Seven Steps to Improving Your Business’s Twitter Results

Actor Donald Glover says it well, “If you’re on Twitter, what you’re saying is, ‘I’m important enough for you to care what I think.’ ”

True for a celebrity, perhaps, but just as true for an individual and for a business. Twitter’s slogan is, “It’s what’s happening.” There’s a subtle statement made by the fact of being on Twitter. It’s the suggestion that you’re in the moment, that you matter, that you have something to say that’s worth watching for.

With those thoughts in mind, we funnel this down to just business considerations of Twitter. With no further ado, here are seven steps to make your business’s Twitter account shine:

tweet pic
This is a tweet from our agency’s own Tweet feed. Twitter gives a business an opportunity to take the outside public inside its operations. You can share your values, your personality, your competitive advantages. These help break down possible resistance to your business’s appeal.

1. Set Goals

If you’re at, say, 200 followers on Twitter, set yourself a goal of getting to 1,000 followers. Give yourself a year or two. And remember that you don’t have to have huge followings to get some good out of your Twitter presence. Hashtags, for one thing, will flag and funnel prospects your way, and you can also run advertising on Twitter that will expose prospects to your offerings.

2. Employ Imagery

Don’t run text-only tweets exclusively. Add a photo below your tweet or, for a more professional look, create a graphic that has text embedded in it. This makes for a more shareable post. But even when you create an attractive, professional-looking graphic, think about placing a line of text with it. (That is, text that is not a part of the graphic itself.) Why do this? Because you’ll want your post to show up in people’s searches of Twitter, and unless there is freestanding text in your post, there will be no words to match up against those searchers’ search terms. Words that are embedded in (placed upon) an illustration or photo are not searchable by Twitter. If you want to share a link, then you’ll want the link to be click-able, and that only happens if the link is above the graphic, not displayed within the graphic as text. Also, you’ll want to include hashtags in some of your posts, and hashtags must be in the freestanding text that is not displayed in your graphic. See this example, below.

Sample tweet from @jemullymedia
This tweet from our @JemullyMedia feed includes hashtags, a backlink, and a graphic.

 

 

 

 

 

 

In this example, the keywords Wix, Weebly, and Squarespace, as well as the hashtagged terms #free, #website, and #cost are all included in the hope of attracting searchers on Twitter who are interested in these topics.

3. Be Engaging

Some businesses, in their Twitter embodiments, maintain a highly corporate look that is all graphics (and these generally with very refined, highly standardized design elements), with (usually) no text-only tweets. That’s fine for a major corporation, but then large corporations tend to be somewhat starched and they don’t generally present themselves as chatty, candid, or casual. If you examine the tweets by large corporations, you’ll see that they have relatively low levels of engagement. I’ve charted a statistic on some of them—retweets per 1,000 followers—and their numbers can be amazingly low. But major corporations are (mostly) not there to accomplish the same ends as small businesses, so if you’re a small business, don’t be afraid to inject text-only tweets, and @reply tweets, and shout-outs, and especially retweets of other accounts’ messages. These are all things that major corporations rarely do, if ever. But major corporations do not necessarily look upon Twitter as a customer-growth or demand-growth proposition. For them, it’s more about staying visible and looking branded across all channels. You, however, as a small or medium-sized business, want to attract potential customers. So get out there and mix it up!

4. Schedule Your Tweets

There’s an additional reason for scheduling your tweets, beyond just the idea of getting many of them done in advance. There’s the pure efficiency that comes with scheduling tweets, especially when you planning to tweet the same material multiple times. In Hootsuite, for instance, one can click the “save” button to preserve a freshly constructed tweet in “draft” mode. So once you have scheduled the tweet, you simply re-open the draft and schedule it for yet another date (and so on, repeatedly, as often as needed). If a Twitter account is going to display a particular tweet eight different times, for instance, then this draft function is a huge time saver. We sometimes like to make minor tweaks on the fly each time we schedule it—changing, say, the hashtags or the textual message or the graphic (don’t forget to use graphics with your tweets when you can).

A graphic illustrating a marketing tip, shared in a Twitter feed.
For our own company Twitter account, we’ve created Tips that we trickle into our feed. We have built some 150 such tips so far. This one links readers to a blogpost, but many such tips don’t. They are a reader service for our followers.

