What is Twitter marketing? It’s what you want it to be. Want to learn more about your customers? Make your brand a little more human? Build buzz about your new product? Make an influencer’s day? Provide lightning-fast customer support? Start mopping up after a PR disaster? Publicly humiliate trolls? Twitter’s got you covered.
Whatever your goals, there’s no question Twitter can be a powerful tool to help you achieve them.
If you’re just starting out with Twitter, this guide will show you how to craft a winning strategy. If you’re already using the platform to grow your business, jump to our section on smart Twitter tips for business.
Bonus: Download the free strategy guide that reveals how Hootsuite grew our Twitter following to over 7 million users and learn how you can put the tactics to work for your business.
How to create a Twitter marketing strategy
A well-crafted strategy is the foundation for success—and it’s what separates the most effective brands on Twitter from the also-rans. Without a clear plan, you will waste time and money tweeting without a clear understanding of how your activities are helping your organization meet its goals. And when it comes time to review your performance, you’ll struggle to prove what you’ve achieved. And that will make it hard to make the case for increasing your team size or budget.
Every hour you spend on research and strategy will pay off tenfold. We promise. Here’s what you need to do:
Define success and set goals
Okay, so you’ve got a good answer ready when your boss asks, “Why are we on Twitter?” Then come the two follow-up punches: “Are we on track to meet our goals? And… what are they again?”
Answering these questions isn’t hard if you do your homework. Start with a list of your organization’s current high-level business objectives, such as:
- Generate leads and sales
- Increase customer loyalty
- Build brand and product awareness
- Decrease customer support costs
From these objectives, craft specific and measurable goals. This will make it easy for you to evaluate progress and prove success. For example, if your objective is to provide your sales team with high-quality leads through social, your goal might be “use Twitter to drive 30 email sign-ups per month.”
With objectives and goals in place, remember to take time to benchmark the current state of your team’s performance. This will help you measure your progress toward your goals, proving that your strategy is producing real, measurable results for your business.
Defining and measuring success on social media can be challenging, so taking the time to do this right will really set you apart. Our guide to the ROI of social media breaks down the process for you.
Research the competition
Gathering information about your competitors’ strengths and weaknesses on social is critical. Not sure where to start? Read our quick guide, and then use this competitive analysis template to design a social marketing strategy that will leave your competitors in the dust.
Identify your target audience
Your brand can’t be all things to all people on Twitter—nor should you want it to be. Know who you’re targeting and craft a strategy that focuses on delivering real value to them. This will encourage them to engage with your brand and eventually become customers and advocates. While you’re at it, check out our guide on how to attract and engage more Twitter followers.
Audit and take charge of your Twitter accounts
Depending on the size of your company and your goals, you may want to use a single Twitter account or multiple accounts for different departments or functions. If multiple people in your organization are already using Twitter, auditing and consolidating existing accounts is key.
How important is this? When the Vancouver Canucks hockey team deleted rogue accounts and launched official social media channels as part of their social strategy, they were able to strategically grow their Twitter fan base by 800 percent.
Integrate Twitter with overall social strategy
Teams working in large (or growing) organizations can find themselves working in silos. If you find this happening to your social marketing team, make sure you keep tearing down those silos and stay connected to other teams. Their work can be a rich source of information and assets to share with your followers. And they may be gathering insights that can open up new opportunities for your Twitter strategy.
Keep your Twitter presence unique
While it’s possible—and easy—to post the same content to multiple social networks, cross-posting isn’t an approach we recommend. Each network has its own unique characteristics and user base, so while applying the same strategy to multiple networks might seem like a shortcut, it might cost you more in engagement and authenticity than it saves you in time and effort. Nail your strategy on one network at a time, keeping it unique and fresh.
For a head start charting your strategy, download our social media templates that cover everything from social media strategy and audits to content calendars and bulk message uploading for Hootsuite.
10 useful Twitter marketing tips for business
1. Use Twitter tools to get more done
Twitter’s website and apps are great for sending the occasional tweet or direct message—but to manage your Twitter marketing at scale, you need the right tools for the job.
Our list of 33 Twitter tools you can use in your marketing strategy is broken down by function to help you find the tools you need to market your business more efficiently on Twitter. Here are just a few of the things these tools will help you do faster and better:
- Generate leads by learning more about the people engaging with your brand, why they’re sharing your content, and who they’re sharing it with.
- Find industry influencers to connect with.
- Analyze your competition to find detailed information on their tweets, mentions, hashtags, followers, and more.
- Find trending topics by content, hashtags, search terms, sources, and more.
- Edit and add images to your tweets.
- Manage who you follow (and unfollow) to add valuable new information to your Twitter feed—and remove inactive and spammy followers.
- Time your posts for maximum impact with tools that analyze both your tweets and your followers’ tweets.
With your Twitter toolbox stocked and ready, it’s time to turn your attention to crafting a world-class profile.
2. Build a great Twitter profile
A complete, strategically crafted Twitter profile does far more than put a pretty face on your organization’s Twitter account—it can build trust with your audience, improve how your business appears in search results, and give your customers a direct, real-time channel to reach out to you with questions and kudos for your company. Here’s how to do it right:
Write a great bio
Twitter lets you use a few more characters in your bio than in your tweets (160, compared to 140), but you’ll still want to get maximum impact from every word (and hashtag). Whether you’re writing writing a new bio from scratch or looking to freshen up an existing one, we’ve got a list of world-class Twitter bio ideas to increase your follower count.
Complete and optimize your profile
A strategically optimized Twitter profile can do far more than just share your name, handle, and description. With a few quick tweaks, you can boost the visual impact of your profile; target a precise physical location or general area; help customers find other Twitter profiles your company manages; and make it easier for people to interact with your brand and start conversations about your products. For all the details, see our video on optimizing your profile settings on Twitter.
Get verified
When people see that you are verified by Twitter, they know that they can trust your content—and your brand. Learn how to get verified on Twitter and earn that small but highly valuable blue “verified” checkmark next to your account name.
Show it off
Of course, after investing all this work in crafting a great profile, you’ll want to make sure people actually find it. Add your Twitter handle to your website, email signatures, the side of your delivery truck, and wherever else it makes sense to show it off.
3. Listen and learn
If your strategy is focused on using Twitter to broadcast content to your followers, you’re not taking advantage of Twitter’s massive potential as a platform for social listening.
As our CEO Ryan Holmes explains, “For businesses that pursue social listening seriously, the benefits can be significant: real-time intelligence on competitors; instant feedback on how your own brand is being perceived; and actionable data for designing or tweaking marketing campaigns.”
You need to know what your Twitter community is talking about, whether people are directly mentioning your brand or not. What topics are they interested in? What kinds of content do they respond to? Who do they engage with? These are all important factors to consider when participating in social media listening.
Things to listen for include:
- Your brand’s name (including misspellings)
- Your brand’s product names (including misspellings)
- Your competitors (again, including misspellings)
- Industry buzzwords
- Brand slogans
- Your CEO or public representative’s names (and misspellings)
- Campaign names or keywords
Another key reason to listen on social is to find influencers and experts in your field. Nearly
