Top 10 Ways to Use Twitter for Your Business Growth

There’s a lot running into the mind of a business owner.

You need to keep an eye on everything such as ensuring customer happiness, marketing business, ensuring timely production and delivery of products and services and so on.

Many things are important or need to done in urgency. These can take away your attention from the things that though being  important can be done later and so those get lost in the clatter and activity of the day to day “busy-ness”.

Therefore, you need to think on setting your priorities and finding what should you focus and invest time on.

What’s Important?

You might have heard the quote by the US President Eisenhower:

“What is important is seldom urgent and what is urgent is seldom important”.

The author of the book “The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People”, Stephen Covey developed and made it popular by a matrix that offers busy people with a framework and tool to prioritize their time.

Twitter can work in two ways either a distraction or an interruption. But note that it is also an important tool for planning, marketing and networking of your business.

Check below the ways in which you can use Twitter for your business:

Optimize Twitter Bio

The first and foremost Twitter strategy is to optimize your Twitter bio. This can be done by ensuring that your company’s brand is well known to all. Let your audience know about you and include a link to your company website or landing page. Also, use a consistent tone for your audience to clearly understand your company and its work.

Interact with Influencers & Experts

Do you know the most important Twitter guidelines for business? It is to use Twitter’s search tool for searching similar people, customers, and influencers in your niche. After finding them you can connect with them, and interact with them daily. Create a private Twitter list and add the top 50-100 influencers you want to interact with and with the tool like Hootsuite make your interaction with them easier to accomplish.

Involve Employees

The followers on your company’s Twitter page must come from internally. This has been recommended by several professionals that have been successful on Twitter for promoting their brand. So, ask your employees and colleagues to follow your company’s Twitter page. Also, keep the page active by tweeting, engaging, retweeting, and sharing user-generated content on behalf of your company. Don’t forget that inviting your employees for interacting on Twitter page of your company gives them exposure to public. Therefore ensure that act in a professional manner on Twitter and represent the brand with respect.

Regularly Tweet

Your profile needs to be active as well as healthy while using Twitter and this is possible only when you tweet regularly. This is because if a brand fails to maintain its Twitter profile, the audience too forgets about it and it becomes very difficult to get back to the initial stage. Remember to tweet over 3-4 times a week and of course a couple of times a day. Stay active by tweeting and engaging your audience. Ask for the user-generated content to add to your profile and also, run some surveys, contests on your profile to learn more about your audience and also, to keep them engaged.

Track Company/Brand Mentions

Keeping a track on people’s views about your company will keep you in the loop with your audience’s feelings about your brand – their likes and unlikes. In case you see any great comment about your brand, respond to it with interest and thank them in some way or simply tweet back. If someone comments in a negative way about your brand, respond in a polite way and offer a solution to the situation. It is very important to give response to the negative comments of your brand to maintain a good reputation and build trust among your audience that you are always ready to move forward and beyond for being the best in your industry.

Use the Right Hashtags

For your information tweets that contain 1 or 2 hashtags have 21% higher engagement as compared to tweets with 3 or more hashtags.

You might feel appealing to use every hashtag you can think of for gaining attention, but it can prove to be a bad idea!

It clearly indicates that you have to be careful and thin down your hashtag choice to 1 or 2 per tweet (if you were previously using more).

If you haven’t used any hashtags, you can start using them right now. They help in improved visibility and getting your tweets in front of more people.

But how to select the best hashtags?

You can use various tools such as Ritetag to identify the right hashtags to use in your tweets.

You just need to enter a keyword related to your niche and Ritetag will provide you with all the relevant hashtags.

Not only this, you will also get the data on:

• The number of times a hashtag is used.
• The number of retweets those tweets received.
• The number of tweets that contained links.
• The number of tweets that contained images.
• The number of views they received in total.

This is a valuable data for any marketer and it will help you to select the right hashtags.

Additionally, these hashtags have proven to increase engagement and interactions.

This is the one of the effective ways to use Twitter for your business.

