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With 500 million Tweets a day and 230 million active users, consumers turn to Twitter to talk about the things that matter the most to them... which can include their cats, Harry Potter, or maybe even your company! Engaging in real time tweet conversations can provide you with useful information to help improve your customer's overall experience.
Listen and Learn
Listen to your customers and competitors. A customer’s tweet about your company can be the most organic feedback you can get, so take advantage! Reward awesome tweets (by re-tweeting) and reply to inquisitive tweets with solution based answers...you might just gain a promoting customer in return! You can also “favorite” those who re-tweet your content. Gain market intelligence by viewing what your competitors are tweeting about by running keyword searches and following industry related businesses.
Grow Your Reach Potential
As a strategy to boost your delightful content, consider utilizing Twitter’s paid advertising options. It’s quite simple. Tou can “boost" or "promote” your tweets, account, or trending topics. This means that Twitter will get your business in front of the people you desire to reach. Pricing works on a bidding basis and you will only pay when users engage with your paid ads. If your budget allows, experiment with these promotion options to see how they can improve your account following and engagement.
Tweet Valuable Content
Every single thing that you tweet must add value to your followers' day. Keep your message short and effective (Twitter forces you to be concise for a reason) and track the level of engagement you receive. Avoid auto-tweet generating tools as much as possible- this will keep your tweets sounding new, exciting, and like they were written by humans!
First Follow, Then Lead
Build your following organically (don’t bother buying fake followers) by searching popular hashtags and keywords then following influential users in those categories. If they have a similar strategy, they will follow back. Fortunately there are a number of automatic follow services and hashtag generating sites that will allow you to find already popular hashtags and increase your following. Consistently respond to your followers' witty tweets with an answer, re-tweet or a favorite. Acquiring real followers is the first step in reaching the most engaged users and becoming an influencer on Twitter.
Be Consistent
Guess what? The majority of your followers are active on Twitter multiple times per day. This means you should be tweeting multiple times per day, ideally. If not, tweet as often as possible! Consistency on social media is the best way to reach your goals. In order to master Twitter, you’ll have to master the language that includes constant abbreviations and hashtags. Hashtags are a powerful tool that you can use to target your audience and reach more users. Consistently using hashtags and abbreviations in your posts will help increase engagement with them. That being said, don’t overuse hashtags- use no more than four in a post. One last thing to be consistent about is avoiding negativity. Spread fun, valuable content that will help shed some light on the negativity that sometimes exists in Twitter-verse.
Maintaining an engaging Twitter account can be very powerful in helping your company reach their inbound marketing goals and gain helpful insights from customers and competitors! What are some Twitter best practices that your company utilizes and how have they worked for you?
For more best practices on Twitter and other social networks, download the "Ultimate Guide to Social Media Posting Checklist" below!
