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 for Business: 24 More Do’s and Don’ts

In previous posts, we have covered the basics of Twitter that make it different from other social media. And we offered reasons why businesses ought to strongly consider making Twitter part of their overall social media effort. Now we take a deeper dive into some tactics to help you leverage the platform for your small- or medium-sized business. Staying with last year’s “Twitter Do’s and Don’ts” format, we proclaim some best practices and puncture some not-so-good ones.

For selections from our previous Twitter coverage, go here for our previous Twitter Do’s and Don’ts Column, and here for our Twitter for Business primer.

 Actually spend time on the platform. There’s no substitute for spending time on Twitter. That might seem too obvious to mention, but we see Twitter postings by individuals who seem to have virtually no acquaintance with the network itself, or its ways. We also see accounts in which the feed is entirely content that is auto-shared from the business’s Facebook account, or its Instagram account, or some other social medium. It’s plain to see that no human being had anything to do, directly, with that company’s Twitter account, to the point that you might wonder why the company even bothers. It doesn’t take much acquaintance with Twitter to realize that the medium is a community, and that a conversation is going on. As we say in one of our other blog posts (the second of the two links shared above), Twitter is essentially a chat room.

Expect organic growth (of followers). One piece of advice I received has proven to be invaluable. It is, “organic growth is almost always a lie.” The illusion is that you create an account on Twitter and you begin putting out appealing messages and people are attracted to you and the following just keeps building. But the reality is that you must get in there and “growth hack.” The illusion does occasionally become the reality for celebrities and entities with established reputations. For the rest of us, it is work to get a following. But it is worth it. Use a “follow first” tactic. Follow accounts who would make good followers for you. Give them time to follow you back, but if, say, months go by and they haven’t followed you, then unfollow them. Rinse and repeat.

Have a website. Most business people reading this blog right now already have a company website. But just in case you don’t, it’s worth saying it here: you really ought to have a website if you are going to invest time on Twitter. You’re trying to build your brand, right? As you build up all this good will and branding and buzz on Twitter, where does your prospective customer go to cement a relationship, or to initiate the purchasing process? It can’t all be done on Twitter. Your website should be the hub of all your marketing efforts. Social media like Twitter should be a marketing outreach effort that funnels people to your site. Customers need more than just a place (Twitter) where they can be messaged and cultivated. They need a domain where they can do business with you. So get your website up and get your Twitter account linked to your site, and vice versa, to maximize your efforts.

Create automated direct messages. Yes, we know that most of the advice you see out there recommends that you auto-DM all your new followers. But forget that. Those who are reading this who are very active on Twitter already know what I’m about to say: that an automated DM—dispatched to you from an account you followed yesterday—is the equivalent of social media junk mail. Yes, we know you want us to visit your website. We all know you have a great download you want to offer us. Thanks.

Reciprocity graphic
Follow back. Each time you gain a new follower, follow back! If you don’t, you’ll likely lose that follower, eventually. Unless, say, you’re a celebrity. But if you’re not, follow back, and retain your following.

Follow the Giants. If it’s a huge Twitter account and it’s a firehose tweeter and it doesn’t really follow others (rarely follows others), don’t follow them, list them (put them on a Twitter list that you can look at only as needed). This keeps your feeds cleaner.

Retweet your own posts. This is different from repetitive scheduling. Repetitive scheduling is most efficiently done in a site such as Buffer or Hootsuite. A self-retweet (a retweet of one of your own posts, not of someone else’s) gets additional mileage out of a post. Simply scroll down through your past feed, looking for good past efforts with messages that are still valid, and hit the “retweet” icon.

Expect engagement while you’re still on the lower end of the scale, when it comes to followers. You’ll need to have a thousand followers before you get significant “follower” engagement. But remember that engagement isn’t everything. Even when you’re seeing no engagement at all (on your content), you can still be doing good for yourself.

Think of Twitter as a backlink wonderland.  Search engines like Google monitor positive social signals even if the general consensus is that social media links are considered “nofollow.” Even if the possibility that the social links don’t count toward your ranking, the number of likes, retweets and shares will impact rankings. Search algorithms routinely crawl social media analyzing these signals. Don’t forget that the job of search engines is to deliver helpful content.

Neglect to be reciprocal. Don’t try to be a one-way street with your communications. You’re wanting shares, right? You’d like for your followers to engage with your content, and to retweet it, and spread the good news about your business, right? So ask yourself, are you not willing to retweet anything of theirs in your own feed? And if so, then how realistic is that? Sure, the giants of Twitter get away with it. The mega-corporations get away with it. But for those who lack that kind of cachet, there’s no substitute for joining the community and being reciprocal. Twitter is a community. You’ll be appreciated for your reciprocity.

Spend some money on Twitter. It gets you noticed. A little lettuce makes the world go ’round. Just ask Facebook.

Talk to one person and tie up the masses. It’s okay on occasion to issue an @reply to one follower—a reply that posts in your feed. Sometimes it can be a way of showing your own personality. But if much of that sort of thing needs to be done, do it via direct messaging.

Resist the urge to automate. Too much automation is just absentee-ism. Go back to point 1. Spend time on Twitter.