5. Up Your Posting Game

Of all the most popular social media platforms, Twitter is most forgiving on the issue of repeating posts. Today, you’ll find many Twitter authorities urging marketers to be quite liberal in re-posting content. Twitter is a “noisy” platform and the half-life of a tweet is a mere 8 minutes, by at least one estimate. I’ve also heard sources say it’s 14 minutes—either way, it’s probably safe to say it’s less than 20 minutes. That’s not to say that someone should repeat a post in 20 minutes. By no means. But if you want a tweet to be seen by most of your followers, then multiple transmissions of it are necessary.

How many? Again, the estimates vary, but the figures do seem to cluster around 10 (times per tweet). We advise that you spread those out. If the message is evergreen enough, then the freshness-factor is not so critical, and in such a case, one ought to spread the repetitions out at least several days apart. We’re not averse to running repeated messages on consecutive days, but if you are only going to repeat a message, say, ten times altogether, then putting weeks between transmissions is even better. We also have some tweets that run once a month for, say, a year. If the content has value and isn’t time-sensitive, make the most of it.

Sources such as Hubspot recommend that online marketers apply a 40/60 rule to content creation. Forty percent of one’s time is to be spent creating the content, and 60 percent of one’s time is to be spent sharing the content, repurposing it, or promoting it.

sample tweet
Install your Twitter app on your phone and use it to snap pix on the fly to post immediately as live tweets. This one was shared during one of our team meetings. Twitter is all about immediacy.

6. Think “80/20”

Note: The “80/20” rule is not to be confused with the “40/60” rule from the previous tip.

Remember, with social media, you are replacing and bypassing traditional media. Eighty percent of your messaging should be informative or entertaining—not sales-y. In the old world of traditional media, the media outlet itself assembled and held the audience, and marketers simply pushed sales messages, nothing more. But in social media, the account itself has to do both jobs—gathering and retaining an audience, and selling. And so, 80% of your effort ought to be dedicated to obtaining and holding a following, without pushing a sales message. We often encounter clients who, in their early days with us, voice their insistence to be constantly selling. Some of them want to see a sales pitch in every post. They’re not always comfortable with spending time or money on efforts that are not directly tied to a sales pitch. But the practice of selling constantly is at odds with building a brand that retains a following. Who wants to be sold 100 percent of the time? Social media is reciprocal, not unilateral. It helps, then, to remind others that social media is media. To support ads, media must offer something of value to the audience. It has to function as media, as well as marketing. In some capacity, it needs to do the same work that traditional media did.

7. Consider Hiring A Social Media Manager

For brands that reach a certain size, or that desire a certain level of activity, it may become essential to hire a digital agency or solo professional to manage social media messaging and engagement. It might be the most cost-effective thing you can do. Some business owners cannot spend the necessary amount of time to nourish their social presence when they also have a company to run. We know from experience that we can grow clients’ accounts and make good things happen for them. Any business looking to get its feet wet on Twitter can do well for itself by following the first six steps guide, but at a certain point, when you’ve started to see that growth, bringing in a little outside help can be just the thing you need to scale up your social media efforts accordingly.

Twitter Tips and Tricks for Businesses

Here at jemully.com, we get a lot of mileage out of Twitter, both on our own Twitter account and on our clients’ accounts as well. That activity spawns a lot of ideas for blogposts like this one. You’ll find below some miscellaneous tips and tricks for getting more out of your company’s Twitter account.

Before we venture into some tactics, let me dispel a myth. It’s not necessary to have a huge following on Twitter to enjoy some success there. Any Twitter newcomer is bombarded with reminders that some Twitter accounts reach gigantic followings. The very big accounts are very visible on Twitter. In 2017, Katy Perry set a Twitter milestone by becoming the first person to reach 100 million followers on the site.

But the biggest Twitter accounts operate in a sphere that the rest of us can safely ignore. We need to follow certain practices that those mega-accounts never need follow.

One of those practices is called “growth hacking.” It’s the activity of building one’s following. Companies that are not household names are likely to find that their follower count does not increase very quickly unless one “primes the pump,” so to speak. At least in the early going. And you might find that it is a useful tactic that you might never want to relinquish entirely.

Hack Your Way

The better known an individual or organization is, the less it needs to growth hack on Twitter. I’ve noticed that many Twitter experts, those dispensing advice, have been mum on the subject of growth hacking, the practice of building one’s following. They do not often suggest a follow-first practice (the most common form of growth hacking). Maybe they feel it’s beneath them to reach out to potential connections. But it works. And it even gets employed by some Twitter accounts that are prominent-but-not-celebrity-status.

