How to Effectively Use Twitter to Grow Your Business

Many businesses spend a lot of resources on Twitter but never see results. Twitter can be a difficult social media platform to master because it is very different to the others (including Facebook and LinkedIn). You only have a 140 character limit and you must use hashtags. With the right ideas you can ensure your Twitter account becomes more successful and gain more followers and eventually more traffic towards your business.

However, it is important to note that implementing these steps will not change the success of your Twitter account overnight. It takes a lot of time and hard work, but eventually you should start to see some results.

 Twitter phone sign up

1. Identify potential influencers and get them on board with your account

As the name suggests, influencers have significant sway over what other people do and see on Twitter. Their followers value their opinion and look to influencers for guidance. Therefore when you engage with an influencer who is in your field of business you can create more opportunities including, increased engagement, traffic to you site and Twitter followers. You can find these influencers using the audience insight program Audiense (you can create a free account so it won’t cost you any money).

Influencer

Audiense helps you quickly search and find potential influencers in your business industry. All you have to do then is get in contact with an influencer that you feel as though best suits your business and explain to them why they should get behind you and your business.

2. Research the audience of your competitors’

Finding out what your competitors are doing on Twitter is important for any social media strategy. You can see what they are doing well and what they are doing not so well. If some of your competitors have a lot of Twitter followers it is important to investigate their followers and see what they like and what their interests are. A program called Twitonomy which provides twitter analytics is a very useful tool in researching competitors. All you have to do is enter a username and this program will provide you a detailed analysis of their profile including; how many times they tweet per day, how many re-tweets, how many hashtags they have used, etc. and this saves you the time of individually researching each user.

3. Use the correct hashtags (and the right amount of hashtags)

Hashtags are a very slippery slope, especially on Twitter. Used correctly they can be very beneficial to your business, however incorrectly using hashtags can be detrimental. Research shows that tweets containing only one or two hashtags have significantly higher engagement (by about 20 %) compared to tweets with more than three. Many Twitter users fall into the temptation of trying to use as many hashtags as they can in the 140 character limited but this can be harmful to your business.

hashtag twitter

Choosing the correct hashtags to put into your tweet can be very difficult as well. However, there is now a website that can help you create the best hashtags; www.all-hashtag.com. Simply type your keyword into the search bar and it will generate potential hashtags. For example, I searched the word ‘marketing’ and here are the results:

 4. Make use of your pinned tweet

Twitter gives you the option of ‘pinning’ one of your tweets to the top of the timeline. This means that when anyone searches for you on Twitter and looks at your profile they will see this tweet first. This is an especially effective tool for the potential growth of your business as it sets the tone of all other tweets. This tweet should be the one you feel is the most important and it should be a general overview of your business and should also include an image. You are able to change which tweet is pinned to the top of your timeline so if you have anything special happening in your business (i.e. a promotion or a business birthday) you should have this as your pinned tweet.

twitter message