14 Ways to be UBER Successful on Twitter

I love Twitter, I love how easy it is to find your target audience and how powerful it can be for brands. Its so user friendly, you can quickly scan the tweets in your feed, easily share and tweet to anyone at anytime. I also love the enormity of it and the fact that you can pretty much follow anyone you like and find out anything you like.

Since I launched my books I have been growing my audience steadily on two separate accounts and driving new people to my Facebook Page, my opt in and have made connections with some awesome people. It's going better than I ever dreamt, so I thought I would share how I have done this so you too can make Twitter really work for your business.

Have clear Goals
Ok there are lots of people just having fun with Twitter which is great but if you really want it to work for your business then you need one or more clearly defined goals. Ask yourself, what you are using Twitter for? This could be any of the following:

• To grow an engaged following of your target audience to increase brand awareness
• To generate leads
• To drive traffic to your blog or website
• to drive traffic to a particular offer or sales page
• To drive traffic to your Facebook page or LinkedIn or another social media platform
• To use for customer service
• To monitor your brand in real time ( Listen to what people are saying about your brand)
• To drive traffic to your YouTube Channel

Have a clear strategy
You need to work out exactly how you plan to achieve your main goal and create a strategy. This could be any of the following:

• What sort of accounts are you going to follow?
• How much do you intend to increase your audience in a year/ month/week?
• How many people are you planning to follow a day/ a week?
• How many times do you plan to tweet a day?
• How many blog posts/ videos/ content/ images are you going to create per day/week/month?
• What message are you going to send in a Direct message or mention when new people follow you ?

Know your target audience
This is probably one of the most important tips, if you know your audience then you know the type of content they will want to consume. Once you have this information you can deliver compelling content which will please your followers and they may want to share that content with others and obviously if you are delivering the content they want they are more likley to continue to follow you. For example my target audience are small businesses and entrepreneurs. These people love help, information and ideas about how to make their business more successful and how to make things easier . They like to hear about any new online products or apps that may help them in their business and they love motivational, inspirational and entrepreneurial quotes. For me delivering this type of content is a joy because I love helping my followers in their social media and businesses.

Write a clear Bio
Before you write your Bio ask yourself what your target audience wants, what is is that you can offer them which will make them want to follow you. What value are you going to offer them? How are you going to help them? Once you have this information you have more chance of crafting a really good bio which is centred more around what you can do for your target audience. it's also a great idea to offer something really unique about yourself, this can help make you stand out from the crowd.

Communicate with your cover photo
The new Twitter design offers valuable real estate for you to clearly communicate to your audience what you or your product is about. Make sure you use this to it's best advantage. I look at hundreds of cover photos on Twitter and Facebook. Some just leaving me thinking , Hmmm and.......... But some really interest me and pull me in. Most businesses are missing out on communicating visually what they are all about. Most of us are visually wired so try and use this area to woo new followers and grab their attention. It's a great idea to go and study other cover photos and see what you think works and what doesn't.

Schedule your content
Unless you are a big business or in the media then it would be impossible to be on Twitter all day, however if you want to build up any type of relationship with your followers then you need to Tweet fairly frequently. I would say a minimum of at least 4 times a day and if your followers are across different time zones then make sure you tweet at those optimal times. I use bother Buffer and Hootsuite ,they are both amazing. You can also use these applications to monitor your tweets and mentions which makes staying on top of Twitter much easier.

Follow follow follow
To increase your following on Twitter then you need to continually follow lots of other people in your niche and grow your audience. I am not talking about indiscriminately following people but about finding your target audience and following them. Unless you are a famous film star or personality then it is very unlikely that you are going to grow your audience on its own. I personally use unfollowers which is an awesome app for following new people and also for offering a mass of information about your new followers and new unfollowers. I'm planning to do another blog post shortly about this one subject because it really is amazing and has helped me considerably in managing my account and gaining new followers.

Pin your best offer or message
Make sure you pin your most compelling offer with an image to the top of your profile. This means when anyone views your feed the most important information you want to communicate is right there for them to see at the top.

* Use images on Twitter*
Sharing images can increase retweets by up to 150% on Twitter. That is because most of simply like pictures and they communicate quickly and effectively. You can easily find images on Flickr or even on stock photo sites and sites like Picmonkey and Canva have made photo editing incredibly easy for most of us. You can also take your own photos.

Send out a direct message and /or a mention
Some people are really against this but I think it is great and it works. Ok so the majority do not even check their DM’s but I would say more than 10 % do so it is definitely worthwhile. I send a direct message to anyone who follows me and I do this as well through unfollowers. I'm not self promotional and I have made some great connections this way. Also it's a really good idea to check your DM's because replying to people who have DM'd you can also help you to make new connections and start building relationships.

Use Hashtags
Using hashtags in tweets is proven to double engagement on Twitter. Hashtags are very useful in helping people find relevant content more easily on Twitter. https://hashtagify.me/ is a great site to find popular hashtags. Be careful though not to overuse them or it just looks bad. Once or two in a tweet is ok but anymore and it looks like you are over using them.

Do not buy followers
I am horrified by the number of people who buys followers. It is an easy trap to fall into but it just looks really bad and does not offer your business any benefit at all. These followers that people buy are usually not engaged and anyone can check how many fake followers anyone has with www.twitteraudit.com The other thing that people do which I would definitely advise against is following to unfollow, this is just not authentic. Of course everyone has the right to unfollow anyone but to do it just as a policy to make your ratio look better is really bad practice and just upsets people and will often result in these people unfollowing you. People are more and more savvy on social media so it is very likely they will be using an app to find out who has unfollowed them.

Be active and engage
Twitter is not a one way street. Supporting and helping your followers out by favoriting their tweets, retweeting their content and thanking them for retweeting will go a long way in building lasting relationships. Also you will find that people are far more likely to reciprocate and share your content if you do the same. Obviously you need to be discerning and only retweet what you think will be useful to your audience but this is what Twitter is all about so try to make time to do this as it is definitely worthwhile.

I hope this helps you on your Twitter journey and you will enjoy it as much as I do. I plan to keep blogging and posting tips throughout my Twitter journey. If you have any tips or little gems of info that you want to share about how to best use Twitter please feel free to do so in the comments below. I for one would love to hear about them. For more information and more blogs about Social Media Marketing please visit www.AlexStearn.com