How to use Twitter for business?
Twitter for business – does it spark your attention? It should! Twitter is a robust social media platform that has a lot to offer to business owner. If you have no clue how to start your Twitter adventure, you’re in luck! This post will show you how to use Twitter for business.
As a business owner, you have a lot on your plate – you have to take care of so many big things and little details that every additional task seems like an unnecessary burden. Using Twitter for your business might look like a futile duty at first, but this social media platform offers some robust solutions for medium and small businesses.
It’s because Twitter is a very versatile platform for business promotion. Its functionalities includes:
- increasing the recognition of your brand;
- creating a fast-paced customer service channel;
- monitoring the industry trends;
- promoting your website;
- finding new clients.
These benefits might seem quite vague right now, but hopefully, you’ll realize all the perks of having a Twitter for business at the end of this post!
Here’s a roadmap for today:
How To Create A Twitter Business Account
From a technical point of view, creating a Twitter business account is quite straightforward.
Follow these steps to set up your Twitter business account:
- Go to Twitter and sign up with your email or phone number.
- Choose your Twitter name. It should be the name of your company.
- Twitter will send you an email/text message to verify that you’re the owner of the email/phone number.
- Set up your password.
- Choose your profile photo. Use the same photo across different social media channels, preferably your logo, so your potential customers recognise your company no matter the social media platform.
- Choose the topics you’d like to follow on Twitter. Think about your business niche, terms specific to your company, etc.
- Voila! You’re ready to tweet!
Of course, to establish a robust Twitter presence for your business you need much more than that!
This article will help you get a basic grip on Twitter, which will translate in many benefits for your business!
Ready! Then let’s go!
Is Twitter Important For Business
Well, probably most of the social media marketers would immediately answer – yes, it is!
Sadly, it’s a little more complicated.
If you want to be successful on any social media platform, you need to broadcast to the audience that wants to listen to you. Otherwise, you’re just wasting your time.
According to many surveys about the Twitter audience, people using this social media platform are most likely the early-adopters. They like to discover new things way before others and are open-minded.
If your target audience fits this description, you can set up your Twitter business account.
How To Use Twitter For Business Marketing
Twitter for business is not that complicated. There are things you have to remember about, for example, the Twitter algorithm, but overall it’s quite straightforward.
You only have to put out a couple of tweets, now and then, and it all will be ok, won’t it?
Well, Twitter is simple, but, unfortunately, not that simple.
Take a look at a couple of tips and tricks I prepared to make your Twitter life a bit more manageable!
Set up goals
Setting up goals in social media marketing is a vital step. Unfortunately, many social media managers forget or ignore it.
Without setting goals for your Twitter business account, you won’t be able to measure the results of your social media activities.
You won’t be able to assess whether you’re making progress, nor adjust your Twitter marketing tactics to boost your social media goals.
What can be your business Twitter goal?
The platform is so adaptable you can choose from goals that fit your current business needs.
The most common Twitter business goals include:
- building brand awareness;
- setting up a customer service channel;
- building an influencer marketing campaign;
- increasing direct sales;
- establishing your business as an industry thought leader.
The good news is, you don’t have to implement all of them. Identify one or two business goals that your business needs the most and excel in them.
Setting up goals is not the end, though. You also need to identify the metrics that will determine the results of your Twitter presence.
Twitter analytics is one of the most important parts of your Twitter for business account setup. I prepare post that will help you familiarise yourself with the ins and outs of Twitter analytics:
6 Twitter Metrics to Follow to Boost your Online Presence
Moreover, to fully understand your Twitter presence, you need a Twitter analytics tool. There are plenty of Twitter analytics tools available on the market, so make sure you find one that suits your needs.
Define your brand tone
The tone of your brand sounds quite vague, doesn’t it? Well, it’s one of the most important aspects of your business Twitter marketing strategy.
Your brand tone depends largely on your audience demographics and the goal of your account. If you want to provide excellent customer service on Twitter, dismissing your clients’ problems with sarcastic comments won’t bring you any good.
Not everyone is bold enough to pull off Wendy’s trademarks tweets. Just like that one:
But you can take a different approach. Take a look at Innocent Drinks:
The key to establishing the tone of your brand is to be consistent. Set up general guidelines so whoever takes care of your Twitter will know how to respond.
Your brand tone is one of the factors that will differentiate your brand from your competitors. That’s why it’s important to set aside some time and know in advance how to talk to your customers.
Use social media monitoring
Social media monitoring tools gather all publicly available mentions from the Internet, including social media platforms, with your predefined keywords.
