Twitter marketing tools: 4 tips to develop a Twitter marketing strategy

Twitter is one of the most widely used social media sites, with an estimated 320 million active users per month. With such a wide potential audience, it makes sense that it has also become a highly sought-after marketing channel for brands and companies.

However, Twitter marketing is more complex than posting a few tweets and waiting for retweets.

Before your brand can take off on Twitter, many factors need to be taken into account, including how effectively you use hashtags, when to tweet, how to build relationships with influencers, and what makes your business stand out from all the others sharing similar content on Twitter? 

Twitter allows for a message that respects the customer’s time, delivers immediate product or service availability, and aids in building brand identification through succinct but simple content.

This is the kind of priceless contact and unrestrained feedback that the business mind greatly values and respects (at least by those who know how to listen to the voice of the client). 

You would be in the ideal position to track 

1. Who would your consumers be if you had immediate access to their ideas and attitudes?
2. The rationale behind these customers’ decision to utilize or consume your good or service.
3. What features of your product or service do your customers appreciate and what do they dislike?
4. How changes to your offerings are received by your customers (or those of your competitors).
5. The potential influence of your customers in persuading—or deterring—others from purchasing your products

Long-standing business principles state that effective marketing entails creating a product or message, creating a need in the mind of the recipient, and then directing a response by inspiring the recipient to act, such as visiting a location, buying a product, or recommending a company to a friend. Let us see how we can devise Twitter marketing strategies.

1. Listen In & Optimize the timing of your tweets

People tweet about the things they do, encounter, read & think. The site has been described as a sentient machine. It is a goldmine of ideas, feelings, and conversations. Twitter’s search feature allows us to see in real-time what people are discussing, topics, or keywords related to your brand.

Twitter Search also features trending topics, to help us eavesdrop on recent trends. 

The four most important things to search for are

1. Your Name.
2. Your Twitter account name
3. Your company, brand, or product
4. Your competitors.

In Twitter, timing is very important. Tweets are often visible shortly after posting them.  If you want to increase engagement on your Tweets, you need to know the ideal posting time.

What makes you so sure of the time? Well, you may start by analyzing the situation rationally.  What is the most likely time your followers check their Twitter feeds?  Timing is crucial to optimizing your marketing reach. Twitter owns the Twitter management tool Tweetdeck (https://tweetdeck.twitter.com/). You may schedule Tweets from here, as well as keep an eye on your Twitter stream.

2. Converse towards greatness and know your TMO (Twitter Marketing Objectives)

A small number of great followers are more valuable than a herd of uninterested people. That being said, Quality Followers, i.e., people who care enough to follow on their own – are worth more than a great number of random followers. Quality Followers can be gained by

1. Being Interesting
2. Being Conversational
3. Following relevant People. 

It is essential to tweet or post updates at least a few times a week or perhaps a few times a day. This helps in building relationships with external customers to maintain a positive reputation on Twitterverse and create more prospects.

Tip: If you run a local business and if you are on the lookout for clients, using Twitter’s advanced search to find the people nearby asking questions you might be able to answer, would be useful.

You need to decide what you want your Twitter marketing campaign to achieve. Here are a few examples of various goals you could need to achieve with your Twitter marketing efforts:

• Boost traffic to your website
• Maximize client gain
• Boost business sales
• Interaction with clients and future customers
• Gaining more Twitter followers
• Improve and expand the brand

Timing and specificity are essential for Twitter Marketing. If you want to gain more followers, it should be obvious that you want to do so at a set rate per month. As a result, by establishing specific metrics for objectives in your Twitter Marketing Objectives, you may monitor your progress or setbacks and revise your Twitter Marketing Strategy as necessary.

3. Share Information & Ideas – A Picture speaks

Twitter is a fantastic platform for exchanging knowledge and concepts. Generally speaking, communication can be difficult when there are only a few messaging options.

To provide interesting information, attain clarity, and make the most of Twitter’s space limitations, we need to examine some of the cleverest strategies that individuals have discovered.

In addition to helping other people find cool stuff and the latest happenings, there is a self-interested good reason to link liberally- When messages are well-described and contain cool links, they are more likely to be retweeted.  As a result, your professional reputation can also be enhanced.

Another way is to link appealingly to your blog or site. The key to generating click-throughs is writing an appealing little introduction to the post or page you are linking to. Think of it as a headline tailored for your Twitter audience and bear in mind that simply posting a feed is not going to be helpful. Rather than posting a link, contextualize it for your followers. 

Also include videos and photos in your Twitter marketing plan A study found that tweets with photos or videos receive six times as much engagement as tweets with plain text.

4. Post mostly NOT about your business & harness the power of Integration

 If you have a popular brand that many people already appreciate, you can get away with posting largely about your own business because they already adore you and want to learn more about you. Consider Twitter as a platform for exchanging mutually fascinating information if you’re an unknown figure to most people, have a spotty reputation, or simply wish to advance your Twitter relationships. Therefore, try to share mostly external links, resources, and advice that would be of interest to those who follow you rather than a lot of information about your business.

You might be able to integrate Twitter directly into your website if you have a web-based product or service because Twitter provides an API (an API is a data service, for those of you who aren’t geeks). Businesses with integrations claim that people who use Twitter’s features are frequently their most ardent supporters.

Of course, the Twitter API may also be used to construct standalone services; an example of this is StockTwits (http://stocktwits.com), which converts twittered ticker symbols into visual representation links that lead to living listings of all the comments made about that business.

You should utilize the Twitter REST API if you have determined that you must communicate with Twitter as if you were a user. This is a well-liked choice that several third-party apps, including Twitterrific and Twhirl, employ. You may essentially perform the following activities with this API:

• Access the timeline for everyone
• Access the timeline of your pals
• Refresh your status
• Create new direct messages to send
• Observe other users
• Disable other users

And the Twitter API makes practically every other activity you can perform via the Twitter website available.

You can also send Twitter search requests using a different API. Because the search engine that Twitter uses was initially developed by the aforementioned third party, Summize, these APIs are distinct. Twitter is combining these two APIs to make them more similar to one another soon as REST-ful APIs. The Search API can be used to find tweets that reference a certain person, contain a specific term, are from a specific user, contain a specific hashtag, or are from a specific user (think topic). By specifying a radius around a specific longitude and latitude, you can even define that your results come from a particular geographic area.

Twitter is just one—although by far the most successful—of the microblogging services available on the Web, and it’s a part of the social media phenomenon that has revolutionized the Internet and the world of publishing.

Recognizing the potential of Twitter and other social media platforms requires an understanding of how anyone with a computer and Internet access can now communicate with millions of people worldwide. You own the power to broadcast, as well as the power to profit from those broadcasts.