Have you ever wanted to truly dominate Twitter (now X)? You may ask, “Why would I?” but the truth is that social media platforms are an indispensable piece of today’s business reality. To promote your brand effectively, you will have to master one or several social media platforms as modern digital marketing tools, whether X/Twitter or else.
Like other popular social networks, Twitter is a space where people share their thoughts on various subjects and learn what others want to tell. It is a place to express approval (by retweeting or liking a particular post) or disapproval (by posting a reply to it). If user settings allow, it is also possible to DM (direct message), making Twitter a place for people to find each other and communicate.
Twitter is one of the most popular platforms not only for socialization and entertainment but also for business purposes. With clicks, which lead to corporate websites, retweets and replies are the most common types of user engagement.
It is the right time to ask – how to make the most out of it, making your company’s brand as recognizable as possible?
7 Tips for Getting Your Brand Noticed on Twitter
What Determines the Engagement Rate for Brand Posts?
It is basically the same question reformulated because, in the end, we want more engagement of whichever form it may take. Probably the most desirable outcome for any digital entrepreneur are clicks leading to your corporate website, where visitors may be converted into customers.
On the other hand, retweets with brand posts are great to expand promotion, especially if the one who does retweet has many followers. Even with facts as plain as those, there come bright ideas of how to determine your digital marketing strategy with Twitter chosen as the target social media platform.
#1 Mutual Retweeting
It is an agreement with a rival on mutual promotion by the good old quid pro quo principle. It does not require particularly warm relations but does require at least some established recognition on a chosen market segment, or business reputation. Otherwise, retweeting your partner’s posts will bring only limited benefits and will not present much interest.
To think of, mutual retweeting is similar to exchange backlinks between two organizations, which is an example of a backlinking strategy.
This is what happens when you retweet other people’s content. From the days I was very active on Twitter.
A friend's Story as a ?
— Tasos Perte Tzortzis (@TasosPerte) July 26, 2016
Family owned ????
Business problems ⚒?? Example https://t.co/673yDS11ut pic.twitter.com/5ZDwXCaZw1
#2 Social Media Posts
Believe it or not, your Twitter account can be promoted and needs that promotion. Apart from mentioning your corporate website, a natural way to do that is through accounts in other social media networks (Facebook, LinkedIn) and blogs.
Blogging, however, consumes much time resources, which is why there exists such a thing as sponsored posts in blogs as a service, done qualitatively by professional writers in exchange for a fee.
#3 Choosing the Brand Type
The choice of a brand for digital promotion appears to be essential. According to Statista, last year, active engagement with brand posts was demonstrated by alcohol brands (0.08%), followed by financial services (0.07%), sports teams, nonprofits, and food (0.06% in the last three cases).
This could be top-5 brand types in terms of engagement, with engagement rates remarkably higher than the total average (0,045%), if it weren’t for higher education services, which are in the first place and outperform the followers with an astonishing 0.091%.
Does it mean working in a field other than higher education services crosses out all the opportunities to increase brand engagement?
Of course not, because there are many other influencing factors.
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Active engagement with brand posts by alcohol brands
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Active engagement with brand posts by financial services
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Active engagement with brand posts by sports teams, nonprofits, and food
#4 Hashtagging
According to a study by digital ad agency RadiumOne, as of 2013, more than 70% of social media users didn’t mind using hashtags. Today there has got to be more – at least for the sake of fashion, let alone their actual benefits.
A surprising fact about Twitter: although the hash (#) sign was first used there ahead of any other social platforms in August 2007, it was far not the first time. Not the last time either, as today it is a very common addition to almost any post on Twitter and other social platforms.
Even before Twitter came to life, hashtagging was already used for categorization, which is still one of the main reasons to use it with your posts. Another connected reason is increasing people’s engagement.
And engagement does increase, as it was stated in Huffpost three years ago in the case of Instagram posts where hashtagging caused about 12% more engagement on average. Although estimates may already be different for Instagram and Twitter alike, the main idea is clear.
