Social media is ideal for promoting your website and online business, and Twitter is an absolute traffic powerhouse. With a network of over 271 million monthly active users (and counting), not only it is a great tool for you to spread out your message, reach out to your target audience and engage in conversations that are happening over the social web, but it also provides amazing opportunities to meet and prospect new leads and clients for your business.
Keep on reading to find out how you can harness the power of Twitter for your online business, attract more followers, create engagement and, of course, drive greater traffic to your content.
Is Twitter Part of Your Social Media Marketing Strategy?
In case you’re still not tweeting about your business, here are few facts that may change your mind:
- Twitter’s 271 million monthly active users send out 500 million Tweets per day. 78% of these active users access the network via mobile.
- More than half of its users follow six or more brands on the network for promotions and discounts (94%), free stuff (88%), fun and entertainment (87%), updates on upcoming sales (79%), or to get access to companies’ exclusive content (79%). 47% of these people are more likely to visit the company's website.
- Twitter is the 4th most popular social platform in the World in terms of account ownership and active usage, coming right after Facebook, YouTube, and Google+.
The social site is already super noisy, having experts and influencers on every topic known to man. Just copying the title of your latest blog post with a link driving back to your website simply won’t work anymore.
So what can you do to stand out? How do you get people on Twitter interested in what you have to say?
Don’t worry. You don’t need a sophisticated, super-powerful strategy to get your story in front of the vast Twitter community. And even if you don’t have an impressive following just yet, you can still focus your efforts on the ones you do have. Remember, it’s always better to have a small community of the right people that support your work and drive the traffic your content deserves, than to have thousands of the wrong followers.
Here’s a list of ten simple tactics you can try out for your business and website to start seeing some great traffic results:
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Optimize Your Twitter Bio
Your name, profile image and message are the only things visible when your tweets appear in your followers’ streams (or in the Who-to-follow sidebar). If they want to know more about you, they’ll click to check out your profile. Once there, people’s eyes will be automatically drawn to your bio. So it makes perfect sense to use this space to provide basic information about your company and products, but even more importantly, to include a clickable link to your website, blog, or latest post and most popular content.
Your Twitter bio is a great channel for directing valuable traffic to your site, so make sure it’s optimized and regularly updated for your presence to be always in step with your latest content.
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Keep Your Tweets Short and Intriguing
Tweets are how your business communicates with its following on this microblogging social site. They are limited to a maximum of 140 characters, but according to Track Social, the perfect tweet length appears to be around 100 characters, and tweets that are under 100 characters receive 17% higher engagement rates as confirmed by Salesforce. This length is enough for you to share something of value and generate curiosity, and leaves enough space for the person retweeting to add their commentary as well.
You don’t have to include your posts titles in your tweets; just something that would spark interest. Don’t give too much away about the content as well, as no one would want to click the links if they can guess everything from your tweets. Instead veer toward the shorter side, – tweet a question that begs for an answer, mix in numbers, facts and statistical data, or add a puzzling quote from the post you share. Studies show that tweets with quotes see 54% more retweets than any other type of post.
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Use Hashtags (#)
Hashtags help organize tweets around various topics, extending your Twitter reach beyond just your following. According to Buddy Media, tweets with hashtags receive two times more engagement than those without hashtags, and the more engagement, the greater your tweets visibility and potential clicks.
You can create your own hashtags to promote your business, products, contests, etc., or use general words and phrases related to your topics and content. Go to hashtags.org to listen, measure and engage in Twitter conversations and select the hashtags that are fastest moving and seem to best fit your niche area, search What the Trend to find the relevant trending ones, and check what the influencers in your industry are already using for similar topics.
Avoid starting your tweets with hashtags because it looks kind of spammy, and don’t use more than two in a tweet as they actually show a 17% drop in engagement (overstuffing devalues your message). Read what other mistakes you may be making with your SMM strategy.
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Use @Mentions and Retweet When You Get Mentioned
Mentions are messages you send out that include other Twitter users’ names. You can use them when tweeting about a certain individual or brand, when commenting on the work of other prominent bloggers and companies in your industry, or to thank your customers, blog post authors and guest bloggers. They certainly won’t mind the mention, and they may also retweet your message and expand your reach to their following. When using mentions, there’s a little reciprocity required, so you’ll have to retweet as well when someone else mentions your business or content.
Also, make sure to ask your followers to “RT” or “retweet” your updates, as studies show that this type of tweets actually do get retweeted 10 to 23 times more than average. So why not try it yourself.
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Tweet About Your Contests and Promotions
Contests, group offers, and other types of promotions, are a great way to boost your website traffic and bring in new customers for your services and products. Make sure to tweet about them to your followers, let them sneak-peek into the prices and everything, and include a link they should click to get more details.
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Get Visual to Stand Out from the Crowd
Twitter is no longer a text-only platform. Using visually appealing images, Vine or YouTube videos, with your tweets almost certainly guarantees greater engagement; and more engagement equals more traffic back to your website. Tweets with photos get twice the response, and according to Buffer’s research tweets with images get 18% more click-throughs, 89% more favorites, and 150% more retweets. You shouldn’t ignore these stunning numbers.
Choose photos with strong focal points, include an image from your post when sharing your blog content, and search for visually attractive imagery, free of copyrights, on sites like Unsplash, Free Range Stock, Flickr copyright free images, and the free stock images on iStock. Make sure they’re up to 3MB in size and in GIF, JPEG, or PNG format.
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Pool Your Following and Use Twitter Search to Identify Common Questions and Concerns
You can sometimes ask your Twitter followers what type of issues they typically face, and then create and share blog content that answers those specific questions, @mentioning the users who’ve participated in the survey. By showing interest in their challenges and concerns you establish trust and help connect readers sharing similar interests.
If your following still isn’t large enough, you can use Twitter search to identify these common questions and tune in your content to provide true value to your audience and ensure greater traffic to your website and company blog.
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Search the Terms “Looking for” or “Recommend” to Find New Customers for Your Business
People search the Internet (and Twitter) all the time looking for new products and services they haven’t used or don’t know who to turn to for recommendations. Twitter search is an official search function hosted by the network, and you can use it to promote your offering in front of these people, and be their trusting friend in a time of need. Just type in “Looking for” or “Recommend” and check out the latest tweets containing the terms.
If you’re an indie designer, this tweet below is waiting for you to reply. If you don’t answer, somebody else will.
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Repost Your Tweets
Reposting same content is usually considered a bad practice, but on Twitter the updates can be easily missed by your audience. To get your tweets in front of more followers, you can alter the used images and text and share them at different times of the day, on multiple days, but not more than three to four times in a single week.
For example, you can tweet your content with the original title, a link, and an image from the post, then use different photo with a quote and link, and next time just ask a question and include the link. Be sure that these tweets are spread out among other shared content so you won’t irritate and spam your following. You can share your older posts as well, weeks or months later, as long as they’re still relevant to your audience.
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Consider Promoted Tweets to Extend Your Reach Beyond Your Current Following
Organic sharing may not be enough to spread out your message and increase the visibility of your tweets, particularly at the beginning when your following is not yet significant. By using Twitter’s promoted tweets you can reach out to a new audience that otherwise wouldn’t be able to see your content, targeting the right demographic by keywords, interests, location, or used devices.
Promote tweets with links to your most popular or evergreen content, in-depth articles, and original stats relevant to your industry and a new market that isn’t familiar with your business. Spread out your budget carefully, and measure the success of your campaigns to make necessary adjustments in the future.
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This guest post comes courtesy of Tommy Bjorn, Second Online Income