Although there are rumors of a downfall for Twitter, it is still an incredibly powerful social network. Twitter is still in the top for referring web traffic, it is a fantastic place to develop leads, and it is an incredibly powerful customer service tool. If you are a small business owner who has tried to use Twitter to market your brand who has not seen success, this post is for you. We’ll give you suggestions to help you actually get results from your Twitter efforts and break down the things you need to do on a daily, weekly, and monthly basis in order to achieve them.
Twitter Growth Strategies for Business
Daily Tasks
These are the Twitter tasks you should perform daily. Why daily? Because on Twitter slow, smart and steady wins the game.
Follow Targeted Accounts
The best way to get followers on Twitter is to follow people yourself. Every time you follow someone, they get a notification. That gives that account the chance to check out your profile and if they find it engaging enough, follow you back. If you follow the right kind of people, you can get up to 40% of them to follow you back and be exposed to your tweets. To increase these chances even further, engage them as you follow (by commenting or re-tweeting) and schedule a retweet of their posts using Socialdraft.
How to Choose Accounts to Follow
It’s not as hard as you think. You can search accounts by keyword and location. Once you find them, Twitter will suggest similar accounts. You may also want to start by following those who have engaged your business in the past. Lastly, you’ll want to follow and engage those who follow and engage your followers, they will be the easiest to convert since they are interested in what you have to offer…but don’t know it yet.
Unfollow 100 People Who Don’t Follow Back
Those who don’t follow back, or those who haven’t followed you in ages are not likely to do business with you. Clean up your following by unfollowing them. You will need to use a 3rd party tool like ManageFlitter to help you with this task.
Engage
You will want to engage all those who engaged you. Thank those who retweeted you, reply to those tho commented on your tweets and keep that conversation going.
Check Your Online Reputation
Keep an eye on what is being said about your business or brand on social media. Then, take action.
- Share the good stuff
- Address the negative
- Engage those who created content around your brand
Weekly Twitter Growth Tasks
The majority of the weekly tasks are content sharing tasks. Using tools like Socialdraft, you can do this weekly as opposed to having to do it all the time. This is a serious time saver and the tools I’ll share with you in this section will make finding content to share a breeze.
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Tweet Reviews & Testimonials
Reviews and testimonials are awesome forms of evergreen content. Pop them into a CSV and upload them on a weekly basis. You can use the Socialdraft CSV bulk uploader and randomize this content using TrueTime so your audience doesn’t get bored.
Tweet Popular Content
Popular content is popular for a reason. Keep an eye out for content that is trending in your industry and share it on Twitter.
Wondering how to find this content? Start out by following influencers in your industry. Check out what they tweet and what gets them engagement. Chances are it will work for you too.
Tweet Promotional Content
Sticking to the 80/20 rule is great here. 80% of the content you push out should not be promotional. 20% should deal directly with your goals. Schedule your promotional content to come out amongst all the other content you have coming out.
Keep an Eye on Questions People Ask
People often ask Twitter for advice and opinions. Look for these questions and answer them with your tweets and content. This is a great way for you to make yourself an industry authority.
Monthly Twitter Growth Activities
This is where you can save time and really make an impact. Let’s get to work:
Tweet Quotes
Quotes are a great filler strategy. If you use Socialdraft, you can create an evergreen CSV sheet and upload this content on a monthly basis. Use TrueTime to randomize the content so that your audience does not get bored. If the person you are quoting is living, tag them. It’s flattering and a great way to connect with them.
Add Influencers to Public Lists
The key here is to make it flattering. Create public lists on Twitter that group people together who have influence. Give it an awesome name. When you add someone to this list, they will get a notification which will prompt them to check you out.
Check & Update Your Profile
Do a check to make sure all information on your profile is accurate. Change and update it to keep it fresh.
Connect Email
Connect your email (Gmail or Outlook) accounts monthly. It’s a great way for you to connect with those you are already connected with on a business basis.
Check Your Stats
With Socialdraft you can pull Twitter reports as often as you want. While weekly is a great way to make sure you’re on track, monthly should be the absolute minimum that you pull reports. See how you are doing and check your demographics to make sure your growth is on the right path.
Twitter is an effective social networking tool for developing leads and communicating with customers. And Twitter, along with Facebook and Pinterest, is among the top three social media platforms generating web traffic. But as Omkar Mishra with Digital Insights points out, until recently, Twitter account holders had to rely on third party apps to measure crucial Twitter data and post activity.
Since going public, Twitter has introduced Twitter Analytics for different components on Twitter. And Mishra does a good job of breaking down the Twitter Analytics dashboard, available to everyone who has created ad accounts on Twitter. But now you don’t have to be an advertiser with Twitter to access the dashboard; you can use the Analytics Dashboard by simply setting up a Twitter Ads profile. Twitter Analytics is a great tool allowing brands to see what’s working and generate more out of daily tweets.
