Twitter Marketing

Twitter’s marketing service is one of the world’s largest social media platforms: it has 300 million active users around the world, another half a billion unregistered visitors are looking for information in it, and the number of mobile app installations is about a billion. If used correctly, Twitter can be a unique platform for brands to communicate with the audience. However, few people know how to use it correctly.

According to the company itself, Twitter has one of the highest conversion rates for advertising messages – 3-5%. 73% of users follow different small brands and read their tweets, 60% of them made purchases using this service. 57% of users learned about these businesses for the first time from Twitter.

In Twitter, unlike other social networks, tweets are displayed in one tape in user feeds in chronological order. Therefore, the main task here is to ensure that users in this thread notice your posts. Here are some tips to help you achieve this.

Write bright and short tweets

In a regular message on Twitter, you can write up to 140 characters, but the company’s own research shows that messages up to 100 characters long increase the audience reach by 18%. Especially if they contain a call to action. Write tweets as simple and human language. They must be emotional and dispose to dialogue.

A common mistake is faceless tweets similar to press releases. When companies are going to publish something in their blogs, first they should think about what the users will give their message. It should entertain, inform, or assist the audience. Ideally, do it all at the same time. If the message does not fit either of these requirements, it is better not to publish it at all.

Catch the moment

Twitter users post about a billion tweets every two days, and each brand can respond with a relevant message. But it is important to come to any user at the right time, than to the right user at the wrong time.

Recently, the flowering of situational marketing has been happening on Twitter. Brands have learned to seize the moment and take advantage of live events, holidays, various TV shows. A vivid example is how dozens of brands reacted to the “What color is the dress?” Internet virus, about which users wrote 2.5 million tweets.

Situational marketing, if used correctly, improves consumer awareness of the brand, causes a positive emotional connection with it and increases loyalty. In addition, it is a good opportunity for competitors to play on each other’s pain points. So, for example, when users began to complain that the iPhone6 ​​bends too easily, Samsung, LG, HTC and Nokia responded with a series of relevant tweets.

Therefore, it is vital for brands to join the discussion and, with the help of hashtags, fit into the agenda, which can be traced to the top 10 most relevant trends.

Use photos and videos on your tweets.

Recently, new multimedia formats have appeared on Twitter in addition to 140 characters of text. Up to 4 photos can be attached to each tweet, upload your own video (for ordinary users, up to 30 seconds, longer ones are verified). Western advertisers are increasingly using the Vine Loop Video service. Multimedia content significantly increases conversion – users respond better to such tweets than to bare text.

According to Simply Measured, posts with multimedia content get an audience reach of at least 300% more than standard tweets. A post with a loaded photo will be seen by five times more people than if the tweet will simply contain a link to the photo (which also takes the user out of Twitter). In addition, in this photo you can place your logo, etc.

Twitter is now very effective promotional video – the price for them is one of the lowest in the world. Another small piece of advice: “If you want the audience to watch the video, do not post other links under it and be sure to tell users:“ Watch this video! ”

Plan your posts

Various studies show that the best way to tweet is clicking from Monday to Thursday from 13:00 to 15:00, and most of all users retweet from 16:00 to 17:00 on Friday. In general, users are most often active on Twitter at the beginning of the week, the dynamics begin to decline gradually towards the weekend, and on Sunday evening they start to grow again.

But on weekends and on holidays, on the other hand, there is less competition among advertisers, the coverage of advertising messages is higher, and the cost of advertising impressions is lower.Brands can save on paid promotion in Twitter, properly using holidays for their own purposes.

In Twitter, a custom feed is updated quickly, so tweets are relatively quickly outdated. The optimal number is a few tweets per day that will encourage users to make a purchase, download an application or watch a video.

Planning is important only in daily and weekly activities, but also in relation to major events, in the context of which you can enter your advertising messages. A striking example is the World Cup in 2014, to which the attention of the entire planet was riveted. Many brands then developed a successful Twitter strategy for this event. But if you try to predict unplanned but probable events, you can hit the jackpot.

Ask users to retweet you

The biblical rule of “Ask and be rewarded to you” is also relevant for Twitter. The audience responds more actively when asked about something. Studies show that a retweet call on Twitter will bring you 4 times more retweets than if the post was published without Call to Action.

