Twitter is one of the best social media platforms to grow your business.
Even if you are familiar with social media’s Facebook or Instagram format, Twitter marketing may seem a bit alien to you.
Maybe you just see Twitter as the most vocal social media platform, but not so for your small business.
But you could not be more wrong about this!
In fact, 75% of B2B businesses use Twitter to promote their product.
You see, there are 330 million monthly active users on Twitter, with 145 million daily, whereas 500 million tweets are sent per day.
Well, that just tells about the massive reach and potential for brand awareness it holds.
Many small businesses create successful social media campaigns to increase their sales, spread brand awareness, build an audience, and cater to customers.
You certainly want to be one of those fortunate businesses that leverage Twitter to increase sales for their business eventually. Well, we’ve got you covered, as here are the best Twitter marketing tips for small businesses to win this game, even if you are starting out.
Twitter Marketing Tips for Small Businesses
1. Define Your Business Goals
You have to define your business goals before getting into twitter marketing or any kind of marketing for that matter.
You must know ‘Why’ your business is on Twitter and what you are trying to achieve with it.
Here are a few examples of business goals :
- Generating Sales
- Building Brand Awareness
- Increasing customers
- Driving customers to your website
Once you know your specific goals, you can create a Twitter marketing strategy to meet your measurable objectives.
Then only you can quantify whether you were able to track your results on Twitter.
For example: If you want to generate traffic to your website or generate leads, you can measure the number of lead generation via Twitter.
You can set your benchmark for your Twitter marketing strategy for your small business.
2. Tweet Quick And More Often
If you are starting out on Twitter, you don’t have any certain idea of how often you should tweet or when is the best time to tweet.
There are surely some common effective guidelines to follow with Twitter. But you need to try and test yourself about when your audience responds the best.
You need to understand that people don’t use Twitter at the same time, or they don’t check simultaneously.
Different people use Twitter at different times of the day. Some people check Twitter in the morning and then directly not until late evening.
Focus on tweeting at different times of the day and see when you are getting the most responses.
Pro Tip: Try to tweet throughout the day rather than just the working hours.
3. Selecting the Right Twitter Handle
The very first thing to do with your Twitter business account is to optimize the profile to create the maximum brand value.
Choose a Twitter handle that resonates with your brand. It must be recognizable. Also, something easy to remember.
Go for shorter names, preferably, as people easily tag you. Make sure your Twitter handle is something unique and extraordinary that has a ring to it.
It should not be wordy or clumsy to write or say. Also, keep all the names you use across social media for your branding the same.
If you use different names across multiple social media platforms, it can be confusing for your followers.
Pro Tip: Use the abbreviation in your Twitter handle if your brand name is long, and keep it consistent for all the platforms.
4. Choosing the Right Profile & Header Image
A prospect is likelier to engage with your Twitter profile than the physical store. It is much easier.
So, you must optimize your profile and header images to attract an audience and give them a good first impression.
Make sure your profile picture is recognizable and caters to your brand image.
It also should be something minimalistic in the sense that people must remember. Don’t just go with some random images for your logo.
The spot should be placed by an image optimized for the purpose.
Small Businesses should preferably put their logo as a profile image. People see your logo here and on other platforms, they will start recognizing it.
It is an integral part of consistent branding. And if you’re a personal brand, you can use your professional headshot image as the logo for the brand.
The logo should be as simple, minimalist, and clean as possible.
The header space at the top of your Twitter profile page also can be utilized to spread brand awareness.
Small Businesses can use this opportunity to showcase their creativity and represent what their brand stands for. It also shows the personality of your brand.
So use some creative, attractive, and fun images that also incorporate your logo.
Pro Tip: Put Your logo in the header image and try to use the same color scheme as your logo.
5. Optimize Your Twitter Bio
You get 160 characters to write in the Twitter bio of your company. Well, this is a space that shows just right down your profile picture.
You need to write short but impressive sentences here. Be specific about mentioning what your company is about.
Here are a few things to remember while crafting your bio.
- Tell exactly what your brand is, and be accurate.
- Put some personality in your brand, some humor, or anything unique or new.
- Brag about your accomplishment.
- Write the bio for the targeted audience in your mind.
- Add relevant hashtags
- Remember to tag other brands with whom you are associated.
Your Twitter bio also supposes to cater to the overall personality of your profile.
Bonus: 777+ Social Media Bios For Every Businesses.
6. Hop-On Relevant Trending Hashtags
The very simple and easy yet essential way to reach out to a larger audience is to hop on the relevant ongoing trends and hashtags.
Keep looking at the trending topics going on Twitter, usually carrying a hashtag. Join the conversations wherever you see they are relevant to you.
Put out your take on trending topics. Try to have a unique voice. It should look like it actually matters to you and not just to get traction.
For example, you can join a digital movement going on the web supporting some cause. Have your support for the cause or stand against it as well.
Don’t be afraid to try new things to participate in the conversations on Twitter. Also, remember that you don’t necessarily have to participate in the conversations that are related to your product or services.