When it comes to business Twitter account goals, social media monitoring will help you with at least four:
- setting up a customer service channel;
- building an influencer marketing campaign;
- establishing your brand as an industry leader;
- building brand awareness.
All the fun with social media monitoring starts with setting up a project.
I wholeheartedly recommend Brand24, a robust social media monitoring tool for SME. You can start your free trial here (no strings attached, no credit card required!)
Enter the keywords you’d like to monitor in the project creation wizard. A keyword can be the name of your company, your branded hashtag (I’ll come back to the use of hashtags later on) or a term generally related to your business niche.
Twitter customer service and social media monitoring
Let’s start with using Twitter as a customer service channel for your business.
There are two ways your customers will interact with your brand. Most of them will find your channel and either send you a direct message or use a @handle in which case Twitter will notify you about.
But some of them will mention your brand on their profile without an @handle. If you want to provide an all-around customer service you need to respond to all the mentions, most importantly to those without a direct handle.
Just like here:
Twitter influencer campaign and social media monitoring
Brand24 will help you build your influencer marketing campaign.
If you want to run a successful Twitter influencer campaign for your business, you have to choose the right influencers. And by the right influencers, I don’t necessarily mean people with the highest followers count.
The right Twitter influencers for your business are people who can reach your target audience. In this case, Twitter engagement rates are much more important than followers number.
Take a look at the Analysis tab in Brand24. When you scroll down, you’ll find two tables with a ton of data analysed by the tool.
The first one is called “Influence of social media authors.” The table shows the most influential authors on Twitter, together with their share of voice (the number of online discussions generated by the author) and the influence they have on Twitter.
The second table will show you the most active social media authors. Brand24 also calculated their reach (the number of Twitter users who might have seen their content) and the total number of mentions with a keyword from every author.
Establishing your business as an industry leader and building brand awareness
I connected the last two points because they go together like peanut butter and jelly. Both of them require of you to track mentions relevant to your industry and to share your input on many different issues related to your business niche.
Look not for mentions containing the name of your company, but for some more general ones, preferably with wording such as: “who can recommend” or “where can I…”. Team the key phrases up with a specific term for your business, for example, restaurant.
Brand24 will collect results like this one:
All you have to do is engage with users actively looking for your business.
Prepare dedicated graphics for Twitter
A lot of your success on Twitter account for your business depends on how much engagement your tweets generate.
The Twitter algorithm is a complicated piece of code, but there are small details you could take care of to pump your business on Twitter.
One of them is to prepare graphics solely for Twitter. That way they will have the right size and quality and won’t be cropped in some strange way that will make the photo illegible.
Photos and videos uploaded natively to Twitter generate higher reach rates than content shared on Twitter from other platforms.
Moreover, a native video will play automatically on Twitter, while a link to YouTube link requires a click through.
And videos are the future of your business activities on Twitter. Videos are six times as likely to be retweeted than photos and three times more likely to be retweeted than GIFs.
Use your content multiple times
An average lifespan of a tweet is about 24 minutes. That’s a short time frame, even for the high paced world of social media.
There are good news and bad news when it comes to the limited lifespan of tweets.
The bad news is you have to constantly come up with new content (tweets, photos, and videos) to keep your audience engaged and entertained. That can be quite overwhelming, especially if you’re not a full-time social media manager.
The silver lining is that, because of the short lifespan, you can reuse your best performing content multiple times. The chances are many of your followers haven’t seen your tweets. And for those who had seen them, change one element of a tweet – a photo, apply some alterations to the text, or change the video.
Keep an eye on your competitors
To know whether you’re running your Twitter account successfully or not you need a benchmark – a Twitter account you can compare yourself to.
Take a look at your competitors!
Create a project in Brand24, but instead of using keywords related to your brand, use ones related to your main competitor. The Internet listening tool will gather and analyse all the relevant mentions. You will be able to see pieces of information about:
- estimated social media reach;
- type of engagement;
- reach of their hashtag campaign;
- most active social media authors;
- the total number of positive and negative mentions
You can compare two projects by going to the Comparison tab.
Brand24 will not only give you some hard numbers about your and your competitors Twitter presence, but it will also give you an opportunity to spot their weaknesses. That’s basically a niche you can develop to your benefit!
How To Use Twitter Hashtags For Business
Hashtags are one of the essential features of Twitter marketing for business, that’s why I decided to dive deeper into this topic and dedicate a separate paragraph solely to hashtags.
