Despite the many recent changes, Twitter (now rebranded as “X”) is still one of the main places people go for trending conversations. Given this fact, it doesn’t take a marketing genius to realize that X is still a fertile environment to meet new customers—despite how newer, more short-form focused platforms seem to be getting all of the attention from marketers these days. That said, X requires a specific and unique marketing approach in order to succeed. You can’t approach it the same way you would your Facebook, Instagram, or Youtube marketing and also can’t simply cross-promote your existing content.
With more than 335.7 million monthly active users, it’s important that you standout to your specific audience. So, what can you do to ensure this? How can you promote your product or service without being a distraction or an annoyance? And, most importantly, how can your brand exist on a platform that is, arguably, prone to more trolling and snark than others?
In this post, we’ll walk you through all the steps required to leverage X’s remarkable reach for your brand.
Design Your Twitter (X) Marketing Strategy
The first step to getting ahead on Twitter is to effectively plan your marketing strategy. This will be your foundational approach to how you’ll address the content that you produce and the way in which you will distribute and publish it across the platform. As a goal, your content should gather new leads, attract new customers, grow conversions, and increase your brand awareness.
Just like any new social media platform, it is very important that you do your due diligence before immediately jumping in and posting. Therefore, follow these quick steps to decide how you should best handle your strategy:
Identify your key goals for the platform
Every platform can’t be everything to everyone. Therefore, decide what you want X to be for you and your brand. Do you want it to be a way to quickly post updates to your customers? A way to communicate directly with them? Maybe you are looking for a way to be more fun and casual, and Twitter will let you exist outside of the corporate bureaucracy and have a bit of fun with pop culture. Whatever your reason may be, identify it early and be on the same page with it across your organization.
Research your competition
Figure out the types of content that your competitors are posting and the ways in which your shared customers are responding to it. Can you expand on it, or should you be pivoting in a whole new direction? Research the way that their customer service looks and ask whether or not you can improve on it. The openness of Twitter allows you to see how your competition manages a lot of their social process; use this to your advantage.
Identify your audience
It does not matter how great your content is, if you are creating it for the wrong audience, you are never going to convert. Therefore, it is incredibly important that you understand your target, specifically, who your audience is on X. Your audience can vary from platform to platform therefore it is incredibly important that you define your audience for X and not just assume that it is the same one from a different channel such as Facebook. You could have a different demographic, or maybe your customer uses X just to interact with your customer service. Therefore, study what type of audience and customer uses Twitter and revise your strategy accordingly.
How to Build Out Your Profile
Whenever a potential customer visits your Twitter page, it should be a direct reflection of your brand. It should be in line with your website and have your brand’s logo, color palette, font, and other brand attributes front and center.
Along with ensuring that your brand voice is present in all of your X communications, here are a few things to keep in mind when first putting together your Twitter profile.
Twitter (“X”) Handle
Make sure that your Twitter Handle includes your brand’s name or at least something close to it. This is so that anyone who is searching for you via Twitter’s internal search engine can easily find you.
Profile Picture
You will want to make sure that your profile picture represents something indicative of your company or brand, as it will sit prominently next to every post that you tweet. Therefore, it makes sense to use something such as your logo or a picture of a high-ranking executive. You can also modify your profile picture to take advantage of global events such as National Holidays or culturally significant events.
Bio
Your bio is where you will want to explain who you are and what you are about in 160 characters or less. This should be in your own brand voice, so have it reflect the same type of content that you are looking to put out.
Website URL
Be sure to include your brand’s website URL. Afterall, I highly doubt that your end-all be-all destination for your customers will be your Twitter stream. Therefore, make sure that you provide a web destination and any other destinations like phone numbers or physical addresses that your customers should know.
Header
X provides some additional visual real estate where you can let your brand shine through. The header acts as the background image for your feed and you can choose to use either a custom image, your existing logo, or something completely unique.
Twitter (“X”) Advertising in 2024
As mentioned before, X has gone through some significant changes. On one hand, the change in ownership has ignited fresh enthusiasm for the platform and boosted user engagement. Concurrently, the platform also now charges a monthly fee for verification.These shifts are prompting some users to leave the platform, resulting in a decline in monthly active users.
Take advantage of Twitter keyword SEO
Just like any other platform, Twitter has its own internal algorithm that takes advantage of metrics and keywords. Keyword targeting allows you to specifically target users through specific words and phrases that you put inside your content. When it comes to keywords there are two types that you need to know about:
- Search Keywords – This type of keyword targeting lets your tweets come up whenever a consumer searches for a topic that you deemed related to your brand.
- Timeline Keywords – This type of keyword targeting is much more broad and lets you target words surrounding your brand. For instance if I were a hockey brand, I could target phrases around ice skates, hockey sticks, hockey tryouts, etc,
Interact with your audience
It’s called social media for a reason. Therefore, it’s imperative that you engage with your audience and the rest of the X ecosystem. The best accounts and the ones that get the most engagement and followers are the ones that consistently follow up and engage with their audience, followers, competitors, and colleagues. It’s an interconnected social ecosystem and social media managers need to be part of it to ensure their brand’s success.
Monitor and promote media mentions
Ideally, your brand will be getting promotions and mentions throughout other media extensions and it will greatly benefit your brand to promote these via your tweets. This will also allow you to create backlinks via your tweets that will, in turn, boost the brand recognition of the brands that promoted you: win/win.
Create video content
I hope you didn’t think that X is simply a text-based platform because visual content is the best content to post. This is especially true for integrating video into your Twitter marketing strategy. Video is the best way to communicate ideas in an engaging way, as seen with many of the newer social media platforms like TikTok and Instagram. With everyone attempting to create scroll-stopping content, video continues to be the thing that gets folks to stop and breathe for a moment.
Use those hashtags
Hashtags are a great way to expand the reach and influence of your content. However, there are a few things to keep in mind when creating hashtags for your brand. First, create hashtags that are unique and connected to your brand. Make them relevant and memorable, too. Lastly, don’t continually use them over and over as they can become confusing for folks searching them over a long period of time.
Check your DM’s
As a consumer there is nothing worse than reaching out to a brand to ask a question and having it go unanswered. At best you feel like they have dropped the ball. At worst, you feel like they don’t care about you. Therefore, it is imperative that you check your direct messages consistently to ensure that messages sent to you are received and answered in a timely manner.
Get to Tweeting
X has the amazing ability to not only connect you with a remarkable community of followers, like-minded experts, and customers, but it has the capability of completely revolutionizing your business. Now that you have your strategy in place, your account setup, and some best practices in hand, you’re ready to begin implementing your marketing plan! Need help? Schedule a call with one of our experts below and we’ll help you get started.
* This article was originally published here