It can be anything relevant to your brand or what you stand for. Even it can be something funny, exciting, or quirky to engage.
7. Keep Your Hashtag Use Minimum
Tweets that include hashtags receive twice more engagement as those that don’t. But if you increase more than two hashtags in a tweet, the engagement seems to drop by 17%.
So clearly, it is better to use minimum hashtags in a tweet. And more importantly, use the relevant hashtags only.
You can find the most popular hashtags via Twitter Analytics by looking at what really worked for you.
Use tools like Hashtagify to look further for the best hashtags for your tweets. It will allow you to find out the relevant hashtags to the keyword you enter.
The tool will help you to find out the strength of the hashtags. So, look for what works best for the tweet.
7. Engage More, Broadcast The Less
It becomes quite apparent that most brands seem to forget that Twitter is a social media platform.
It is a platform to engage with your audience and provide helpful content.
But it’s not the case! Most brands get into this trap of sharing just the links in their tweets. So the audience doesn’t have much to engage with such tweets.
Some top brands can easily get away with broadcasting their links usually.
But you, as a small business, your aim is to build an audience and engage with them to develop a long-term relationship.
So your goal should be to engage more and broadcast less. Put out helpful content for your audience. Ask questions or do Twitter polls.
It is essential to engage people in conversation daily.
9. Know When To Tweet
There are certain times of the day or certain days of the week users are more active on Twitter.
It means at these peak hours; users are more likely to engage with your posts. You need to recognize the peak hours for your Twitter profile.
These peak hours will get your tweets more impressions, also will increase engagement, and get you a lot of clicks.
According to Buffer, tweets published on Friday, Saturday, and Sunday get more impressions and have higher CTRs than others published during the rest of the days.
According to some studies, posting between 12 PM and 6 PM gives you the most impressions.
Some other studies suggest tweeting between 12 PM and 3 PM on Monday to Friday works the best.
So, there are different peak hours as per the studies. It primarily depends upon your target audience.
10. Add Images To Your Tweets To Boost Retweets
Tweets with images usually get 89% more favorites.
So, it has been seen if you add images in your tweets, you are more likely to get a larger number of shares and clicks than tweets without images.
You must ensure you add high-quality, relevant, and compelling images.
You don’t have to use an image that is not relevant to your tweet; you just add it for the sake of adding an image.
Whether you are tweeting about your blog posts or product, or service, you need to put the image that represents it.
It is also advisable to design attractive creatives or graphics using a tool like Canva and add to your tweet.
Pro Tip: If not images, you can also add videos to your tweets as well. Videos tend to work way better than images.
11. Using All The 280 Characters
Twitter, in the year 2018, made the decision to increase the character limit of a tweet from 140 to 280.
Some people appreciated the fact that now they can express more in one tweet. Others say it is not a good idea.
But the fact is, it does allow you to put more words in a tweet.
With that, you can be more descriptive and creative with your tweets unless you take it for granted.
Image Source: MoonPie Twitter
You can take an example of MoonPie and how they utilize the full word limit of the tweet to their advantage.
12. Engage With Your Twitter Followers
The very simple yet most overlooked hack to increase your followers is interacting with your followers on Twitter.
You need to indulge with your Twitter followers daily regularly.
If you simply interact with your followers on your tweets or others, they will keep connected to you and further engage with you on your future tweets as well.
The easiest way to start is to start responding to the comments on your tweet.
Also, say thanks to the people who retweet your tweets.
The aim is to engage with your followers and keep connected with your audience.
Users really appreciate when a brand is more communicative and open to responding or engaging with them.
Pro Tip: Start by replying to everyone who retweeted you or commented on your posts.
13. Putting Out Great Content
People will only connect with you on Twitter if they find any value or information.
It is essential to keep churning out good content through Twitter for people to consume.
It doesn’t need to be something very descriptive but surely valuable.
That’s why you need to be more creative and find out more ideas on what to tweet that actually helps your users.
Write more focused, easy-to-read, and yet valuable tweets.
Here are some content ideas for Twitter:
- Post tips in your tweets every once in a while relevant to your niche and users. In this way, the series of tweets you do become a page for really helpful tips for a certain niche.
- Don’t be afraid to retweet other great tweets in your industry that can help your followers or other users.
- You can share various multimedia to drive more engagement, such as GIFs, images, videos, and infographics.
- Help your followers by providing them with solutions and information they expect from you.
14. Automate When Required
Social media automation can be good and bad both.
Either your profile becomes more active and productive, or your Twitter account will look like a personality-less chatbot that nobody wants to engage with.
So you have to think about when to automate. It is better to automate when it makes sense.
You need to be selective about Twitter automation.
Here are some good examples of how you can automate your Twitter profile:
- Schedule your tweets instead of tweeting manually.
- Use Twitter chatbots for efficient customer service.
- Tag tweets with a certain hashtag using a social media management tool.
Now, here are some bad examples too :
- Sending automated direct messages to your new followers but more like spamming them with links consistently.
- Relying too much on automated tweets for customer issues.
15. Try To Retweet With a Comment
Image Source: SproutSocial
It is great that you want to share interesting and helpful content with your followers by retweeting others’ posts.