Hashtags on Twitter play a specific role. Hashtags will help you:
- find interesting conversations you can join;
- measure the effects of your Twitter marketing campaign;
- categorize your content and make it easy to find for other Twitter users.
To have a robust Twitter reach you need to find the right hashtags for your tweets.
Many social media experts claim that the optimal number of hashtags for every tweet is around three.
Which hashtags should you choose to boost your Twitter for business strategy?
Twitter branded hashtags
Let’s start with branded hashtag.
A branded hashtag is a unique hashtag that Twitter users will identify with your brand. It can be the name of your company, the name of your product or a slogan you use.
An example of the branded hashtag is #McCafe by McDonald’s or #justdoit by Nike.
A branded hashtag will help you raise brand awareness. Every time your tweet is shared, new people will see your Twitter hashtag and familiarise with it.
Your branded hashtag should be accompanied by a trending hashtag.
Twitter trending hashtags
A trending hashtag is a hashtag that is popular within a specific timeframe. Your social media monitoring tool will generate a list of 100 trending hashtags based on your keywords. You can find the list in the Analysis tab.
A list for our company, Brand24, looks like this:
You can adjust the time frame, so you can spot any seasonalities and use the right hashtags on Twitter depending on the time of the year.
Twitter campaign hashtags
And last type of hashtag is a campaign hashtag.
A campaign hashtag is a hashtag used to differentiate the tweets you published for every specific Twitter marketing campaign.
A campaign specific Twitter hashtag will make it easier to measure the results of your marketing activities.
Create a project where the keyword is your unique Twitter campaign hashtag.
Brand24 will gather all the mentions containing your hashtag and analyse the results. You’ll be able to analyse:
- total number of mentions
- estimated social media reach;
- total number of social media interactions;
- type of interaction (retweet, comment or share);
- the total mentions with positive and negative sentiment.
You’ll also be able to see how your hashtags spread across Twitter and other social media platforms.
Measuring the results of your Twitter business campaign is essential. If the results are bad (e.g. the total number of mentions or interactions is low or the sentiment is mostly negative) you can adjust your strategy in time and stop wasting your resources.
How do you adjust your business Twitter marketing campaign?
You could rewrite the copy to your tweets, change photos or videos, or just replace written tweets with more interactive ones.
Just remember to test one thing at a time. That way you’ll know whether you tweaked the right aspect of your Twitter marketing campaign for your
Disadvantages Of Twitter For Business
Clearly, there are plenty of benefits when it comes to Twitter for business.
But there is a cloud to every silver lining, and there are disadvantages of using Twitter for business.
If you know about them right at the beginning, you will be prepared to solve any problems that might occur.
Be prepared for negative comments
First of all, be prepared to receive some negative comments. They will come either from your customers who are now 100% happy with your product or service or from trolls who want to undermine your position.
Either way, you need to be prepared to respond in time to negative reviews. I explore the topic in further details in this blog post:
Positive Sides of Negative Reviews
Commit to building a robust Twitter presence
Secondly, once you commit, you have to stick to it. It means preparing interesting content on a regular basis.
Some tools will help you manage your Twitter business presence, but they won’t do the job for you. You need to have tweets prepared in advance and check the tweets around your brand regularly.
That involves not only posting, but also replying to comments and direct messages. It might not sound like a lot right now, but when the presence of your company on Twitter will grow, it will take much more time.
It takes time to build a loyal following
Building a strong Twitter account for your business won’t happen overnight. It will take time, and you won’t see the effects right away.
It might sound like nothing, but working hard on a project and not seeing any results is discouraging. You have to be aware of that and don’t feel defeated after the initial period.
That doesn’t mean your Twitter business strategy is set in stone. You can change it if you don’t see satisfying results and try new things.
Just don’t abandon Twitter all together.
Key Takeaways
Let’s sum up what we know so far:
- Twitter is a versatile social media tool that can benefit your business in multiple ways, for example, building brand awareness, providing excellent customer care or executing a Twitter marketing campaign.
- To build a successful Twitter account for your business you need to start with:
- setting up your goals;
- defining your brand tone;
- creating a social media listening project;
- preparing dedicated graphics;
- reusing your content;
- tracking the performance of your competitors.
- Hashtags are an indispensable part of a Twitter business presence. You need to choose the right hashtags and regularly monitor their performance.
- There are cons to your Twitter business presence and you need to be aware of them. That doesn’t mean you should give up on Twitter right away but be prepared for any obstacles on the way.
Would you like to add anything? Have you built your Twitter for a business account from scratch? I’d love to hear about your experiences! Reach out to us on Twitter!
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