it is used to it’s true potential.
On Twitter you probably won’t be able to get your whole message across, and will link to a blog, or website. Linking to this source is great because it drives traffic to your website, but is useless unless you can get your audience to engage and follow the link. So the question is, how do you get your users interested enough to follow the link you have provided and continue reading?
- Tweet pictures relevant to your topic.
- Tweet to where your followers have to answer to a call to action.
- Tweet engaging, sharable content.
Pictures get more engagement than a plain text tweet, so if you attach a relevant picture to your tweet chances are your followers are more likely to click that link and continue reading. Twitter Media Blog did a study and determined that tweets with a photo attached received an average of 35% more retweets and engagement. This tells us that people are willing to click on an image and see what it’s about, but when they do this they don’t have to leave Twitter to do so.
When you attach a link to your website or blog you are asking your follower to navigate away form Twitter, which many users don’t like to do. So now the question is how to you get your follower to willingly leave twitter and follow your link? How do you get your follow to keep doing this? One of the biggest mistakes that businesses make is to post to Twitter via Facebook instead of posting to the two platforms separately. This is a terrible practice because it navigates your follower away from Twitter to Facebook. This turns users off of your brand because you are asking them to navigate to Facebook, and if they wanted to be on Facebook and engage with you on Facebook, well, they would be on Facebook. It’s that simple. So think twice before you link the two platforms together. Don’t get me wrong, I don’t necessarily think it is a bad thing to share the same content on both platforms, just make sure you tweak the content a bit to make sure it gets the most engagement on both platforms.
When you compose your tweets you have to make sure you aren’t promoting your product or service too much. Don’t get me wrong you should definitely be promoting yourself but you don’t want every tweet to be like an advertisement, because if it is people will begin to unfollow you. People don’t like being sold to on social media so your goal is to sell to them without them knowing you are actually selling to them, so the way you compose your tweets is important.
It’s also important to engage with other users on twitter as your business. You should be retweeting, favoriting, and replying to other tweets. Engaging with others is good because if you engage with them, chances are they will start engaging with you and you can start a professional relationship with other influential people and businesses.