Research Your Competitors’ Audiences

Want to find out who your competitors are engaging with on Twitter? Want to connect with new people? Who in your field is already interacting with?

Twitonomy will give you a detailed report of a particular profile by simply entering the username of Twitter.

You can find the people in your industry that others are already connected to. Additionally, you can find the people who you haven’t found yet.

Twitonomy is the best tool to find them. Just enter your competitors’ usernames and check if any names pop up repeatedly.

Also, check that you aren’t missing any hashtags.

Monitor Twitter for Keyword Mentions

With the tools like Hootsuite and TweetDeck you can set up search columns to find any mention of a particular word or phrase immediately.

For example, let’s say you are into a restaurant business and want to find the people looking for a great place to eat in your area.

You might want to search for words like “digital marketing agencies nearby” or “digital marketing” along with the name of your town or city.

Then, follow and respond to the tweets that appear. Also, start building relationships and making new contacts.

Use Photos, GIFs and Polls

With Twitter, users can add up to four photos to posts. It also allows you to create graphics for adding to your tweets. Don’t know to use Photoshop? You will get several tools online that help you to create the image you need.

You can connect easily with your followers by using photos and GIFs within your tweets. You get a built-in GIF keyboard in Twitter. Search a keyword and choose a clip that best suits your tweet.

It is important to engage with your followers on Twitter to maintain the consumers’ interest in your brand. Creating a poll would be a fun way to involve your followers. Create your question and select the responses. Then add the question by clicking on the Compose box at the top of your Home timeline. Next, click on the Add Poll icon that symbolizes a horizontal graph. Enter your poll options into Choice 1, Choice 2 and so on. You can add up to four options in your poll, and each option comprises of 25 characters or less. By default, the poll stays live for 24 hours but you can shorten that duration, if you prefer.

Live Tweet

With live tweeting you can get a topic trending on Twitter. Basically, live tweeting means a user tweets his or her reactions to a live event when it is happening, then it can be a breaking news or entertainment-related. When brands run events, they need their attendees to live tweet while they are present. Therefore, the brand often uses its own individual hashtag and shares with the invite list so that others too can follow.

You will find live tweeting generally on TV shows and televised events. It’s common during such events to find the trends box filled with related topics – for example, during the Oscars, you will find use of hashtags related to this event along with the names of celebrities and films winning major awards.

While live tweeting or using multiple tweets for the same topic, always give response to your original tweet. It is because the users can then follow the entire conversation.

Bonus: Tips and Tricks for Twitter Usage

Don’t buy followers: It is possible to buy followers from certain services to increase your follower count. Though you may find it tempting to display your large follower base, mark my words it won’t be worth. The reason is that the followers you will get won’t be real and therefore, won’t interact with your brand.

Go mobile: Since the Twitter mobile apps are incredibly well integrated with the web platform, you can seamlessly transit from your desktop tweeting to smartphone or tablet tweeting.

Add a Twitter widget to your website: On your web page add the Twitter widget to show your audience that you’re active on social media. You simply need to go to http://twitter.com/settings/widgets and click on Create New. You’ll land on a page where you can customize as per your preference. It is possible to make a widget out of your own timeline of tweets, favorited tweets or lists created. Additionally, you can search for a specific hashtag. You can adjust the size, link color and theme of your widget. Once you finalize your new Twitter widget, simply click the Create Widget button and you’ll be taken to a new page that comprises of HTML code necessary in order to embed the widget on your website.

Embed tweets on your blog: If your brand has an active blog, you can embed tweets to showcase any fun tweets you shared or tweets from your loyal followers. Believe me it’s a great way to place your social media accounts on your website. In order to embed a tweet, go to the tweet you prefer to share and click on the More tab in the upper right corner. You will get a dropdown menu, choose Embed Tweet option, and you will land to a new page with the appropriate HTML code. From here, just copy and paste the code where you want it to get displayed.

Bottom Line

You might have now understood about how to use Twitter for growing your business, traffic and sales.

I hope these ways to use Twitter will help you to make your brand presence stronger and also increase your brand profitability.