With over 400 million monthly active users, Twitter can be a powerful tool to raise awareness about your business, engage with customers and develop leads – not just for customer facing businesses, but B2B too.
Like many businesses, you may have a profile and tweet once in a while, but Twitter needs to be used regularly to be most effective.
Here are 10 Twitter features that your business should be taking advantage of:
Professional Profile
Let’s start at the basics. Every element of your Twitter profile should accurately reflect your brand’s purpose and values to help persuade a potential customer or stakeholder to follow you. First impressions count and it’s a chance to make a lasting, positive one.
Make sure your profile photo represents your brand – this typically would be your logo. Remember, this image will appear as your Twitter icon in every Tweet you write and every Tweet you reply to.
Your header photo should be engaging, it could be your latest product or important campaign you’re working on.
Your bio text is critical because this is where you can explain to people what you do, how you do it, and why they should follow your business. You have 160 characters in your bio, so keep it short and sweet. Be sure to add a link from your bio to your website; this way, someone can click through from Twitter straight onto your homepage.
Twitter Ads
According to Twitter, people spend 26% more time viewing ads on Twitter than on other leading platforms.
Twitter Ads can be an excellent way to create a buzz around a campaign, it enables you to target your ads at specific groups of people. Ads are clearly marked with a “Promoted” icon. People can follow, like or retweet your ads in much the same way as organic content.
97% of people focus on the image when reading tweets, and ads with custom graphics are likely to perform better than just plain text.
Quick Promote
Linked to Twitter Ads, business accounts can use Quick Promote, a new option for promoting content. Similar to boosting posts on Facebook, Quick Promote lets you pay to sponsor content via ads without having to go through the entire campaign creation process.
A Quick Promote button will appear next to your Tweet – just click and you’re good to go!
Mobile app promotion
Does your business have a mobile app? Twitter has an exciting tool that lets you target your audience through an ad to drive app downloads. You can create a custom image and app description for the ad and target users by location, gender, language, and mobile platform.
For example, if your app is available only on iOS devices, you can target users who access Twitter from those devices. The tool also shows you how your campaign is impacting your app downloads purchases and registrations.
Location Spotlight
Location Spotlight is a fairly new feature, but a useful one for businesses of any size. It allows you to display your business address, hours of operation and contact information in your twitter bio so that visitors to your profile can easily get in touch with you, without having to click elsewhere.
Scheduling Twitter posts
Got a great idea for a tweet but now is not the right time to send it? Or do you want to post a tweet on the weekend? Schedule posts through Twitter directly or its scheduling software Tweetdeck.
When you start drafting a new tweet, you’ll see an icon that looks like a calendar and clock. Click on this and you can schedule your tweet to share whenever you’d like in the next 18 months. This is best if you’re scheduling one or two posts in advanced.
If you are scheduling a complete social plan, we’d recommend Tweetdeck. Owned by Twitter, it is free to use and has customisable interface where you can organise lists, notifications, and your feed. You can also track hashtags in separate columns, schedule tweets in advance and add multiple Twitter accounts to manage several users at once.
Edit button
On September 1 2022, Twitter announced that it has started testing the ‘edit button’. This is so you can go back and fix typos, add missed tags, and more on already live tweets.
It will shortly be available to those who pay for Twitter Blue, the company’s subscription service. While the ability to edit tweets will be limited to those who pay $5 a month for now, all Twitter users will be able to see tweets that have been edited in their timeline and it will clear that the post has been edited.
Hashtags
It may seem obvious, but hashtags are a great way to increase the visibility of your content beyond your own followers. Popular Twitter hashtags you are likely to have come across include #FollowFriday and #ThrowbackThursday.
You might latch onto trending topics to contribute to the conversation or promote content around a national awareness day such as #MentalHealthAwarenessWeek. Look at the trending box to the left of your timeline for some inspiration to see what people are talking about.
You could also create your own hashtags to draw attention to your brand or events you are holding.
A good tip is to only use hashtags that are relevant to your content and limit how many you are using. The more you use, the less likely people are to interact with your content – it can be seen as spam by people and the Twitter algorithm!
Photos, gifs and polls
Twitter allows you to add up to four photos to a post. You can also create graphics to add to your tweets.
Using photos and GIFs in your tweets is a great way to connect with followers. Twitter has a built-in GIF keyboard, you simply search for a keyword and choose the clip that best suits your tweet.
Twitter polls are also one of the best ways to get feedback from your audience and get people engaging with your profile. It’s simple to set one up, when you compose a tweet, click the “add poll” icon that looks like a horizontal graph. Type your question into the main “compose” box, then enter your first poll response option into Choice 1 and the second option into Choice 2. You can list up to four answer options in your poll and each option can be up to 25 characters. The poll stays live for 24 hours by default, but you can shorten that timeframe if you prefer.
Live tweets
Live tweeting is a quick way to get a topic trending on Twitter. Essentially, it’s when a user tweets their reactions to an event as it happens, whether it’s entertainment or breaking news.
If you hold an event and want your attendees to live tweet about it, it’s a good idea to create your own hashtag for the event and share it with people so they can spread and follow it.
When you’re live tweeting or using multiple tweets for the same topic, make them responses to the original tweet. This makes it easier for users to follow the entire conversation.
Hopefully now you have a clearer idea of how these Twitter features can add value to your marketing efforts. If you’re not sure where to start with using Twitter, or other social media platforms for your business, we can deliver social media training. Get in touch with our team at [email protected].
