Of late, Twitter has turned out to be one among the top powerful social networking platforms. With the help of Twitter, one can send messages (within 140 characters), called “tweets”. Also, we can insert web link in such tweets, and thus can hyperlink blog or web page or video or picture and more. Moreover, others can follow (subscribe) your account, and you have also the option to follow other accounts to get periodical update from such followed accounts.
Twitter was founded in March, 2006 by Jack Dorsey, Evan Williams, Biz Stone, and Noah Glass. Within a decade, Twitter has acquired 302 million active users (May 2015), 3,900 employees (2015), with a reported revenue of around US$1.4 billion (2014). In 2013, Twitter was one of the ten most-visited websites, and was marked as “the SMS of the Internet”. This has compelled Business segment to use twitter as social media channel for advertising. The reported higher traffic of twitter brought one more avenue for leads for business to reach out their target market.
How to do social media marketing through “Twitter”
One needs to follow set of processes to get maximum out of twitter promotion. A few such tips are listed below;
1. Presenting the brand: The Twitter platform is a tool to share business story and information. The brand presence needs to be presented appropriately to help other users to easily identify your business and consequently build trust. The selected Twitter name should be easy to memorize, pronounce, spell and type in mobile. The two different images which are allotted to be present in the profile needs to be attractive, and should clearly define your business.
2. Completing the profile: It is important to complete the profile as well. The completed details need to disclose vital information about your business. There are three important pieces of information which need to be filled in as well.
- Location – Need info about the business and how others can locate the business premises.
- Website – Web link or blog that provides more information about the business.
- Bio – There are 160 words for users account holder (business person) to say who are they and what do they provide?
3. Following people: To grow the network, it is equally important to follow other users. If we will follow one twitter account then we get access to tweets/messages of that account. Ideally, one should follow the accounts based on their business objectives as follows;
- Customers
- Business partners, suppliers, contractors and vendors
- Competitors or peers
- Trade organizations or professional organizations for the same industry
- Businesses in your neighborhood
- Businesses run by people you know (in professional network)
4. Start talking: Messaging is very important in account management. One can grow the twitter network by communicating through messages. There are four basic types of message sending options as given below;
- Tweet – This is the main part of twitter. When anyone tweets, it automatically sends out to those who follow the account.
- Reply – A reply message is sent against the message which a person received.
- Direct Message – It a private message, which is sent by one twitter user to another twitter user.
- Retweet – If anybody shares a message to his/her follower which is created by others, called retweet.
5. Attract traffic to own blogs and website: To do this an account holder has to tweet the link, which is hyperlinked with website or blog. Generally, attractive tweet content will give higher mileage.
Importance of followers in twitter:
- If anyone has more followers, people assumes that he/she has a good knowledge about what he/she is talking about.
- Those, who are using twitter as marketing & sales tools of their business get more customer and grow their business, if they have more followers.
- People can share their ideas with each other via twitter. Every people have their own opinion; more people more opinion. So if more followers are there so more ideas will generate.
How to Increase Followers in Twitter?
There are a few tips by which we can increase followers in twitter as follows;
- Write an attractive twitter bio.
- Use relevant keywords in twitter bio, which will give a good rank in search result. Try to put city/region name, which will attract local traffic.
- Upload contact and email in twitter. Some people, who know account holder personally, may get him/her through this. It will help to increase followers.
- Use headshot rather than logo. It shows the real person behind the brand.
- Follow more popular users in twitter.
- Post regularly – this will increase visibility and helps to increase followers.
- Use important links or tweets, which are already posted by others, and re-tweet.
- Use hashtags while tweeting
- Ask others to retweet.
- Try to put some relevant images with post
- Don’t try to use twitter burst (A bulk number of tweet in a short period of time). According to a research study, one among the reasons for other to unfollow twitter is the over tweeting – too many tweets in a short period of time.
Whether you are promoting your account, or client’s brand, applying above strategies will help in increasing the visibility and online traffic of your website/account.