Growth hacking graphicOverlook Twitter’s “advanced search” function when you’re practicing your “follow first” growth hacking. Access it from your home page by typing a word into the search bar. When you hit “return” (or “enter”), you’ll get a fresh screen and on the upper left side you’ll see the words “Search filters,” with the option to “show” those. Click “show.” You’ll get a menu for more search parameters, but skip those and click the words “Advanced search.” Try that, and filter it, as you bring up fresh results, to reveal profiles, not tweets. You can really narrow down the kinds of follower prospects you view, and this will help you attract just exactly the kinds of followers you want.

Create graphics. Find more on that angle by visiting this post.

Have dupe tweets, or highly similar tweets, displayed in your feed consecutively.

Conduct Twitter polls to stimulate some interaction and conversation. And to generate some data that you can analyze and convert into useful content.

Spend a lot—not at first. Don’t spend on promoted tweets and don’t pour time (and money) into analytics and tools until you’ve put the apparatus in place to capitalize on those expenditures and get your money back out of them. Do some serious content creation first, paired with some serious growth hacking. And create a bevy of backlinks. Once you get some traction in the Twittersphere, then it might be time to start spending. We see too many people spending on Twitter when they have fewer than 100 followers and very little content in their feed. Whoever is advising them is doing them a disservice. The same indictment goes, in a different sphere, for digital agencies that sell a $500-a-month (or more) SEO package to clients who have only five pages on their website, and no blog. How on Earth can someone justify that degree of monthly expense when there’s so little content to benefit from it? While we’re at it—the same goes for agencies that charge for “blogging” and then put a mere paragraph on a page for a client and call that a blog post. Do customers really know what is going on? (Rant over! But remember, all of this internet biz is interconnected.) Make sure you know what you are getting for your money, and with Twitter, that means having an audience of followers to receive your tweets.

Create a Recommendables list. (That is, create a list and name it “Recommendables.” Then add such accounts to it as seem most fitting.) Later, when you’re ready, tweet about the accounts you want to recommend. You’ll make yourself a hero to the accounts you recommend, and in the recommendation process you’ll be providing a service to all of your following. If you maintain this list as a private list, then your recommendations, when you share them, will be fresh news to your viewers.

Retweetables graphic Create a Retweetables list and make it private. Recommendables are accounts I list that I want to later recommend to others. But retweetables are accounts that are consistently worth hearing from, and, accordingly, worth retweeting. With some regularity. Not every account out there is highly retweetable. Do you have some prospects out there—companies that you’d love to do business with? Are they on Twitter? Follow them and list them, too, in your Retweetables list. Any list, when opened, displays a feed. Pop open that feed every week and just see what’s being said in it. Hit the retweet buttons on the tweets that seem best for your purposes. Now you’ve put yourself into the Notifications tab for those accounts that you retweeted. They’ve been “flagged,” essentially, and when they open their notifications they’ll see you’ve done something good for them. Over time this can only help your marketing efforts.

SEO graphicNeglect the fact that being on Twitter helps your website’s SEO, provided that you are creating backlinks from Twitter to your website. According to Socialmediatoday.com, “Google looks for backlinks and page content, and individual social posts and profiles are considered the same as any other webpage that Google can index. That means that if you have a lot of people visiting your social profiles and content, they can individually rank in search. In fact, for a lot of entities, you’ll find a Twitter profile, in particular, will show up high in search results (this has been helped by the fact that Twitter and Google have an agreement to index tweets).” The site went on to note that “That Google/Twitter deal can also help your tweets rank, individually, and a study of more than 900,000 tweets published earlier this year showed that tweets with more Likes do have a better chance of ranking higher in Google results.” Read the whole report here.

Retweet others for the purpose of dividing up and spacing out your original tweets in your own feed, especially if you are worried about not having enough variety in your messaging. This helps, too, if you have concerns about some repeated tweets falling too close together in your own feed. Most people aren’t looking at your feed and critiquing it. It’s natural to think that they are. Generally, users are just looking at their own feeds. Just the same, you won’t want your tweetstream to have an unappealing and unvaried look.

Put all your links at the end of all your tweets. Statistics show that you’ll get maximum engagement when you put links one-fourth of the way into the tweet.

Follow @TwitterBusiness. Better yet, list them instead of merely following them. And the same with @JemullyMedia to get tips not just about Twitter, but about the main social media platforms and digital marketing in general.

What Twitter best practices do you swear by? We’d love to know!

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!

 

What Is Twitter (And How Can It Help Your Business)?

What makes Twitter different than other social media platforms?

What Is Twitter?

Maybe you’ve heard it before. There are some people who will say, “What is Twitter?” “I don’t ‘get’ Twitter,” and “how can Twitter help my business?” The implication is that they ‘get’ other social media, but not Twitter. This makes as good a place to start as any, if we are to examine Twitter as a social medium where businesses could and should have a presence. Twitter.com is a social media platform like no other, and grasping its differences is the first step to understanding how a business can get the most from it.

Facebook vs. Twitter

So, why do some not understand Twitter?