And it is indeed a great way to provide value to your followers.
But you can take this even further to gain more engagement through a retweeted post as well.
Just retweet with the comment instead.
Retweeting with comments enables you to add some commentary or your opinion on the post. It becomes more personalized and credible rather than just retweeted.
Also, retweets with comments are more likely to get higher engagement than the others.
16. Focus On Twitter Video
Image Source: Social Media Examiner
82% of users on Twitter watch video content.
In a world where brands compete against each other to gain more and more attention from users, you need to follow the best strategies possible.
Especially as a small business, it is essential to focus on elevating yourself from the competition.
The best way to start is by relying on video content rather than images or text.
According to Twitter, Twitter videos get 2.5 times more responses and 2.8 times more retweets, and 1.9 times more likes than other videos.
So focus on creating original videos for your small business.
Twitter videos gain more organic reach than any other kind of tweet.
It is the best Twitter marketing strategy you can adopt the right way without giving it a thought.
17. Conduct Twitter Polls To Engage More
Image Source: Airbnb
One of the most effective ways to bring more engagement to your Twitter profile is to conduct Twitter polls.
Creating Twitter polls is easy. You will go to the same button where you go to add a new tweet. There you will see a poll icon at the bottom of the window.
Polls help you collect the necessary information from the customers or prospects.
You can use it to do market research, get feedback from them, and also engage with your audience.
Try to be more unique and creative with your polls. It should be asking something engaging and requiring a bit of thought.
Small businesses can use polls to tap into the minds of their customers.
It further helps you in your marketing campaign, creates content, and even makes your product/services better.
18. Using Twitter For Customer Care
Image Source: Medium
Many brands utilize the Twitter platform to resolve customer complaints and queries about their products or services.
In fact, social media platforms like Twitter are the most popular choice for customer care today.
This works even better for all the big brands, as a large part of their Twitter engagement comes right from resolving customer problems.
They don’t necessarily have to focus on quality content all the time.
For small businesses, Twitter can’t be or even shouldn’t be just for customer care, but it surely is an integral part of Twitter marketing.
Image Source: SproutSocial
Enabling your customers to ask their queries or put their complaints on Twitter and resolving them gives you more credibility.
But you also have to be very attentive to resolving all the issues.
You don’t want your Twitter swarming with negative reviews and complaints putting off your potential customers away.
So remember when you need to take the conversations private.
Twitter is great for initial contact with the customer, whether it is a complaint or query. But when your conversation requires going more in-depth, it is best you take it to an inbox.
Avoid conversations on Twitter feeds that may irritate or put you off your product or service.
19. Find Targetted Customers Through Twitter Search
Twitter is one of the best social media platforms for finding new leads. People use Twitter to project their opinions and talk about what’s happening to them.
People generally talk about their problems, experiences, and complaints about things in their life.
You will discover many people with problems that your product or services can resolve.
Such prospects are highly powerful and have tremendous potential for becoming your customer.
For example, if you are a healthcare brand, and you find people talking about health issues such as obesity, hair fall, etc.
You can do a Twitter search by using various keywords or search terms.
You can provide them with some tips for improving their situation and direct them to your website for more information.
Pro Tip: Instead of directly providing them links, try to converse. Even before that, leave some really helpful tips. Focus more on providing information rather than direct selling.
20. Never Forget To Respond
15% of consumers unfollow a brand if they don’t get a reply.
For small businesses, this can be revolutionary in terms of boosting engagement and generating leads.
If you are a small business, responding to every user who mentions you in a tweet helps you develop trust and relationships with your customers.
Big brands receive thousands of tweets daily. They are not able to reply to every single one of them. Also, it is not expected of them.
But for small businesses, people expect a response from the brands, especially when they mention them in their tweets.
According to Sprout Social, people expects a response from brands within four hours. Still, most brands provide an average response time to be 10 hours.
So focus on giving responses to everyone who mentions you in a day.
FAQ (Frequently Asked Question) about tips on Twitter for small businesses
Why Use Twitter For Your Small Business?
Twitter is an ideal place to connect to your audience for communication and conversation. It is an open forum where you can have real-time conversations. Twitter marketing act as a social currency and also can drive traffic to your website. It is the best tool for creating brand awareness, lead generation, and resolving customer issues.
How To Use Twitter To Grow Your Small Business?
Here are the ways to use Twitter to grow your small business :
-Use Twitter cards to make your tweet stand out
-Go for Twitter ads for the tailored audience, such as your email list.
-Use only 1 or 2 relevant hashtags.
-Reply to every tweet that mentions you.
-Join relevant conversations.
-Use your pinned tweet to get users to your websites by using a lead magnet
-Use Twitter analytics for A/B testing
-Use More images and videos in your tweets
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“Business, marketing, and Branding – these three words describe me the best. I am the founder of Burban Branding and Media, and a self-taught marketer with 10 years of experience. My passion lies in helping startups enhance their business through marketing, Branding, leadership, and finance. I am on a mission to assist businesses in achieving their goals.”