Just as important is how you reach out to your audience. For example, according to research, the call “Please Retweet” works better than “PleaseRT”. The more you manage to penetrate the audience, the more retweets you will get. And with them – and the coverage of your messages.

Hashtags

Hashtags are an important point that advertisers often lose sight of and without which conversion significantly drops. Hashtags help start a conversation, build it in the right direction, or join the agenda. In the case of the same dress, for example, brands used the common hashtag #TheDress, so that users who followed the topic could see their ads. The most popular hashtags of users at the moment can be found in the “Hot Topics”.

Hashtags should not be abused, they should not be more than one or two, a maximum of three. As practice shows, tweets with one or two hashtags get more retweets than tweets with a few. The hashtag should be treated as a call to action, it is a kind of Call to Action. If there is more than one call to action in the tweet, the user may become confused on which one to click. It also does not make sense to put mutually exclusive hashtags. But if two completely different topics are covered in a tweet, you can put two hashtags (# kitchen and # football).

Listen to your audience

The secret to the success of brands on Twitter is in knowing the topics that are of interest to the audience. Understand how she lives at the moment, and you can reach her. Think about what visual content users will be interested in at the moment. A vivid example is the period of vacations or holidays, in which the Aviasales portal has successfully entered its advertising campaign.

The service used promotional tweets in which the Image App Cards were embedded with photos of interesting places and airplanes and provided advice to travelers on how to book a flight at the best price. Plus, the company in its tweets focused on the benefits of early booking of air tickets. As a result, the service increased by 4 times the number of its subscribers and by 16% the number of downloads of its mobile application.

Twitter – marketing opportunities

So, the distinctive features of Twitter are identified and indicated. There is only one, but the most important question – how to use them for marketing purposes? In fact, everything is very simple: read, write and implement in practice.

-Capitalize your own brand. Brand capitalization is first and foremost – increasing awareness. Increasing the number of subscribers and increasing its presence in the information space, you gradually gain popularity. Well, fame increases credibility in the eyes of users and contributes to the influx of customers.

-Formation of the target audience. Placing information about growing cucumbers, you will attract workers of the garden and garden front. By distributing information about your activities and your services, you will win the attention of interested parties. They are the target audience. It is from their ranks who come ready customers.

-Feedback Exchanging messages with potential and real customers allows you to discuss business issues, get an assessment of your own services, agree on new products, etc. Communication simplifies life.

-Presentation of products. Here you are not limited to anything. Advertising, description, placement of photos and videos – Twitter allows you to show your product from all angles and with any comments.

-Realization of direct or indirect sales. Again, no restrictions. You can simply promote your services or place direct links to relevant pages in online stores.

Promotion of corporate content and traffic growth. Sharing materials from your site or blog on Twitter is a great way to increase their ranking in search. External links and new readers will help push corporate content to the top. Thus, Twitter is also an SEO tool. Not bad.

Twitter – tools to help marketers

To provide marketing opportunities, Twitter provides supporting tools.

-Use of tags. By the way, the so-called hashtag first appeared on Twitter. Today it is placed everywhere and greatly facilitates the search for information. For example, they clicked on #rubyonrails and received all relevant answes to the request.

-Following, repost, huskies. Any activity on Twitter does not pass unnoticed. Its addressee (the account you subscribed to, the author of the post you like, etc.) immediately receives a corresponding notification. In this way, you kind of offer yourself: make contacts and grow connections. And then according to the scheme: brand capitalization, the formation of the target audience, product presentation, etc. etc.

-Placement of media content. Pictures, gifs, videos make posts more presentable and noticeable. And this in no case should not be neglected.

Firstly – it is fascinating. Secondly, it guarantees feedback to readers (communication simplifies life – see above). Add that in February 2016, Twitter users were able to conduct surveys using the Customer Feedback service, which allows them to study the loyalty index and satisfaction. And this is a pure tool for business.

Proper use of tools, especially new tools – the key to successful marketer. And for this you need to know all the subtleties of this tool – when, how and to what extent to use it. We hope our small educational program on Twitter will be useful for our readers.