Unlock the Power of Twitter for Your Business

Twitter has unmatched potential to let you build relationships with customers and it would be a mistake for any business to ignore its unique brand-building power.

Here we’ll look at the should and the shouldn’t for branding and selling on Twitter.

Contents

• Benefits of Twitter Marketing
• The Secrets to Twitter Marketing
  
  

Twitter had 206 million active daily users in 2021. While that figure might not look all that impressive compared to Facebook's 1.9 billion daily active users, Twitter is an often-overlooked gem for digital marketers. It has a committed, active user base that loves conversations with its favorite brands. Twitter conversations are an excellent way to generate brand awareness and increase loyalty and sales long-term. 

Before we look at how to best use Twitter for branding and selling, let’s look at why it’s considered such a powerful platform for marketers and what the benefits could be for your business:

Benefits of Twitter Marketing

1.    Increased Brand Awareness

You can quickly share information on Twitter and easily start conversations with your audience. Being able to do both effectively build brand personality and raises brand awareness. By maintaining a consistent tone and brand personality on Twitter, you can attract consistently larger audiences that like your brand personality and will eventually convert. 

Conversing with your audience is also an excellent way of improving brand awareness. Companies that regularly reply to Twitter users even increase the chances of appearing in non-followers feeds. By appearing more in people's feeds, your company further improves its brand visibility. This increase in brand visibility improves your brand's organic growth and increases sales.

2.    Access to Customer Insights

Twitter marketing is an excellent way to collect new customer data. According to the head of Twitter's EMEA Data & Enterprise Solutions, Joe Rice, "Twitter is the world's largest focus group because, at its core, Twitter is a consumer insights engine."

Twitter data can reveal insights like new customer trends, which you can use to improve your product and service offering. This data could be invaluable for improving your brand's long-term ability to appeal to consumers. 

For example, you can use the Twitter explore page to see an updated list of trending topics and hashtags for designing your content to maximize appeal. Virtually no other social media platform can provide that much data. Maximizing appeal naturally leads to an increase in sales long-term. Additionally, you can track the use of specific keywords like your brand, your product keywords, and competitors on Twitter using Mandala Analytics. Mandala lets you gather and Analyze tens of thousands of mentions based on your input keywords.

[screenshot from Mandala]

3.    Improved Customer Service and Feedback Collection

Twitter is perfect for collecting customer feedback information. It's effortless for users to reply to tweets, so many of the world's biggest brands use Twitter for customer care and feedback purposes. For example, Netflix has a dedicated Twitter account for providing customer support to multiple locations in multiple languages. 

You can use this feedback to improve product offerings and deliver customer support. The best part is that customer support via Twitter incurs minimal expenses. The improved customer support can go a long way to encouraging consumers to convert. 

4.    Easily Build Large Brand Communities

It’s easier to build brand communities on Twitter than on other social media sites. That’s because it’s easier to generate conversations on Twitter than on other social media sites. Brands can use these conversations to build loyal audiences for their brand. 

Brands build loyal brand communities by developing a consistent brand narrative. Consumers begin following the brand out of interest in that narrative. So long as the brand maintains a consistent narrative, they attract more followers and build larger audiences. Over time audience members will begin to convert, increasing sales. 

Some brands like Taco Bell have already developed loyal brand communities on Twitter. Taco Bell regularly replies to consumers and re-tweets customers’ and super-fans tweets to show appreciation and attract new followers.  These large, large brand communities naturally increase the brand’s sales figures every month. 

Source: SOCi

The Secrets to Twitter Marketing

Now that you know the ‘why’, let’s talk about the ‘how’. The most important secrets to branding and selling on Twitter are having clear goals, being engaging, having a consistent brand voice, uploading great content regularly, and listening to your audience's feedback. 

1.    Have a clear Business Goal

Step one in any business plan is to decide your business goals. Why are you on Twitter? If it's to increase sales, the next question is by how much do you want to increase sales? Decide on a realistic goal that you can achieve over a specific period. 

You need to set out realistic goals and define metrics for measuring progress. For instance, setting a goal of making 10 new sales a month from Twitter in the next 6 months is more realistic than expecting 100 new sales just in your first month of Twitter marketing. 

2.    Have a Brand-Appropriate Profile

Jet Blue’s Twitter profile

The quality of your Twitter profile is directly related to your marketing success on Twitter. The best brand profiles on Twitter will have a consistent tone, upload regular content, and have optimized Twitter profiles. 

Your Twitter profile could just be your businesses' name, but it could also be something witty and memorable. Also, depending on your brand's size, you should decide whether you want a single Twitter account or multiple ones for different functions. For example, you could have one Twitter account for feedback and another one for conversing with customers. 

Your overall goal is to provide consumers with a consistent visual and textual presentation of your business. Consumers should clearly understand what your brand does and what it's all about. 

