10 Opportunities Most Businesses Miss on Twitter

How to get results for your business using Twitter marketing.

Twitter is absolutely massive, making it a great platform for advertising products and services or sharing your content.

If you aren’t using Twitter to boost your brand in 2019, you’re seriously missing out.

According to Statista, Twitter has amassed 330 million active monthly users in just ten years. 

In this article, we go over the most common 10 opportunities that business owners will miss on Twitter.

1. The power of Micro Blogging

Unlike Instagram, Twitter’s micro-blogging capability allows you to write brief text updates about your life on the go, and send them to friends and interested observers in the form of Tweets.

Business owners can use a microblog to quickly share short pieces of information with clients. These might include tips, links, news updates or video commentaries.

Due to the nature of a microblog, individual posts are generated quickly, giving businesses another way to post content to their site and share information with their customers, without having to devote as much time as a regular blog post might require

2. Twitter and Google’s Intimate Relationship

Twitter has a long history with Google, leading to a lot of confusion about whether signals from Twitter influence Google’s search results. 

Search engines actually use social signals from social media to rank your website. Likes, shares, and comments affect SEO in huge ways.

In fact, according to a study completed by cognitive SEO, the higher the average number of shares, comments, and likes a brand has, the higher their website rank actually is.

Try to maintain consistent communication and include similar keywords you use on your website. Remember that hashtags play the role of keywords for Twitter; they improve your searchability and help people find your content. Therefore, turn your essential keywords into hashtags because thanks to them, each one of your tweets will appear in the Twitter search for a specific topic and in the Twitter’s Trends Feed. 

However, avoid overusing hashtags for a single update as this might look spammy and discourage your potential followers. It’s optimal to use up to 3 hashtags for a single tweet. Feel free to add them at the end of a link to an article explaining its field or category.

Once in a while, analyze which hashtags bring you the most engagement: clicks, retweets, likes. Then, optimize your profile by focusing on the more effective ones. Review your results using Twitter analytics and find out what works best for your business.

3. Schedule Massive Amounts of Tweets

There is this misconception that you need to spend tens of hours to schedule massive amounts of Tweets. 

The reality is with the strategy I’m about to share with you, you’ll be able to save those hours and focus on your business, while Tweets are automatically generated for you. 

Furthermore your Twitter will be posting relevant content every day. Are you ready? 

First you need to understand the gist of this strategy. The goal is to take relevant to your audience news and blog articles from all over the internet and make sure they are being published daily. As a result, you will reach your first month of 20,000+ Twitter impressions.

When a new trending piece of news comes out by an industry-relevant blog, you can bet that your audience members will end up learning about that article from one or another person. Your goal is to make sure they learn it from you. 

This strategy has three major parts: 

1. Buffer Social Media Scheduling Tool.

Create an account at Buffer.com and upgrade it to the Pro version ($15/mo). Next, connect your Twitter account through Buffer. 

Once your Business’s Twitter account has been successfully connected, go to Settings -> Posting Schedule, and create 5 posting slots for every day. 

2. Feedly RSS Feed Tool.

Next, we establish channels to learn what the most popular content is on the daily, for each industry category that we serve.

Create a Feedly account, and switch to the Pro version immediately ($7/mo). Create at least three or more different Feedly feeds, one for each side of your target audience’s interest. Feeds can relate to industry news, entertainment, tips & hacks, health & wellness, or anything else. 

Answer the question “What categories of interests does my audience have?” and create a different feed based on each category of interest. 

Once you have created each category, it’s time to add Sources to it. To do that click on the “+” or “Add Content” buttons, and type in an industry relevant keyword. When you hit search, you’ll see a list of results. Select the relevant blogs, and add them to each respective feed. 

3. Zapier Automation Tool.

Finally, we get to set-up the automation tool to connect our Buffer and Feedly accounts.

Register on Zapier.com, and visit this link to connect your Buffer and Feedly accounts.Once you’ve done that, you get to choose among several options on how you’d like to share Feedly articles onto Twitter, through your Buffer account. 

As a result, you will be able to easily utilize the top news in each industry and be one of the first blogs to share them on Twitter, thus creating thought leadership for your business on Twitter.

4. Engaging With Influencers the Correct Way

Influencers have been making waves in the marketing industry over the past couple of years and Twitter has played a crucial role in many influencer marketing campaigns. 

According to a recent study conducted by Twitter, partnering with the right Twitter influencers can help brands increase the customers’ purchase intent by up to 88%.

Though now is a great time to experiment with influencer marketing, it’s important to consider the following to make sure you maximize the return on your marketing dollars.

