Twitter is an integral social media platform used by close to one billion people across the world. As such, Twitter naturally provides an excellent outlet for businesses to grow and spread the word about their products and services. Not to mention, Twitter (among many other social media platforms) is a completely free marketing tool for businesses of all sizes.
If you're a business owner who has recently launched a company Twitter account, however, you may be wondering what steps you can take to better reach your audience. Consider implementing these simple yet effective Twitter tips for businesses of all sizes.
If you're not using analytics to track your tweets, this needs to be your first step. There are all kinds of great paid and free software programs available that allow you to keep track of how many people are seeing your tweets, how many people are clicking on links within your tweets, and other important statistics that can inform your social media marketing campaign.
For example, there's "Social Bro," which helps you determine the best time of day to tweet in order to reach the largest audience, identify the top influencers in your industry, and better hone in on your audience. There's also the popular "Twitter Counter," which automatically generates graphs and other data visualizations to help you track your Twitter followers, retweets, and other important statistics.
Many business owners spend a great deal of their time on Twitter trying to obtain new followers. And while it's true that having a decent, growing number of followers is important in improving your reach, the people your business follows can be just as important. By following the right people in your industry, you can build a sound professional network that will boost your reputation within the community. Some specific groups of people you should focus on following include:
The more you start following others in the industry, the more likely you are to gain similar followers back. In turn, more relevant people will be seeing your tweets and possibly retweeting them. Just be careful not to follow too many new accounts at once, as this can be considered as "aggressive following" and may be against Twitter's terms of service.
You only get 140 characters to work with when you post a tweet (that's fewer characters than this entire sentence), so you'll need to take the proper steps to make the most of that space. Fortunately, there are many ways to go about doing this.
For starters, if you have a URL you'd like to share in a tweet but the URL is very long, there are plenty of free link-shortening applications available that will reduce the length of your URL, thus saving you precious characters in the process. Be sure to utilize these as much as possible.
Furthermore, while you don't want to go overboard on the Internet shorthand (you are representing a professional business, after all), using some shorthand to make the most of your character count is generally acceptable.
Twitter is probably one of the more difficult social media platforms to master when it comes to promoting a business of any size. Still, the use of analytics software, following the right people in your industry, and knowing how to make the most of your 140 characters can make all the difference. Now that you know how to better reach your audience on Twitter, what will you post to engage your audience in your next tweet?