In early March, one of our Inbound Marketing Managers, Alicia Inman, gave an excellent webinar about implementing inbound marketing into your already existing marketing strategy. (If you missed it, don’t worry! You can download the replay for free right here!). Over the course of the webinar, Alicia discussed the nuts and bolts of inbound marketing along with best practices and resources that will equip you with a game plan on how to take your marketing strategy inbound.

Our Cleriti team loves to share tips, tricks, and resources about all things marketing. Why? Because we understand that marketing is hard work! We want to empower and educate businesses and individuals so they can be smart marketers as well!

Last week, we talked about the importance of having a social media strategy. Specifically we talked about good Facebook marketing best practices. This week, lets take a look at how we utilize Twitter at Cleriti to bring qualified contacts to our clients. Ready? Lets get started.

For Advertising: Twitter Cards

According to Twitter, the social media giant has 288 million active users. There’s an average of 500 million Tweets sent per day. That is a lot of tweets! With so much activity on Twitter every day, it seems next to impossible to stand out to your potential customers. So how can you drive traffic to your website on Twitter when it is so congested? We love to use Twitter Cards.

Simply put, a twitter card serves as a call-to action that is actually on your tweet. Check out the example below. Notice how the twitter card serves as a visual extension of the tweet itself. Its sole purpose is to capture the user's attention while giving the actual tweet more context. Twitter found that tweets with Twitter Cards drove 43% more clicks. Click here to get started.

For Live Tweeting: TweetDeck

If your business has ever run an event or webinar, live tweeting was probably involved or at least it should have been. Live tweeting an event allows you to instantly engage and listen to people talk about your event. It makes connecting with people so easy. Our go to tool for live tweeting is TweetDeck. TweetDeck allows you to create a custom Twitter experience. It gives you the ability to track topics, events, and hashtags in real time so you can see who is talking about what. This tool makes tracking and engaging simple. The best part? You don’t have to sign up for a new platform. TweetDeck is a Twitter-owned property, and you can sign in with your username and password.

For Tweetable Images: Canva

Canva has been one of my favorite tools in the past year. Canva is a tool that makes design simple for everyone. With Canva, you don’t have to be an expert in Photoshop or another photo editor to create beautiful designs. Just search for the graphic, or upload your own and drag it into the template.

And it gets better too! Canva has pre existing templates ready to be shared. You can pick Twitter posts, email headers, and even marketing material templates ready to be designed. At Cleriti, we love to design graphics that we can use to compliment our tweets. According to a recent post by B2C Community, tweets with attention- grabbing images receive 18% more click-throughs, 89% more favorites, and 150% more retweets. And to top it all off, canva is free to use. So start designing and don’t forget to share what you created with us!

For Monitoring and Engaging: HubSpot

One of the biggest mistakes businesses make is that they turn social networks into social broadcasting tools. No one wants marketing materials shoved in their news feed. People enjoy social networks because it allows people to connect and engage with people who have similar interests. Hubspot's social media monitoring tool makes this very simple. I use it on a daily basis for the clients I work on. It allows me to create custom streams that track keywords or contacts that interest me. I can engage with them, their content, share similar posts, and create more engagements. This tool allows me to track the right people and share content with them.

For Trends: BuzzSumo

BuzzSumo is a tool that I quickly fell in love with as well. I use this social media tool to track what the most popular content is for any competitor or topic. Search any keyword or phrase that interests you and it will show you the most popular content based on that keyword. You can even refine your results by filtering by articles, infographics, social channel, and much more!  I use this tool quite a bit to get a jist of what content is popular so I can curate content based on what is performing well.

Our Ultimate List...With More To Come

There you have it! Social media is an essential component of the inbound marketing methodology. Utilizing these tools in your inbound marketing strategy will get you more engagement and more contacts through Twitter. Want to talk about how inbound can impact your business? Lets chat.