During the week I was writing this blogpost, I was followed on Twitter by Kim Garst (@kimgarst, one of the top experts on Twitter practices). It wasn’t the first time, either. I’ve not followed Kim Garst back, but that’s because she has posted more than 300,000 times, and I don’t follow back people who pour that much into my feed. But my point is this: if someone as prominent as Kim Garst (who has more than 600,000 followers), practices a follow-first strategy, then people like me probably ought to do so too. And I do.

Link, Link, Link

And while we’re on the subject of Kim Garst, I’ll note that when I looked at her feed just now, the majority of posts are messages that take a follower to her website, via a backlink. That is largely the strategy on Twitter.com. It’s to get people from the site to a website. Or to a Facebook page. In other words, to some platform where business (or your conversion of choice) can be transacted more easily, or where email addresses can be captured, or where (at least) online traffic and online domain authority can be built. So links are vitally important in Twitter content.

Savvy marketers look at Twitter as a place for making connections with people. That’s because people are much more approachable in this chatty platform. And connections here are easily made. In his book Jab, Jab, Jab, Right Hook, Gary Vaynerchuk says, “Twitter is a marketer’s dream come true because it allows you to initiate a relationship with your customer.” Then, for many marketers, it becomes a process of expanding the relationship with the contact, getting him or her connected on other levels as well.

But as we said already, huge followings are not strictly necessary on Twitter. They are nice to have, but we can still do well for ourselves with small follower counts. One reason why that is true is because of Twitter’s search function. If we are using the keywords that people want to track, they will find us via search. That can mean a search of just any terms or a search of hashtagged terms. On the @JemullyMedia account, a great deal (maybe half) of the engagement we get is with Twitter accounts who are not (yet) followers of ours. They find our content and like it or retweet it—or simply follow us after having encountered it.

Make the “Notifications” Tab Your Secret Weapon

When we say this, it’s important for you to understand that we’re not talking about your own Notifications tab on your own Twitter account. We’re talking about the Notifications tabs on your contacts’ accounts. It’s those tabs that you want to make your secret weapon. Get on your prospective clients’ radar by listing them (putting them on a Twitter list) and retweeting them occasionally, or at least occasionally liking one of their posts. Any time you engage with them, you’ll show up in their notifications tab—and seeing you there, they’ll think of you favorably.

If you don’t like filling up your tweetstream with retweets of others’ posts, then just hit “like.” But remember that retweets are really where it’s at for any serious Twitter user. A retweet is social sharing. That’s where the most good is being done—for you, when you are retweeted; and for your connections, when you retweet them. Social sharing leverages social media in a far more powerful way than mere “liking” or “favoriting” does.

Tool Time

Lastly, know your tools, and employ them when appropriate. Here are four to get you started.

Use IFTTT. This acronym (it stands for “If This, Then That”) is the name of a tool that allows you to connect your favorite apps together so you can get the most out of them. For instance, you can connect your Facebook and Twitter accounts, so when you like something on Facebook, you automatically share it as a Twitter tweet. You can also connect Google Drive and Twitter, so you can automatically save all your new followers in a spreadsheet. IFTTT describes itself as a “free way to get all your apps and devices talking to each other. Not everything on the internet plays nice, so we’re on a mission to build a more connected world.” Find it at ifttt.com.

Sync your LinkedIn and Twitter accounts. When you sync your Twitter and LinkedIn accounts, not only are you able to track your connections from LinkedIn and follow them on Twitter, but also you can share content across both social networks at the same time. Your status updates in LinkedIn can display as tweets on Twitter. And your tweets (all of them, if you desire) can post automatically on LinkedIn, or you can click the option to be selective, in which case only those tweets that contain the #in hashtag will display on LinkedIn. For more information, go here.

Hashtagify.com is a site that helps you find what hashtags are relevant in your field of interest. Employing the right hashtags can be a big step toward putting you in the right conversations. Twitter’s slogan is “It’s What’s Happening,” and that descriptor is particularly apt. Twitter is very much about real-time occurrences and conversations. Tapping into those exchanges is a great way to leverage the platform.

Create lead generation cards. Twitter’s Lead Generation Cards allow you to attach a form into your tweets and integrate it with your email marketing provider, which means people can sign up to your email list without even having to leave Twitter. This is an effective technique to start generating more leads.

There. These suggestions could keep you busy for a while. And if you need more, come to our blog at jemully.com/blog and search the term “Twitter.” You’ll find plenty more there to get your synapses firing! Happy tweeting!