Twitter Marketing Made Easy: My Top 10 Tips

Twitter is one of the most successful tools out there to promote, connect and brand a business. It offers the perfect platform for up-to-date information, stimulating a sense of communication and interaction between a business and its audience. However, utilising Twitter’s marketing potential can be tricky. So, with this in mind I've developed a list of tips to remember when using Twitter from a marketing perspective:

1. Short is sweet Keep your characters down to a minimum. Research has shown that Twitter users engage better with shorter messages so between 70 and 100 characters is best.

2. Check and check again It's important that you check over your tweets before they go live to avoid any embarrassing mistakes. If you're not one-hundred percent confident in your proofing abilities, ask somebody else to check them for you. Remember: tweets cannot be edited, once they’ve been shared.

3. Get creative when crafting content Research from Mashable has shown that tweets containing pictures receive up to 35% more retweets than text-only tweets. Free imaging software, such as Canva, has made it easier to produce your own copyright-friendly visuals.

4. Don't be shy, keep an eye out Follow your competitors and keep watch over what they're doing. You could learn a trick or two! What gains the best engagement? What isn't working so well? These are questions you should be asking yourself.

5. Don't update your display picture too often Existing followers will become used to your display picture and will look out for it when scrolling through their feed. By updating it too often, you run the risk of followers missing your tweets.

6. Establish a tone of voice which is suited to your brand What is your aim? Do you want to make people laugh, cry, scream, gasp? The choice is yours, but make sure your tone of voice is suited to your brand. It's always a good idea to make note of this in a document for future reference. At Tangerine, we create a Playbook which documents all agreed social media activity between ourselves and the client. This includes information such as, how many times we’ll post content, levels of disruption, tone of voice, type of content, etc.

7. Real-time or scheduled? I find it easiest to flesh out the bulk of my tweets and schedule them before-hand using a tool called Hootsuite. However, it's also important to remain topical and relevant. So to stay on-trend I'd advise that for every two items of scheduled content created, you tweet once in real-time. Remember, scheduled content can change. If you’re scheduling something for a pre-planned activity / event and suddenly something changes, make sure you amend or in some cases, delete the post!

8. Twitter is the Bugatti Veyron of social media The average lifespan of a tweet is around 30 seconds, which is a good indication of how fast-paced Twitter really is. In order to make a mark on your followers' feeds, you need to ensure that you tweet three times a day as a minimum. But keep in mind that Twitter is a high frequency, low quality platform, and you don’t want to add to the latter.

9. Crunch the numbers Make use of Twitter's in-built analytics tool, Twitter Analytics, in order to evaluate your approach and identify successes. Reporting and evaluating can seem boring at first, but will be of great use when looking to progress and refine.

10. Hashtags, hashtags, hashtags It can't be stressed enough. Hashtags are native to Twitter and play a GINORMOUS role in Twitter culture. But in terms of marketing, they will allow you to track campaigns, follow trends, expand your audience... the list is endless! Aim to use at least one hashtag per Tweet, but no more than three. #You #Got #It?