Twitter Analytics Dashboard
After logging in to the Twitter Ads or Twitter Analytics platform, the default dashboard has three components. The dashboard’s components allows you to decipher the performance of your account on a tweet level basis. The Impressions metric lets you see the number of times your followers saw your tweet on Twitter.
Twitter also lets you compare your performance over the 28 day period with specific actionable metrics such as Engagement Rate, Favorites, Replies, ReTweets, Link Clicks and Impressions. Now it is much easier to benchmark your content performance. The tweets are segregated into different categories so you can view a Tweet by Tweet performance for your organic Tweets, Replies and Promoted Tweets. Now if a conversation with a Twitter user is generating engagement, you will know on this dashboard.
The Dashboard’s Key Metrics:
Impressions: The number of times users on Twitter view your tweet in their timeline.
Engagement: The total interactions that have occurred on the tweet by the user which includes all the clicks on the Tweet (hashtags, link clicks, avatar, username & tweet expansion) along with the usual engagement metrics like favorites, replies, retweets as well as new follows.
Engagement Rate: The Engagement Rate for Twitter is the ratio of the Engagement actions and Impressions generated over a Tweet. The key difference to note here is Twitter is giving us the engagement rate based on impressions whereas Facebook does a similar metric based on the number of unique people reached.
Download Data
The best addition to the new dashboard is the ability to download data for each tweet. The “Export Data” option at the right-hand corner gives you a lot of meta data attached with each particular tweet to play with. The information can be downloaded to an excel file for further analysis.
The following metrics are available in the downloaded:
Impressions
Engagement
Engagement Rate
ReTweets
Replies
Favorites
User Profile Clicks
URL clicks
Hashtag clicks
Detail expands
permalink clicks
embedded media clicks
App Opens (If you are promoting an App or sharing one)
App install attempts
Follows
email tweet
dial phone
The same metrics are available for organic as well as promoted tweets. The level of detail allows brands to accurately determine which tweet resulted in more engagement, and which tweet resulted in higher new followers/app installs. The user consumption can be broken down into specific actions to analyze the behavior of your Twitter followers and plan your content accordingly.
Know Your Followers
This section was introduced some time ago in the Analytics dashboard and serves as a useful reminder about the growth of your Followers over time. The ‘Followers’ tab also tells you about the top interests of your followers along with the location demographics. So if you are a blog, you can leverage this data to know the interests of your followers and blog accordingly.
#TwitterTip
Through the dashboard, Digital Insights knows most of their followers are interested in Marketing and SEO and as a results they generate their content mostly based on helpful marketing content.
Twitter Card Analytics
Twitter Cards are small snippets which appear on a Twitter timeline embedding rich context to your website content. Digital Insights has integrated Twitter Cards with their blog posts and have seen a considerable increase in their CTR rate on Twitter. If you still have not integrated your website/blog with Twitter Cards, you are encouraged to do so. With the measurement framework already available, you can test it out to see if it works for your brand and how.
Twitter Cards tell you the link clicks over time to your tweets along with the top links of your website/blog which drove the maximum traffic from Twitter. The best thing about the Twitter Cards dashboard is that it also provides you with the list of Twitter users which often tweet your content and you generate the maximum traffic out of them.
#TwitterTip
Find your most influential users and build long-term relationships with them. Focus on the value providers and ask them for their opinions to create a two-way dialogue.
How to Manage & Grow Your Social Media Accounts
Socialdraft is your all-in-one tool for Social Media management. Socialdraft allows you to:
- Schedule posts to multiple Social media accounts
- Monitor your online reputation
- Have multiple people create and post content
- Pull Reports
- Engage
- and much more
If you’re curious about how Socialdraft works, take us for a risk-free trial. Have questions?
Twitter is a formidable tool in the social networking landscape. According to one study, Twitter is among the top three referrers of web traffic, along with Facebook and Pinterest.
Most small business owners who have used Twitter to market their brand are familiar with basic Twitter strategies, such as following those who have positively mentioned your brand, creating Twitter contests or campaigns, and using cultural events as opportunities to engage your Twitter audience. But a deeper, more in-depth review of Twitter has revealed some rare and invaluable tips regarding this social media titan that can give small business owners/marketers a decided edge.
Thanks to the astute reporting of Kevan Lee, we’ve harvested three uncommon statistical gems related to Twitter that can enhance and strengthen your social media marketing strategy.
1) Businesses Have Less Than an Hour to Respond on Twitter
Customers have high expectations for a quick response. According to a study commissioned by Lithium Technologies, 53 percent who expect a brand to respond to their Tweet demand that response comes in less than an hour. The implications of failing to respond quickly on Twitter are serious and the majority of users will escalate their negativity — from closing their wallets to publicly shaming the brand on social media.
In fact, 74 percent of customers who take to social media to shame brands believe it leads to better service. What’s more, even consumers who are initially positive can quickly turn negative if brands fail to respond to their Tweets in a timely manner. Brands that recognize and seize the opportunity to meet consumers’ rising expectations can achieve serious results.
