Twitter has come a long way since its beginnings in 2006. From a social media platform where anonymous users share their thoughts, it has become a mass means of communication used by everyone — from private users and businesses to pop stars, academics and politicians.
Everyone who is someone is on Twitter — and so should your brand.
Twitter provides vast opportunities for business users, but becoming visible and popular on this social media platform isn’t easy, especially if your brand is new and not yet established.
This article will teach you how to use Twitter for business: you’ll find the best practices, tips, and tricks that will push you closer to your business objectives. Let's start!
The Importance of Using Twitter for Business
Twitter is one of the best social media platforms for staying on top of the latest trends and communicating with your target audience. An average Twitter user follows five business accounts and 37% of users who follow brands purchase from them.
Are these stats encouraging advertising potential? But there is more. According to Twitter’s study:
- 80% of users mention brands in their tweets.
- 50% of people who mention the brand do it more than 15 times in six months.
- 54% took action toward the brand after seeing its mentions.
Here are some of the most prominent reasons you should be using Twitter for business:
1. You Can Achieve Enormous Reach
In December 2022, Twitter had over 368 million active monthly users, who spent, on average, 31 minutes daily scrolling the platform. On top of that, 125 million unregistered users visit Twitter every month, reading topics of their interest.
As you can see, when you tweet, you reach a broad audience — both Twitter members and non-members. For best results, create a reach campaign — advertising developed to increase brand awareness by making your ads visible to as many users as possible.
2. Provides Valuable Insights About Your Audience
Every day, Twitter users publish at least 500 million new tweets, making this conversational platform an ideal source of valuable insights into your target audience’s mindsets, interests, needs and emotions.
Whether you’re launching a new product or service or trying to improve an existing one, these insights will be assets that will help you adjust your Twitter marketing campaign.
Regularly monitor the Twitter Explore page, which displays topics and hashtags relevant to your niche and areas of interest, to help you reach your target audience's tweets.
3. Builds Brand Awareness
Posting engaging content and interactions with your followers is essential for branding, directly affecting brand awareness. Ensure you're using a tone consistent with your brand's personality in tweets and mentions with your audience.
In addition to developing brand recognition and attracting an audience that shares your values, interactions with your followers will help you appear in their followers' feeds, thus making more people aware of your brand. Increased visibility will contribute to better brand awareness.
4. Helps Creating Brand Community
Communities connect people, allow them to communicate about common interests, and make them feel they belong to something significant. Consistent publishing of engaging content and interactions with your followers will gather them around your brand.
Your community will be the best advocates of your products; they will expand your customer circle by conveying their satisfaction and recommending you to close people.
5. Improves Online and Offline Sales
Twitter’s engagement campaigns effectively get your audience’s attention and make them move toward your final goal — more sales of your products or services.
Twitter boosts online and offline sales by:
- Increasing brands visibility and building brand awareness
- Helping you to connect directly with your customers and understand their needs
- Offering target advertising to reach the right audience group
- Sharing user-oriented content to showcase product use
How To Use Twitter for Business: 10 Best Practices
Twitter can help your business thrive, but only if you use it to draw customers' attention and boost engagement. You can achieve your business goals by following the best practices for a successful Twitter presence, whether on your own or with the assistance of some of the top social media marketing agencies.
1. Set Up a Twitter Account That Draws Attention
Your Twitter presence will start by setting up an account, but considering 82% of B2B companies already use this platform, you’ll need to find a way to stand out.
The first thing you have to do is choose a brand name. If your brand name is already taken, add a CTA or attribute next to your company’s name. For example, when we created our Twitter account, “DesignRush” wasn’t available, so we decided to go with @DesignRushMag.
Add profile and header photo. Most companies choose their logo for a profile picture to improve branding and brand awareness. You can change the header more often, but it should be visually complementary to your profile photo.
Include a link to your website, so your followers can easily find it, the company's location, and a bio that introduces your business to the Twitter audience.
