Twitter Best Practices for Small Businesses

It pays to invest your marketing budget in Twitter, especially if you’re a small business owner. According to Twitter, 53% of its users are more likely to be the first buyers of new products. Twitter is also the no. 1 platform for discovery.

Exposing your small business to a nurturing platform, such as Twitter, can foster your growth. With the right Twitter marketing strategies, you can siphon Twitter users to your website and convert them into paying customers.

In this guide, we’ll go over eight Twitter best practices to improve your social media campaigns and grow your small business.

The eight twitter best practices to grow your following and increase engagement.

• Identify your goals
• Optimize your profile
• Include relevant hashtags
• Curate content
• Run surveys and polls
• Use the right CTA
• Schedule your posts
• Analyze your performance

1. Identify your goals

Set goals to identify meaningful metrics and assess whether your Twitter strategy is bringing significant results.

Consider these common goals as your starting point.

• Increase traffic to your pages and website.
• Raise brand awareness by measuring your number of Twitter followers and reach.
• Improve your audience interaction by tracking your audience engagements, such as comments, retweets, and likes.
• Boost conversions by tracking sales that come from your Twitter followers.
• Enhance customer support by providing better response times on Twitter.

Determine your Twitter marketing goals and align your content with your objectives.

Use your goals as a basis for your social media content strategy. Every piece of content you produce should inch you closer to your goals.

2. Optimize your profile

Improve your visibility by optimizing your Twitter profile, making it easy for your target audience to find and engage with you.

Create a compelling Twitter profile by following these tips.

• Keep your Twitter handle simple. Create a Twitter username identical to your business name. Avoid adding numbers or supplementary characters to make it unique.
• Mention the problem you solve in your author bio. Use this format: “I help (your target demographic) get (the problem that you solve) by (your method of solving their problem).”

Here’s an example. “I help business coaches get more email subscribers by using paid ads.”

What do you think would happen if a business coach who’s looking to grow their email list through paid ads sees your Twitter profile? They’ll be mind-blown by your bio’s relevance.

The strong connection between your author bio and who your readers are (and the problem they’re currently trying to solve) can compel your prospective customers to contact you.

3. Include relevant hashtags

One of the benefits of social media is the visibility you can gain from the effective use of hashtags.

Use hashtags to be discovered through your content or when people search for industry-specific conversations to obtain crucial data to reinforce your marketing campaigns. Discover hashtags relevant to your business, and include them in your Twitter posts.

Use Hashtagify to find and track the best hashtags to reach your target audience.

Leverage Hashtagify to get insights, such as trending hashtags and influencers who use them. Image source: Author

The tool gives you custom hashtag suggestions and shows the popularity trend of specific hashtags, the top countries using them, and more. This helps you find hashtags your audiences can relate to. Use them in your content to increase its visibility and engagement.

4. Curate content

Don’t just publish your own content. Gather content from other sources, and share it with your audience to diversify your Twitter posts.

Retweet helpful articles, positive customer feedback, and user-generated content, among other posts, to maintain a solid Twitter presence and to better connect with your audience.

Consider these tips when sharing other people’s content on your profile.

• Limit the third-party content you’ll publish. While it’s a great practice to share outside content, set limits to this practice to prevent your brand image from being diluted. Make sure your self-produced content still stands out.
• Consider your audience’s interests. Know the topics that interest your target audience to ensure you’re sharing third-party content that matters to them.

What you think is interesting might not be interesting for your audience. This is a common disconnect that happens between marketers and their audiences. Don’t make this mistake.

Publishing third-party content bolsters your sales and marketing strategies. It allows you to build strategic relationships with your content sources, and it adds variety to your tweets.

The best part is that sharing other peoples’ content is absolutely free.

5. Run surveys and polls

Engage your audience efficiently by running polls, customer feedback surveys, and others. Improve your marketing content by asking industry-related questions through polls.

This Twitter poll by Into the Gloss is a classic example.

Run Twitter surveys and learn from your customers to help refine your products and content. Image source: Author

The poll posts a specific question on how to double cleanse with two clear options for audiences to choose from. Polls are a great way to encourage your audience to join your Twitter conversations while learning about their preferences.

Tips on how to use Twitter polls and surveys for your small business:

• Be creative with your polls. Run entertaining polls, and ask playful questions to entice your audience to participate, helping you get better engagement.
• Join ongoing conversations. Use surveys to join Twitter discussions about trending topics to help connect with your audience.

For example, create surveys about your followers’ biggest concerns during the COVID-19 crisis. Publish unique Twitter content such as surveys to show your brand’s personality, and provide memorable audience interactions.

6. Use the right call to action (CTA)

Include relevant and compelling CTAs in your tweets to generate more clicks. Go beyond asking your audience to share your content. Encourage them to visit your website, download content from your landing page, or use a discount coupon.

As a general rule, your CTAs should support your marketing campaign’s goals.

Conduct social media audits to figure out which CTAs you should use. For example, if your audit shows low email sign-ups, use CTAs that urge your audience to subscribe.

Use CTAs effectively to achieve your Twitter marketing campaign goals.

7. Schedule your posts

Schedule your tweets at the perfect time to ensure your audience sees them. Stay on top of your social media content calendar, and automate your Twitter posting schedule.

There are reliable social media management tools, such as Buffer, that can help with this.

Streamline content creating and sharing with Buffer’s automated posting schedule. Image source: Author

The tool lets you drag and drop the things you want to tweet into your content calendar and set up specific posting dates and times.

Buffer helps you create several months’ worth of social media content and schedule its publishing in advance. Advance scheduling streamlines your Twitter marketing tasks and enables you to post content regularly.

8. Analyze your performance

Analyze the effectiveness of your Twitter account to assess your best- and worst-performing tweets. This helps you identify the type of content your audience is interested in. It also lets you refine your strategies, allowing you to figure out which topics to tweet about and which to avoid.

Use platforms such as Sprout Social to gain insights into your Twitter marketing campaigns’ performances.

View your Twitter publishing patterns on Sprout Social’s dashboard. Image source: Author

The platform provides reports on your content performance across multiple social media channels. It also covers customer care, competitive analysis, strategy and insight, and more.

Monitor and analyze your Twitter and other social media metrics. Determine gaps in your strategies and refine your social media marketing methods for optimum results.

Implement best practices for successful Twitter marketing

Avoid wasting your marketing budget by following these tried-and-tested Twitter marketing strategies.

Use the Twitter tips in this guide to help you connect with your audience, grow your following, increase brand awareness, and ultimately, drive conversions and sales.

Develop your own Twitter marketing strategies using the best practices mentioned here.