Identify the Type or Influencer You’re Looking For

“The man who chases two rabbits,catches neither.” ― Confucius

Or in other words - focus on your exact audience, and no one else. 

First, nail down exactly the type of influencer it’s best for you to connect with at this stage in your business. This is all about exchanging value. Look for people or businesses where the relationship can be mutually beneficial.

That means that you can provide a similar level of value for them as they can for you. You should strive to provide that value first. If you can’t do that, there’s no point in trying to connect in the first place.

Many of you are probably familiar with a buyer persona, a fictional representation of your perfect prospect or customer. These are used to help you with your marketing message.

Take the idea and apply it here. Create an influencer persona to help guide you through this process.

Consider their age, gender, location, top 3 major interests, and top 3 pain points. Also, you may have several influencer personas. Just make sure you know who you’re looking for and why before you start. 

It will speed up your search immensely and make sure you’re only building relationships with exactly the right people.

5. Rehash “Evergreen” Content

Twitter’s 20-minute Tweet half life makes it an ideal platform to repurpose previously generated content. Use an SMMT (Social Media Management Tool) such as Buffer or Hootsuite to schedule past content to be posted at least once per week for 4 weeks. Keep in mind to repost old content during different times & days each week. 

Don’t forget your influencers. They likely share content related to your brand on social media, but the buck doesn’t have to stop there. Just as you would toss your Dr. Pepper can into a recycling bin at work, you can repost content that your influencers have already shared with your audience.

In addition to supplying you with free content, reposting influencer content also ensures that your message reaches the broadest audience possible. Influencer campaigns often cost money, so make sure you get as much ROI as possible out of each piece of content.

6. Set Goals & Milestones

The top 3 social media marketing goals for using Twitter for business include boosting your engagement rate, increasing your follower growth, and adjusting your frequency of tweeting.

1. Boost Engagement

Address your Twitter following in a personalized manner with your own great content rather than just sending out meaningless tweets.

Retweets are the best possible way for a tweet to drum up an audience and get more people to visit your links. To help promote retweeting, oddly enough, you actually have to ask for a retweet and spiff up your language with clean wording and a catchy headline. Lastly, don’t forget to add a link to your post, so that Retweets carry your link to new audiences.

The number of mentions can be seen by everyone, and, unlike replies, they’re actually very valuable because everyone in your following can see them. Investigate how often tweets include your company’s Twitter handle inside the tweet. Mentions are a great means to help increase brand awareness and social credibility.

2. Adjust Your Frequency of Tweeting

If you keep track of how often you tweet and compare this to the increase in following growth, you’ll gradually find your best social media fit. Adapting your frequency of tweets is actually a trial-and-error process. Stimulate your social media team to experiment with it, and make the appropriate changes along the way. Considering that the half life of a Tweet is less than 20 minutes, start at 5 tweets per day, and go from there.

While in social media, there are a lot of statistics to fall back on, but there is never a single rule that will cover every industry ground. However, don’t consider it a game of wild guessing.

3. Increase Your Follower Growth

Once you have adjusted your Tweeting frequency to medium-high, you will naturally see a follower increase. Make sure to attach 2-3 hashtags to 80% of posts. Find ideal hashtags on Trends24 or Twitter’s native Trends function. 

Finally, don’t forget to follow users on the daily. Use the search bar to search for potential customers and leads by keyword or hashtag. Engage with their accounts by liking, and replying to some of their latest Tweets. Ultimately, you want to follow their account if they fit your target demographic.

Follow at least 50-100 people per day, with at least 20-30 seconds between each follow. When your following count reaches more than a thousand bigger than your follower count, use a tool such as CrowdFire or ManageFlitter.

7. Get Your Own Twitter Feed on Google

Since 2015, searching on Google for businesses will show real-time content from Twitter right in the search results. Tweets from companies with active Twitter accounts are showing up in a carousel unit. Here is an example of a search for Social Media Week on Google:

Twitter isn’t required for users to see the tweets; those who click through while not being signed onto Twitter will be taken to the network’s logged out experience. 

This gives businesses, brands and marketers another way in to Google’s massive amounts of daily searches. Every business wants more exposure for their Twitter account. With certain SEO tactics, you can increase the visibility of a Twitter account in both Twitter and Google search.

In order to get your live Twitter feed featured on Google, follow these three steps: 

• Make sure your Twitter username and handle match your company name. Consistent branding across all of your channels (company name, website, social media accounts) is your best way to be easily found by your target audience.
• Optimize your profile bio, photo and link for SEO. Your bio is the place where you describe what your organization is doing, why people should follow you and what kind of valuable content you share in your tweets. 
• Post content regularly. Google has the ability to notice an increase or decrease of activity on your Twitter. When you create and post more Tweets, and as a result generate engagement with your Twitter account, it becomes more likely for Google to show a live feed of your Twitter on its search results.