2. Publish Valuable and Engaging Content
Your tweets should educate, inspire, or entertain your audience. Above all, they should encourage them to enter the discussion because Twitter is primarily a conversational platform.
Address your audience directly so that each follower feels that you are talking to them and feels encouraged to respond. If your tweets have a low response rate, consider changing your content strategy to be more appealing.
Remember, Twitter has a 280-character limit; therefore, your messages must be concise. Consider adding multimedia content because tweets with images and videos tend to get better audience responses.
3. Use Hashtags
Hashtags relevant to your industry categorize tweets under a specific topic, making it easier for users to search and find relevant information. They enhance discoverability and help build community, allowing users to connect with people with similar interests and join ongoing conversations.
You can create a hashtag for your brand under which users will participate in conversations, increasing your visibility and brand awareness.
4. Use Emojis
Emojis will help you to convey a clear message, express emotions, and save precious limited characters. Your tweets will be more creative and engaging, as these cute digital icons are popular with Twitter users and encourage interactions.
5. Add CTAs to Your Tweets
Gathering followers and creating a community are milestones that lead to the ultimate goal — promoting brand awareness to improve sales of your products and services.
The CTA will give your followers clear instructions on what you want them to do — click on a link and watch your video, visit your site and take advantage of a special offer, or subscribe to your email list.
However, you must be careful and effectively use CTAs, following Twitter’s best CTA practices. Your business account should balance conversational and promotional — aggressive advertising campaigns could drive away your followers.
6. Use Multimedia Content
One of the social media trends that is always popular is using visual content, which is especially helpful on Twitter, considering its character limitation (visual content doesn’t count in the 280-character limit).
The human brain processes multimedia content 60,000 times faster and better than text, meaning using images, videos, and GIFs in your tweets will improve engagement and ratings. For example:
- Tweets with animated GIFs gain 55% more engagement than tweets without it
- Tweets with video gain 10 times better engagement
- Tweets with images gain 3 times more user engagement
7. Tweet Consistently
Publish new tweets regularly so your messages can impact and fulfill your business objectives. You should always prioritize quality over quantity — tweet when you have something to say and keep your brand tone even.
Scheduling and using a content calendar can help you with consistent posting.
8. Interact With Your Followers
Engaging in a consistent dialogue with your audience is invaluable. You can ask questions, tag them in tweets, host a live chat (Twitter space), and hear immediate impressions about your work or organize a giveaway to reward their loyalty. Your audience will know you're there for them, and that's something they'll appreciate.
9. Consider Paid Advertising
Paid advertising on Twitter includes two types of ads: Promoted Tweets and Twitter Ads.
In both cases, you pay Twitter to show your tweets to users who don't follow your account (you set the demographic characteristics of the audience you want your ads to be shown to).
Promoted tweets look just like "classic" tweets; they can be liked, retweeted, and quoted, except that under them there is a small tag that says "Promoted."
Twitter ads use a larger group of tweets, rather than individual tweets, to help your advertising campaign achieve a specific goal. In addition to tweet promotion, your Twitter account will appear as a suggestion to follow on the right side of a targeted user's feed.
10. Conduct Social Listening and Measure Your Results
Social listening provides insights into mentions and user conversations about your brand. Once you understand what kind of reputation your brand enjoys, you can adjust your social media marketing strategy to suit your audience's needs better.
Measure your performance using Twitter analytics. The total number of followers or impressions per tweet is not an indicator of success. You need to find out how many people interact with your brand, click on your links, like your content, and answer questions — and this tool will give you all the answers. Discovering what type of content gains the most engagement will help you understand and improve your future SMM efforts.
How To Create a Successful Twitter Marketing Campaign
To create a Twitter marketing campaign that produces the desired results, you’ll need a solid strategy based on the following steps:
1. Set Your Business Objectives
Setting clear and measurable social media goals is the first step in any successful SMM strategy; the same goes for the Twitter marketing campaign.
Your goals should be SMART — specific, measurable, attainable, relevant, and time-bound. SMART goals are aligned with your business objectives and divided into milestones so you can track the success of your strategy.