3.    Precise Tweeting and Being Active with Replies

tweets should be short and punchy. With Twitter's 280-character limit and recommendation for making tweets no longer than 250 characters, you can't afford to not tweet concisely. The most successful tweets will be the ones that grab consumers' attention immediately.

Make sure your tweets are instantly interesting. If the first few words of a tweet don't grab a reader's attention, the odds your tweets won't perform well. Also, make sure your replies to tweets and retweets are also short and effective. It's essential to always be concise to increase people's chances to read your tweets. 

In this cool example from Domino’s Twitter account, the Twitter user mentioned Domino’s without including the @domino’s handle, so how did Domino’s know about this tweet? With the 500 million tweets per day (that’s 6,000 tweets per second!) how can Domino’s know when their name is mentioned? The answer is what’s called social listening using an analytics tool such as Mandala, which lets you track your name or brands, or any other keywords. When you’re mentioned (even without the @ sign) you can see it and respond just like Domino’s did. 

4.    Focus on Tweeting Great Content

Higher-quality tweets generate better business results. Ideally, you want all your tweets to be instantly enticing for consumers, turning them first into followers and then into customers. Your tweets always need to be of consistently high quality to achieve that. 

The best tweets are always concise, impactful, and easy to read. Your tweets need to address customer pain points, resonate with followers, and provide them with a call to action. To help, you can produce tweets that have images, videos, and GIFs, which are all attractive to consumers when done right.

5.    Keep Twitter Unique

Never copy-paste Facebook or Instagram captions to Twitter, or vice versa. Twitter users appreciate novelty, and they'll quickly unfollow your Twitter account if they see you're posting the exact same thing on all your social media channels. 

Every social media platform has its own unique qualities and user quirks. You need to recognize that by building a separate Twitter marketing strategy that reflects Twitter's unique features. Your Twitter strategy needs to be optimized for the site's specific algorithm and user preferences to be successful. 

6.    Tweet Regularly

An effective Twitter strategy takes time to develop. One of the best ways to ensure that your Twitter strategy is successful long-term is to tweet regularly. Ideally, make at least one tweet every day. 

Develop a content calendar and schedule when you'll tweet. Try to focus your tweets on new trends and popular topics. It's also vital to use analytics to ensure your tweets cover topics that users actually find interesting. 

7.    Use Twitter for Communicating, NOT Selling

Twitter is all about making conversations, not selling products. Don’t make a mistake orienting your tweets around your products and why people should buy them. No one wants to see that on their feeds. 

Instead, you have to treat Twitter as a long-term game. You can use Twitter to build an audience of loyal users, engage with that audience and provide them content they find helpful, and they’ll eventually convert. You cannot expect a few tweets here and there to generate sales for you. 

Your audience is most likely to buy from you when they feel a sense of connection with you. Twitter users always react badly to hard-selling attempts on the platform. 

8.    Listen to What People are Saying

Use Twitter to learn about your band’s overall perception of your industry. You can use Twitter to track conversations about your brand and learn from them about how audiences view you. This information is invaluable for improving your brand, and Twitter is uniquely able to provide it. Take full advantage of Twitter conversations to learn about your brand. 

Is your brand generally well-liked in your industry? Are there any specific issues that many consumers have with your brand? And how do you compare with competitors in consumer perception? Twitter can provide you with vital answers to all these questions. 

9.    Be Engaging

It’s not enough to occasionally make a few great tweets and then wait for reactions. You need to engage with Twitter users, reply to their tweets and reply to their replies to your tweets. Twitter users value engagement above all else, and the most successful brands on Twitter are always the ones that engage the most. 

Engaging with Twitter users will humanize your brand and improve its overall image. Consumers like brands that are the easiest to communicate with and invest most in engagement efforts. 

The two best ways to be engaging are producing interactive content like polls and retweeting users’ tweets by mentioning their names. Consumers love it when their favorite brands provide them with the validation of seeing their names used on an official brand’s tweets. 

10.    Continuously Evaluate and Adjust

A good Twitter strategy is constantly being monitored and updated. So it’s vital to be flexible with your strategy, changing and improving things regularly. For example, you might find that Twitter users respond the most when you post polls but very little when you post images. The correct reaction would be to reduce posting images and focus more on polls. 

By having a flexible strategy, you’ll continuously be improving your Twitter campaigns and increasing the size of your audience, therefore increasing your sales. These minor improvements will compound significant gains for your brand over a long time. 

Wrapping things up, the biggest secret to selling on Twitter is to not sell at all. You need to build an engaging Twitter profile that talks with your audience, provides valuable content, and convinces them about your brand’s qualities. Over time, your Twitter audience will slowly begin converting. If you’d like to see how mandala helps build your audience, improve customer, service, track your Twitter mentions, and a lot more, try it for free now.