Get More Brand Awareness and Sales through Twitter

The marketing industry today is buzzing with social media marketing tools and techniques. Of the almost countless options available, many marketers are leveraging the benefits of Twitter as a marketing platform. With 240 million users a month and 500 million tweets flashing every day, Twitter stands out as a platform that can increase brand awareness and drive your sales.

Simple yet Important Aspects for a Great First Impression

User Name: To start with, create a catchy username (also called a handle), with a length up to 15 characters or less, that enables audiences to identify your brand easily. Use this handle to the extent possible on your business card, website, Facebook profile, presentation slides, and even on ads.

Profile Bio: Your profile bio will tell your audience who you are, what your products and services are, and where your location is. Add a unique link to it that will lead your audience to your marketing page or blog. Since Twitter allows only 160 characters here, you can create a short link with bitly.com from your website URL, to fit your Twitter window.

Profile Picture and Header Image: Use a profile picture that showcases your business as it will appear as your icon in every tweet. As for product images, event promotions, graphic texts or product news, post them on your header image, like in the case of billboards.

Timeline Pin and Twitter Website Card: Pin the most important information on your timeline by clicking on the more option on the tweet; then click on ‘pin to your profile page option’, so that nobody overlooks it. Also, the Twitter Website Card can be used to highlight product images and promotions in your users’ timelines.

Expand Your Audience

The more the followers, the more credible your brand would seem to be. Decide who your target audience is and search them based on location, gender, interests, and other criteria relevant to your business. In the Twitter advanced search, typing appropriate keywords or words that denote the problem your product or service is likely to solve, can lead you to useful tweets from audiences. Use variations of the words and rephrase them from your customer’s point of view. Apps like Agorapulse, TweetDeck, or Google alerts will inform you when relevant tweets show up.

Paid Advertising: Paid social advertising on Twitter can get you the much-desired limelight. You can decide on a budget with Twitter where you only pay when users take action that meets your goal. Once you cross your budget limit, the ads stop automatically.

Promoted Tweets: Since people love to read and share interesting content on Twitter, you can go for Promoted Tweets, which will appear on your profile page, timeline, and Tweet detail page. These tweets are labelled as Promoted and people can retweet, reply, and favourite them. You can make such Tweet engagements on ads.Twitter.com with compelling content.

Quick Promote: Quick Promote allows you to retweet your best tweets from your timeline, mobile or analytics dashboard by clicking ‘Promote this Tweet.’ It lets you to select a location and a budget too.

Hashtags: Using trending hashtags helps people find interesting tweets and share relevant information with millions of new customers.

More Ways to Reach Out: When you follow someone in your industry or location, they may, in turn, follow you and introduce you to their followers. Further, if you wish to draw a person’s attention to your tweet simply add his or her @username in your tweet. A Twitter button at the end of your email signature, blog, or a newsletter can help people share your content easily getting you more customers.

Build Trust Before You Sell

Buying a product depends on three factors – trust, urgency of need, and price. Consider sharing some valuable information to customers struggling with a problem. Connect to them and give trustworthy advice to solve their query. You may not get a chance to sell your product immediately, but in future, they will turn to you when they are ready to purchase. Apart from this, the amount of word of mouth they will spread about your excellent services is invaluable.

Nothing Can Work Without Quality Content

What can be better than narrating a story to your audience and connecting at an emotional level? Even if you are limited to 140 characters, you can do a lot on Twitter. Always update good content because people will surely notice. Automate content elements that always work and use them over and over again. Social Oomph enables you to import content and schedule when you want to post them. Even Agorapulse comes in handy when you want to schedule content to be sent out.

It is through your content that you can lend your brand an image or a unique personality. Since videos and images appeal to the visual senses, use looping videos and collaged images to arouse interest among followers.

Engage, Engage, and Engage

At the crux of good marketing, lies your interaction and engagement with the customers. Your idea is to connect with people, humanize your brand, and build a loyal community rather than simply pushing sales.

Contests: Engage with the audience by hosting contests and giving away simple prizes like sales vouchers, first preference to visit your sale, and so on. Also, share their entry and names so that you get exposure to more followers.

Referrals: Encourage your audience to refer your site to their friends or followers by giving out small perks for referrals.

Flash Sales: Introduce flash sales for short periods and tweet about them a week or a few days in advance so that people visit your page to keep a tab on the sales.

Hootsuite Social Dashboard: Once your audience count gets amplified, it becomes tough to engage with everyone at a personal level. Thanks to Hootsuite Social Dashboard, you can easily manage your engagements with a large audience. It helps you divide your audience into different levels and allows you to interact with one group at a time and then move on to another group.

Tweet Chat: Decide Tweet Chats in advance and use specific hashtags to help users join in and connect. You can find relevant chats at ChatSalad, Tweet Reports, Google Doc Spreadsheet, and Twubs. You also have #StyleChat on Tuesdays for online stores and # SmallBizChat on Wednesdays for small businesses.

Interact with Customers: Finally, remember people love to be appreciated and heard. When customers compliment you, thank them and add them as your ambassadors to spread goodwill. At the same time, attend to annoyed customers immediately, listen to them, and go to the maximum extent possible to solve their problems and delight them.

Twitter is a wonderful social media platform for all kinds of businesses. To get the best out of it, be regular; experiment with all its features and check out what works best for you. Engage with your audience even during weekends since many users are more active during this time. Always add links, keep tweets short, and never forget to ask your followers to retweet. Ultimately, keep a tab on your analytics with the help of Agorapulse, Account Home, and Tweet Dashboard.