Define specific goals instead of general ones: for example, instead of wishing for your tweets to go viral, set a goal to increase your click-through rate in a given period.
2. Identify Your Target Audience
Whether you're writing a tweet or creating a long-term strategy, you need to keep in mind the target audience or the person you're addressing.
- Who are your average users?
- What problems and challenges do they face?
- What are their interests?
- How can you get their attention?
- How can you solve their problem and improve their experience?
Be sure you have answers to all of these questions before starting a Twitter campaign.
3. Research Your Competition
Identify the main competitors in your industry and study their Twitter accounts. You can learn the most from them, especially if they are present on this social media platform longer than you.
Find out what your competitors tweet about, how they interact with their audience, and most importantly — what are the weaknesses of their strategy, so you can develop a better approach and achieve better engagement with your followers.
You can create a private list, visible only to you, to monitor what they write about and who they interact with.
4. Follow Best Practices for Twitter Business Profiles
Explore best practices to incorporate into your Twitter strategy. Your approach won't remain the same after it is set; by looking at Twitter analytics data, you may learn more about how your efforts are performing. If your engagement and impressions differ from expected, adjust your strategy until you achieve the desired results.
Bonus Tips to Get the Best Results
Here are some social media tips you can apply to boost your Twitter strategy:
1. Understand the Twitter Language
Twitter has specific terminology you should be familiar with.
A tweet is the content users publish. Tweets can be up to 280 characters long; besides textual content, they can contain images and videos.
Retweet happens when one account shares another account’s tweet.
A quote is similar to a retweet but includes a comment above the original tweet.
A mention is a tweet that contains @ symbol and another account username anywhere in the tweet. As a business user, you’ll track mentions to discover your brand reputation.
A hashtag is a word that begins with the # symbol. When you use hashtags, your tweet becomes linked to all other tweets that use the same hashtag. Hashtags ease following specific topics users are interested in.
Trends or trending topics are words, phrases, or topics many users mention.
Direct messages or DM are private messages between two (or more) accounts.
2. If You Want Followers, Start Following
Getting followers is the biggest challenge for many business accounts.
People need to know about your online presence so they can follow you. Follow accounts within your niche and interact with them, so their followers notice you. Sponsored tweets can also help you raise brand visibility.
There's no need to follow everyone who follows you, but you may want to follow back your most loyal fans over time.
3. Engage With Twitter Influencers
Check who your industry's most popular and active users are following and interacting with. People whose tweets reach large and engage audience groups are influencers.
Influencers have credibility — users trust them and listen to their advice; therefore, engagement and cooperation with these people can increase your traffic, brand awareness, and exposure, as well as conversion rates and sales.
4. Verify Your Twitter Account
A little blue badge beside your Twitter name signifies your account is verified.
Verification is important for business accounts because it lets people know your brand is authentic, notable, active and credible. To get a blue badge, you must apply for verification. Although anyone can apply to verify their account, only specific categories are accepted.
5. Pin an Engaging Tweet
A pinned tweet is the first piece of content visitors see when they come to your profile since it stays on top of your timeline, above all other tweets.
A pinned tweet should be impressive and engaging to attract new followers or achieve another goal — send users to the desired landing page, promote your new product or service, or raise brand awareness.
Although a pinned tweet is optional, regularly aligning it with your marketing campaigns can make them more effective — think of it as free advertising for your business.
How To Use Twitter for Business: Final Thoughts
Creating a Twitter account is simple, but developing a solid presence that influences followers and their decisions can be challenging.
Twitter is a conversational platform that differs in many ways from all other social media and therefore requires a unique approach and a carefully developed strategy.
Start with determining the goals you want to achieve with your Twitter presence. Identify your target group and their needs, then develop a series of engaging tweets to get them to interact with you and follow your CTAs.
If you need help carrying out this step, contact one of the top Twitter marketing agencies, who will assist you in developing a plan that will pave the way for your success.