8. Use Twitter Lists To Engage Your Influencers

Right from Twitter HQ a Twitter list is:

“A list is a curated group of Twitter accounts. You can create your own lists or subscribe to lists created by others. Viewing a list timeline will show you a stream of Tweets from only the accounts on that list.”

The simplified version is that Twitter lists organize your Twitter followers. You pick and choose who belongs on which list based on any number of criteria. 

Why Put People on a Twitter List?

Each time you put someone on a Twitter list, it could be for a different reason. You can do so to monitor tweets to find content to post yourself or to make sure you regularly engage with certain accounts.

Using a list on Twitter keeps you organized! The twitter stream moves too fast for you to be able to see the tweets from the people that matter most to you all the time.

How To Create a Twitter List?

This is how you create a Twitter list if you are on your iOS device:

• From the Me tab, click on the Gear icon at the top of the page.
• Select “View Lists” from the drop down menu.
• In the top right corner, click on the plus sign (+).
• Add a name and description for your list.
• Choose whether you want your list public or private.
• Hit save.

To create a Twitter list from an Android device:

Tap on the overflow icon and then select View Lists.

Tap the plus icon to create a new list.

Select a name for your list, and a short description of the list.

Choose if you want to make the list public or private.

Tap Save.

To create a list from a desktop or laptop:

Click on your profile icon to show the drop down menu.

Click on Lists.

Click Create new list.

Select a name for your list, and a short description of the list.

Click Save list.

To add and remove people from your lists:

When you’re creating a list, you will be prompted to start adding people immediately. You can then enter the username or full name of anyone you want to add and then select them from the dropdown by clicking on their name.

To remove a person, click the “x” by their name. When you’re finished, click “Done.”

You can also add people directly from their profile by clicking on the Gear icon on their page and selecting “Add/Remove From Lists.” 

Click on the lists in the dropdown menu that you want to add or remove them from and hit “Done” when finished.

What Twitter Lists To Create?

These are the types of Twitter lists that we recommend creating:

• Current Customers
• Past Customers
• Potential Customers
• Competitors
• Local Community
• Influencers
• Partners
• Affiliates
• People Who Retweet Me
• Event Attendees
• Resources
• Supporters
• Friends and Family
• Employees
• Twitter Chat Participants

9. Use Twitter Listening To Create Revenue Opportunities

If you’re using Twitter to promote your business, make sure you’re missing out on a whole other facet of the channel. 

Utilizing social media listening tools will help your brand improve in many different ways, including product development and industry tracking.

Social monitoring is the tracking of keywords and phrases relevant to your brand. 

It’s likely you’re already doing this and responding in real-time to public comments. Social listening takes it a step further by looking at your monitoring with a birds’ eye view and analyzing all the data. 

This combination is utilized by companies around the world and isn’t limited by the size of the company. In fact, smaller companies may find it easier to execute social listening since the online conversation isn’t as difficult to track.

We suggest using Twitter Advanced Search for your social media listening. Twitter lets you narrow down your searches, search by negative or positive sentiment, explore relevant hashtags, and much more. 

Benefits of Advanced Twitter Search

Similarly to Google Search Operators, Twitter’s search abilities have advanced search functionalities. See image below.

In addition to "Top" and "Latest," you're able to narrow in on a few different type of results, namely people, photos, videos, news, and broadcasts. 

Click on the appropriate tab at the top of the Twitter search results page to filter by:

• People - Accounts (both people and other entities) whose usernames or bios match your search query
• Photos - Tweets that contain a photo
• Videos - Tweets that contain a video link, such as youtube.com or vimeo.com
• News - Tweets that contain a link to a news site, such as Huffington Post or The Next Web
• Broadcasts - Tweets that contain live video streams from Periscope

If you're on the Top tab, you might also see a "Related searches" box in the left sidebar with hashtags that could also be of interest to you.

10. Join Existing Conversations With Your Customers

Twitter chats are a meaningful way of creating engagement around your business on Twitter. In essence, a Twitter chat is a combination of hashtag, topic and a predefined time when a group of Twitter users meets to discuss that topic. The hashtag is used to identify the tweets that belong to the Twitter chat.

Some people or companies host them on a regular basis. Often they take place in a form of question and answer sessions – or just as a business networking event with a theme.

There are some tools that can help you find relevant Twitter chats such as TweetReports, 

Twubs, TwChat, TweetChat and you can also use Hootsuite or Tweetdeck.

Use OPC Social to execute your Twitter marketing plan alongside all other marketing activities. Contact us today for a consultation.