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Social media users that didn't mind using hashtags in 2013
Building Hashtaging Strategy
This explains why it is necessary for digital marketers to apply a thoughtful approach even to such seemingly unimportant nuance as hashtagging. In fact, it is very important, otherwise, they wouldn’t bother regularly checking top B2B and B2C hashtags for the moment.
Among the best B2B (business-to-business) hashtags are:
- #marketing
- #ecommerce
- #digitalmarketing
- #sales
- #technology
- #branding
- #smallbusiness
- #wholesale
- #covid
- #startup
- and many others to work with.
If you work on the business-to-consumer segment, the same resource provides best B2C hashtags, some of which are the same, although in most part look very different:
- #welcomeall
- #borntocompete
- #welcomeallpark
- #youthsports
- #nationsbest
Adding them to your posts, where applicable, contributes to brand recognition, but will it be enough? It appears it won’t, for the reason of them being too generic. It is advised to do a little experimentation with hashtags before posting because what truly increases brand engagement is specificity.
By being too specific you cut some of the total audience which follows any #football instead of #americanfootball. On the other hand, adding #soccer to your posts attracts users interested precisely in that sport – not just in any game played with a ball.
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Instagram posts that received more engagement due to hashtagging
Timing
According to another not-so-recent research by Buffer, it even matters what day of the week is chosen for posting. Upon analysis of millions of tweets in 2013 they discovered that Twitter engagement for brands was 17% higher on Saturdays and Sundays. At the same time, only 1 in 5 brands is actually tweeted on weekends.
Logically, people make their purchases off work, which explains their interest in posts oriented towards consumers. However, it may be different from B2B, so those tiny nuances should be taken into account.
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The percentage of increased engagement for brands on Twitter on Saturdays and Sundays
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Brands that were actually tweeting on weekends
#5 Commercial Promotions
Advertising tools work with Twitter posts just perfectly. Posting a colourful visual of your goods – or a representation of provided services – with a promised 50% Xmas discount greatly increases the likelihood of attraction of someone who is not even in particular need of those goods or services at the moment.
By the way, the visual aspect is always important. The same Buffer mentioned earlier and states that images almost double the probability of engagement!
#6 Content Diversification
In order to extend your audience outreach, try content as a variable to work with for better results. Again, for professional marketing posts, content creation may be put to outsource if internal resources are not enough.
There are two good reasons to do that:
- Diverse content raises awareness and brings newcomers – which means more potential followers.
- It also means a higher retention rate: once followed, you will less likely be unfollowed with time.
Tweets should not be too long, though, no matter how interesting the idea being shaped in them. Once again, we refer to ten surprising facts about Twitter statistics that were discovered by Buffer.
One of them states that posts shorter than 100 characters yield engagement 17% higher.
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The increase in engagement for posts shorter than 100 characters
Making it Technically Efficient
Until now, we have been talking about effectiveness. On the other side of it, there is technical efficiency. Without digging deeply into details, we recommend considering the following two digital marketing aspects via Twitter – or a similar social media platform.
#7 Automation
Some of the aspects discussed earlier probably revealed a pattern to be followed further with posting on Twitter – for example, with a greater focus on weekend posts where consumer activity is at its peak.
But how to arrange that if it is a weekend for your employees as well, so there’s nobody in the office to post a tweet?
The problem may be solved with automated preprogrammed posting upon various tunable parameters, including exact times for your post to appear. Extended functionality of some of those instruments also allows managing posts distantly from any mobile device, monitoring replies and mentions by other users, and tweaking parameters for each social platform separately.
Some of the tools available provide a trial period free of charge to see how it fits your digital marketing demands. Some may even be completely free of charge, although with limited functionality.
Tweeting Where and When It Yields More
With so many vital aspects to think of, planning digital marketing campaigns on various social media platforms (including Twitter) should be taken very responsively. Raising your brand engagement, making it noticeable is a function of many parameters to look after and – alter them if something goes not the way you want it.
A solution to that task is choosing an appropriate tool for implementing a carefully designed strategy to put responses to your brand posts to maximum.
Marie Barnes
Marketing Communication Manager
Marie Barnes is a Marketing Communication Manager at LinksManagement link building service. She is an enthusiastic blogger interested in writing about technology, social media, work, travel, lifestyle, and current affairs.
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