Social Media Strategy: How to Use Twitter
Social media is a fact-of-life for many today. But the strategic use of platforms for marketing purposes is still a mystery to many across a variety of industries. This article series seeks to support professionals like yourself in taking their social media practices to the next level.
We provided some more advanced tips to help you use LinkedIn more effectively in our first post in the series. In this article, we’ll discuss how to use Twitter more strategically to reach prospective clients and make professional connections.
Three Social Media Strategies for Using Twitter for Business
Twitter usually takes slots three to five of the most popular social media platforms, depending on who you ask and when, but it is known for the volume of international users it has and is often considered one of the best ways to keep track of what is happening in the world in real time.
If you’re new to Twitter, you’ll first want to consider whether you plan to create a company profile or a personal one for professional use. (Of course, you can create both, but it is not strictly necessary.) When choosing your name, don’t use any strange nicknames, puns, or special characters. Your profile name should be as close to your real name as possible.
Many professionals, like lawyers and reporters, create personally-branded Twitter profiles. These people are often thought leaders in their industries. But depending on your marketing goals, for example, like the goal of having people recognize your logo, it may be more appropriate for your organization to have a company profile.
If you cannot decide which direction to go now, you can always add an additional profile later, so don’t get too stuck on this preliminary decision.
Now, to start using Twitter more strategically, consider the following points.
- Brand your profile page.
Even if you decide you’ll use a personal Twitter account at first, consider branding everything. Use your professional contact information, branded business colors, and other logos and images that identify your business and connect you to it.
For example, on Twitter you have the opportunity to customize three visual areas on your Twitter page – a profile picture, the equivalent to a “cover photo,” and a background. A smart way to use these spaces is to use a common or branded professional headshot for the profile, a company-branded image for the larger photo area, and your business’ colors or patterns for the background.
To truly brand your profile, these images should have been used on other social media platforms or your website, so at some point, they will become familiar to the people who follow you.
- Be search-friendly.
In the profile information areas, you’ll want to also include your physical location, your website, special offer, or blog landing page, and a bio that describes you or your business professionally.
Twitter bios are known for having personality – you only have 160 characters – so feel free to have a little more fun than you might on, for example, your LinkedIn bio. Consider using search-friendly keywords in your bio. What do you want to be known for? Use those words!
Tweets should also be search-friendly. You have 140 characters to gain attention from your followers and, as of 2015, from Google. While you don’t necessarily need to do keyword research for every tweet you write, don’t waste a word. As a best practice, consider how a customer might phrase a question or a search, and use those words or phrases in your tweet.
- Engage, engage, engage!
If you read the first article in this series, you know this is a repeated recommendation. That’s because professionals like yourself are busy, and often times, participation in social media is not a priority. But if you are using it as a social media strategy, it should be.
Ways to make engaging easier can include:
- adding Twitter to your mobile device to make engaging more convenient,
- organizing your Twitter conversations into lists, allowing you to separate, for example, networking opportunities from true thought leaders and leads from existing customers, and
- pre-scheduling tweets based on your social media strategy using a tool like Hootsuite.
However you decide to engage, do it regularly – like your follower’s tweets, retweet important information from credible sources, ask questions of fellow thought leaders, and provide information of your own to potential clients who will find it useful.
Above the Fold Media provides professional service to its clients that can take their social media strategy to the next level. If you’d like to learn more about leveraging social media platforms like Twitter to grow your business, learn more now.
