How to Use Twitter for Your Business

If you have any social media experience at all, you already know that Twitter is huge. Every day on Twitter, more than 320 million users post hundreds of millions of tweets. It’s easy to see how Twitter could expand your reach.

As a microblogging tool, Twitter allows you to send out succinct messages to your followers within a 140-character limit. This makes it an ideal content distribution tool. All posts are short and sweet. There is no such thing as “TL;DR” on Twitter.

Buy Twitter Followers, Your tweets reach all of your followers, unlike your Facebook posts. You can share images and videos like you do on Pinterest. but stimulating conversation is much easier. On Twitter, you can follow anyone, and anyone can follow you. This is an advantage over sites like LinkedIn which require you to build a relationship first.

Twitter also allows you to build a personalized incoming feed of information by following experts in your industry. This makes it a breeze to keep up with industry news and come up with great ideas for your own content.

Is Twitter Right for Your Business?

Twitter allows you to maximize visibility for your content. That includes short, unique posts on Twitter and links to posts on other social media sites or on your own website. Because you are confined to short posts, you save time. But while Twitter is an awesome tool for a variety of large and small businesses, it is definitely a better fit for some than for others.

Businesses Targeting Millennials

How do you know if your customers are on Twitter, and how do you engage them if they are? According to PewResearchCenter, the main age group represented is the 18-29 bracket; 37% of all internet users in that age category are on Twitter. The next biggest group is the 30-49 age bracket (25% of all internet users).

In other words, if your business is targeting members of Generation Y and Generation X, Twitter may be the right market. If you sell insurance products to baby boomers, Twitter won’t be the best use of your time. If you sell banking products to young adults on the other hand, Twitter would be perfect.

A couple other statistics stand out. Thirty percent of college-educated adults are on Twitter, so users are well-educated. They are distributed pretty evenly across different income levels, but most are urban or suburban.

If you are still trying to figure out whether Twitter is the right target market, you can always survey your current clients. Find out how many are on Twitter now and how they engage with brands. Tailor your first campaigns toward these clients and see if you can boost conversions.

Familiarize yourself with the lingo used by Gen Y and Gen X customers. Speak to them in a language they are comfortable with—but do not try too hard to ape their jargon. It can come across as insincere. Fine-tune your campaign targeting with relevant hashtags.

B2B Companies

Twitter is very popular among marketers, so it can also be a great site to use to promote your business if you are in a B2B niche. You can build strong connections in the advertising, web design, and SEO industries. For companies in these industries, the benefits of Twitter go beyond advertising to include networking.

Companies Posting Time-Sensitive Updates

If your company is involved with news, sports, entertainment, or other industries where up-to-the-minute updates matter, joining Twitter is a must. There is no faster and easier way to send out timely updates to customers, fans and other followers. Even businesses that you would not traditionally associate with time-sensitive fields can benefit from the speed of Twitter.

Consider this famous 2013 tweet from Oreo Cookie:

Power out? No problem. pic.twitter.com/dnQ7pOgC

— Oreo Cookie (@Oreo) February 4, 2013

If you were watching Super Bowl XLVII, you doubtless remember the power outage at the Superdome. Twitter’s timely tweet garnered 6,685 likes and 15,458 retweets. The genius of this moment was that nothing was going on during the blackout except for frustration. Oreo was able to capitalize on that moment with a quick joke people are still laughing at years later.

Cookies certainly are not time-sensitive, but the Super Bowl was, and Oreo made the best of it. This anecdote illustrates how any business—even one outside a time-sensitive industry—can harness the in-the-moment power of Twitter to send messages which will stand for years.

Brands with Dynamic Personalities

Twitter is a wonderful site for celebrities to market their personalities—but you don’t have to be a celebrity to take advantage of Twitter to sell your own dynamic personality. Consider these popular Twitter influencers:

• Steve Johnson: 1.39 million followers. Johnson is an author with a blog on popular culture. Users turn to him for high-quality news.
• Stefanie Michaels: 1.35 million followers. Michaels is a former swimwear model who owns a promotional business called SMC Productions. When she started blogging about her business travels, her popularity on Twitter led her to ever-greater success. Vanity Fair named her “America’s Tweetheart” in 2010.
• Heather Armstrong: 1.53 million followers. Armstrong was fired from her day job because she dared to blog about it. Subsequently, her popularity exploded on Twitter. She now can support herself full-time with the ads on her website. Users follow her because of her relatable personality.