The study also revealed that when brands provide customers with timely responses:
* 34 percent are likely to buy more from that company
* 43 percent are likely to encourage friends and family to buy their products
* 38 percent are more receptive to their advertisements
* 42 percent are willing to praise or recommend the brand through social media
2) Best Time For Retweets?
TrackMaven analyzed over 1.7 million tweets and found that the best time of day to tweet for a retweet is after-hours, between 10:00 p.m. and 11:00 p.m. ET. Track Maven also found that Sundays are the best day of the week to get retweets and that tweeting with the word “Retweet” or with all caps or exclamation points leads to more retweets.
3) Twitter Has 6 Unique Network Crowds
This Pew Research article notes that conversations on Twitter create networks with identifiable contours as people reply to and mention one another in their tweets. These conversational structures differ, depending on the subject and the people driving the conversation.
“Six structures are regularly observed: divided, unified, fragmented, clustered, and inward and outward hub and spoke structures. These are created as individuals choose whom to reply to or mention in their Twitter messages and the structures tell a story about the nature of the conversation.”
Based on a report that analyzed thousands of Twitter conversations, these are the six distinct communication networks.
Polarized Crowd: Polarized discussions feature two big and dense groups that have little connection between them. The topics being discussed are often highly divisive and heated political subjects. In fact, there is usually little conversation between these groups despite the fact that they are focused on the same topic. Polarized Crowds on Twitter are not arguing. They are ignoring one another while pointing to different web resources and using different hashtags.
Why this matters: It shows that partisan Twitter users rely on different information sources. While liberals link to many mainstream news sources, conservatives link to a different set of websites.
Tight Crowd: These discussions are characterized by highly interconnected people with few isolated participants. Many conferences, professional topics, hobby groups, and other subjects that attract communities take this Tight Crowd form.
Why this matters: These structures show how networked learning communities function and how sharing and mutual support can be facilitated by social media.
Brand Clusters: When well-known products or services or popular subjects like celebrities are discussed in Twitter, there is often commentary from many disconnected participants: These “isolates” participating in a conversation cluster are on the left side of the picture on the left). Well-known brands and other popular subjects can attract large fragmented Twitter populations who tweet about it but not to each other. The larger the population talking about a brand, the less likely it is that participants are connected to one another. Brand-mentioning participants focus on a topic, but tend not to connect to each other.
Why this matters: There are still institutions and topics that command mass interest. Often times, the Twitter chatter about these institutions and their messages is not among people connecting with each other. Rather, they are relaying or passing along the message of the institution or person and there is no extra exchange of ideas.
Community Clusters: Some popular topics may develop multiple smaller groups, which often form around a few hubs each with its own audience, influencers, and sources of information. These Community Clusters conversations look like bazaars with multiple centers of activity. Global news stories often attract coverage from many news outlets, each with its own following. That creates a collection of medium-sized groups—and a fair number of isolates (the left side of the picture above).
Why this matters: Some information sources and subjects ignite multiple conversations, each cultivating its own audience and community. These can illustrate diverse angles on a subject based on its relevance to different audiences, revealing a diversity of opinion and perspective on a social media topic.
Broadcast Network: Twitter commentary around breaking news stories and the output of well-known media outlets and pundits has a distinctive hub and spoke structure in which many people repeat what prominent news and media organizations tweet. The members of the Broadcast Network audience are often connected only to the hub news source, without connecting to one another. In some cases there are smaller subgroups of densely connected people— think of them as subject groupies—who do discuss the news with one another.
Why this matters: There are still powerful agenda setters and conversation starters in the new social media world. Enterprises and personalities with loyal followings can still have a large impact on the conversation.
Support Network: Customer complaints for a major business are often handled by a Twitter service account that attempts to resolve and manage customer issues around their products and services. This produces a hub and spoke structure that is different from the Broadcast Network pattern. In the Support Network structure, the hub account replies to many otherwise disconnected users, creating outward spokes. In contrast, in the Broadcast pattern, the hub gets replied to or retweeted by many disconnected people, creating inward spokes.
Why this matters: As government, businesses, and groups increasingly provide services and support via social media, support network structures become an important benchmark for evaluating the performance of these institutions. Customer support streams of advice and feedback can be measured in terms of efficiency and reach using social media network maps.
As Lee points out, tight crowds and community clusters are suitable groupings for brands interested in increasing engagement levels, and adds that support networks can also be a good type of communication network for brands, especially if you are doing customer support on Twitter. Obviously, the goal here is to determine your place in these Twitter networks, and to find out if you need to change your strategy to mix with a different group.
How to Manage & Grow Your Social Media Accounts
Socialdraft is your all-in-one tool for Social Media management. Socialdraft allows you to:
- Schedule posts to multiple Social media accounts
- Monitor your online reputation
- Have multiple people create and post content
- Pull Reports
- Engage
- and much more
If you’re curious about how Socialdraft works, take us for a risk-free trial. Have questions?