Probably the biggest reason is that they bring the wrong expectations to it. Other social media platforms have more straightforwardly obvious reasons for existence. Facebook, on the web, is ubiquitous. And as such it is generally the standard-setter, where social media is concerned. It is quite different from Twitter. Facebook is about personal connections and keeping up with one’s friends, family, and such. Where business pages on Facebook are concerned, the functionality is rather similar to a website, and everyone on the web knows what a website does. A Facebook business page holds the business’s vital information, and even has pages, as a website does, for drilling down into greater detail. Further, many companies even have a Facebook store. Web commerce is done there, just as it can be done on a website.

Pinterest and Instagram vs. Twitter

Other social media are likewise rather obvious in their function. Pinterest is a sort of scrapbooking site. Pinterest does much more, of course, but we can all see the usefulness of Pinterest at a glance. Instagram is about sharing cell phone photos — that, too, is plain, and also useful.

What Is Twitter? Twitter is essentially a real time chat room.

Twitter, on the other hand, is not equipped to provide these services — not as straightforwardly, anyway. Twitter is essentially a chat room. And like a chat room, Twitter is more “real time” and immediate than other social media. Twitter is more about breaking news than Facebook is. More than Pinterest, Instagram, Snapchat, LinkedIn, and Google Plus are, as well.

Twitter is also about conversations. Rapid-fire communications. It is very news- and trend-driven. Twitter is a platform that people turn to when news is breaking and they want to see what the reactions to it are, in real time.

Twitter’s Noisy Rep

It’s often said that Twitter is “noisy,” and by “noisy” someone means that it can be a firehose of content. Nothing is thinned out or excluded. Every tweet goes into a feed, and every follower of that tweep (individuals with accounts on Twitter are called “tweeps”) receives that message. That has pluses and minuses. The good part, obviously, is that Twitter does not have the constriction of reach that we must contend with on Facebook and other channels. The bad part is, of course, the chaos and noise, and that fact that messages can be missed by followers in the torrent of content.

What Is Twitter? Twitter does not restrict content like Facebook does.

There are ways to reduce that chaos and noise. We have more to say more about that in the future, but for now, we are still analyzing Twitter’s differences.

Facebook vs. Twitter (once more)

We found this question posed on Quora: “If a business could choose only one, which network should they choose (Facebook or Twitter)?” A representative of Zoho.com offered this answer:

“It depends on these considerations: (1) On which network does most of your target audience hang out? (2.) What is the primary objective for your social media presence? If you want to create and share content and get more reach for it, then Twitter is definitely the better network since its format lets content get shared/spread more easily. (Emphasis ours.) If you want to showcase your products online and enable people to place orders from your page when they see them, then Facebook is the network to choose because the format makes it easy for your audience to view your products for a longer period of time. (3) How much time can you invest? While both networks will require you to put in time and effort, Twitter is more real-time in nature than Facebook. So if you’re going to actively engage your audience on either network, trying to do it on Twitter could take more time (although it may be worth the extra time, in most cases).”

Perfect for Mobile

Twitter is well suited for mobile users. Its 140-character limit for messaging makes it easy to operate in one’s palm, on the fly.

What Is Twitter? Twitter, and its 140-character limit. is well-suited for mobile.

Twitter is efficient. Because it is so “noisy,” it is also very forgiving — and that forgiveness makes it the perfect platform for repeating and re-using one’s content. Twitter followings are very tolerant of message-repeating. That’s largely because Twitter’s firehose feed means that most tweets don’t get seen by most followers on the first pass, anyway. So transmitting a tweet hours later, or days later, is commonplace on the medium and the Twitterverse is generally fine with it. That means you can get extra mileage out of your content creation. If you’re using Twitter for link-building, that means you’ll get more links built with less time and money.

Growth Hacking and Twitter

Twitter is also a productive place for growth hacking, and given that many companies like to use Twitter to build followings and to move those followings over to Facebook or LinkedIn or other more “aggressive” sites, growth hacking on Twitter can be a very worthwhile proposition.

What Is Twitter? Twitter make building personal connections easy and breezy.

As author and digital marketing authority Gary Vaynerchuk said in his book, Jab, Jab, Jab, Right Hook, “Twitter is a marketer’s dream come true because it allows you to initiate a relationship with your customer.” That’s a good way of thinking about Twitter. It’s an easier, breezier environment for making personal connections, because of that “chat room” feeling. And savvy marketers will then want to cultivate connections by coaxing them over to other social media or to the company’s website.

Twitter Versatility

Moreover, Twitter is a social platform uniquely positioned for customer service, direct influencer-outreach, content distribution, and social listening. For insights on all four, see this source.

What Is Twitter? Twitter can help with customer service, reaching influencers, content distribution, and social listening.

Now that we’ve covered the main aspects of the “Twitter Difference,” we can hit some high points of how to make the most of your business’s Twitter presence. For that, stay tuned for our next deep-dive into Twitter. And be sure to follow us on Twitter for timely tips and links to more in-depth content, not just on Twitter practices but on web marketing and social media—in fact, on all digital marketing efforts in general. Happy tweeting!

For more on Twitter for business, see our article on Twitter Do’s and Don’ts.