All of these are great examples of visionary businesspeople on Twitter you can emulate. Their vibrant personalities and quality news, advice, and updates have won them global success.

While you are at it, Twitter is an excellent choice for your business if you are looking to connect with social influencers. Imagine the kind of exposure you could get if you got a retweet from a popular Twitter personality like Heather Armstrong or Steve Johnson!

Brands Providing Instant Support for Customers

Twitter isn’t just a marketing tool; it is also a functional one. If you have an active customer base on Twitter, you can use Twitter to provide instant customer support. This practice has become especially popular with banks; see examples like Wells Fargo and PNC.

Using Twitter

Before you start using Twitter, you are going to want to take a few minutes to make sure that your profile is optimized. One example of a great Twitter page is Kygo:

(Insert Screenshot 2)

We featured this screenshot in our After You Buy SoundCloud Followers Guide for the same reason that we are featuring it here. If you check out Kygo’s other social media profiles, you will notice he brands himself with complete consistency across all channels. He uses the same artwork, the same logo, the same design. When you do this, Twitter users who land on your page know they have found the right place.

Best Twitter Features for Businesses

You already know the basic nuts and bolts of Twitter. You know what a hashtag is and how to make a tweet. What are some more advanced Twitter features which can help your business to succeed online?

Twitter Ads

You do not need to rely entirely on organic growth to expand your exposure on Twitter. You can also purchase paid advertising. Twitter allows you to set a customized budget and target an audience based on geography, gender, interests, device, and other criteria.

When you set up advertising on Twitter, you can choose to promote your tweets or your account. Promoting your account makes sense if your top goal right now is to build up your follower base. If however you are looking to generate leads, aim for promoted tweets.

Tip: When setting up your keywords, choose negative keywords as well. This will reduce the number of off-target hits your ads receive. This in turn will optimize your budget and help you save money on your campaigns.

Photo Enhancement

Using images in your tweets is a great way to grab attention, but you need to take care with how you present them. Poor quality, badly edited pictures will not send the right message. Twitter has partnered with Aviary to offer photo enhancement through their official app. This makes it a breeze to improve the clarity, lighting, and color of your shots and to set the right tone for your brand.

(insert image: Twitter Photo Enhancement)

Pinned Tweets

Over ninety percent of retweets happen in the first hour after you make a post on Twitter. Sometimes, though, you have a tweet which is going to be relevant for a lot longer than that and you really need it to get seen.

The best way to ensure that tweet gets the exposure you need is to pin it to the top of your timeline. You can only do this with one tweet. It will stay at the top of your profile page until you pin another.

Just think how useful this feature will be for your next product launch, sales promotion, or other big event!

Twitter Trends

Trying to figure out what is in vogue right now? Before you can ride a wave to success, you need to be able to read the currents. You can do this using Twitter Trends. This feature helps you identify global and local trends. You can participate in trends too; just use the word or phrase you find in the trends list in your tweets, and your posts will show up in trend searches.

Additional Best Practices

Optimize Your Tweets and Hashtags

You will get more out of Twitter if you keep your tweets as short and legible as possible. Don’t use too many abbreviations or they will become unreadable. Remember, it isn’t SMS. Try to stick with the 140-character limit. You could theoretically post lots of short connected tweets and try to guide users through them, but this is hard for users to follow.

You should always use hashtags. This will maximize your visibility. But make sure that the hashtags you use are always relevant and targeted. Off-target hashtags are seen as spam, and they do not pull in the audience you need.

Interact and Engage

Follow other users in your industry and retweet and like their posts. Also do this for people who follow you. Reply to comments and actually engage your followers personally. Cross-promote between Twitter and other sites you use like YouTube and Pinterest.

Become Verified

If possible, try and get your Twitter account verified. This gives you the little blue cloud with the white checkmark on your page. Twitter is basically vouching for you, saying, “This is the real account for Business/Person XYZ.” Because Twitter verifies very few accounts, it also means Twitter is saying, “This business is important.”

You should now be set to make the most of Twitter! You will notice once you start tweeting that Twitter is relatively easy to use, but it can be a challenge to actually get seen and heard (with 320 million active users, this shouldn’t surprise you). Devumi’s got you covered. Purchasing Twitter followers , retweets and likes is a great way to start building social proof for your business and jumpstart your path to social media success.