Twitter offers a chance for brands to actively engage and interact with audiences in 140 characters or less. To say that it’s an effective method of reaching out to people would be an understatement – which is exactly why every business should be constantly looking at ways to boost their reach.
To substantiate this further, there is no other platform in the world offering such active engagement, where consumer feedback can be measured so instantly and with such accuracy. A newspaper ad does not get favourited, a billboard cannot be re-tweeted; TV commercials, even with large viewing figures, do not indicate genuine engagement. You cannot directly and rapidly reply to any of these forms of advertising.
We recently revised our Twitter strategy and have since seen our monthly impressions grow fivefold, from 20,000 per month to well over 100,000. Engagement levels and audience numbers are growing as a result, and we’re confident that we’ve learnt a thing or two about social media optimisation.
Here’s a few best practice tips to get you started:
Learn the lingo
Whoever is behind the tweets should have a personal account themselves; being aware of the intricate subtleties of creating content that stirs a reaction is part of what makes Twitter so successful for businesspeople.
If you are not actively doing this in your own life on a daily basis, you are unlikely to have a clue how to engage correctly in the business arena.
At best, it will come across forced. At worst, your followers will vanish in droves.
Discover your audience
Do you know who’s following you? To know what you should be posting depends on who you are trying to appeal to, but going through each of your followers’ profiles and learning their interests would take forever.
Followerwonk could be the answer; it’s a great tool that creates a word map that summarises the interests of your followers based on their personal information.
The Analytics tool on Twitter also summarises information based on individual tweets, providing helpful graphs to define your demographic.
Once you have this information you will be able to get an idea of the most suitable content for your tweets.
The aim of the game
So what’s the point of all this engagement and following stuff if it’s all going round in a mad circle, leading nowhere?
More than anything, you want to take your followers off Twitter and onto your blog or website. Don’t you? So make your…
