Twitter is fast and furious, but it comes with clear benefits for marketing your business.
What is Twitter?
Twitter is a micro-blogging site where each post is limited to 140 characters. Approximately 5,700 tweets are posted each second on the site, and users can choose to follow hundreds of other posters from celebrities to business colleagues to personal friends. Hashtags (i.e. #twitter) allow users to post about and track topics of interest.
Twitter helps you establish your business as a content expert, and quickly connect with like-minded followers.
Twitter is a fast-moving social media with a river of content flowing 24/7. Many people (and news outlets) use it as a source of news, and a way to disseminate news. To use Twitter effectively for your business, you need strong messaging that can be boiled down to brief updates. One of the best ways to build a following on Twitter is to engage other users by following them and interacting with their tweets.
Who is the audience?
Twitter has roughly 500 million registered users, and about 241 million active users. Nearly 18 percent of adult Internet users have a Twitter account, and the fastest growing demographic for the platform is adults age 55 to 64 (that group has shown a 79 percent increase in Twitter usage since 2012).
Why do I need it?
Followers can turn into customers: 47 percent of people who follow a brand on Twitter will visit that brand’s website, and 72 percent of brand followers report that they are more likely to purchase from that brand. It’s a great way to connect with an audience real-time and engage in conversation with target audiences.
What to post?
The best Twitter posts catch a user’s eye and spark a retweet, and a Twitter study shows that the most retweeted posts include a photo (35 percent), video link (28 percent), quote (19 percent), fact or figure (17 percent) or hashtag (16 percent).
The key with Twitter, as with other social media, is to create engaging content that people want to read and share with others. Remember your core audience and the topics that are interesting to them. With Twitter, you can create your own little universe of followers and companies/people that you follow. Ideally, this universe will be focused on a central topic or interest. Over time, you can position yourself as a content expert on that topic. How? Update people on the latest news in your field. Put your spin on recent developments. Share other content sources and engage your audience in a conversation about topics that are important to them. Be a conversation starter and participant. Build your reputation, and the benefits will follow.
Contributed by SMO Pros Contributing Editor Amy J.V. Atwell. Amy is a Denver-based freelance writer and editor. She works with businesses to grow their brands through high-quality copy and content. www.heirloomcommunications.com.
