Ways to Use Twitter to Market Your Business

At the time of its SEC filing in early November 2013, Twitter had more than 232 million active monthly users, 53 million of which were in the United States. That makes Twitter a potentially powerful marketing tool -- if you know how to use it.

So how can you leverage the popular 140-character social media site to drive more traffic to your business or website? Dozens of Twitter experts, marketing pros and business leaders who have used Twitter to market their brands, products and services share their top 14 tips for how to successfully market your business on Twitter -- or employ Twitter as a marketing tool.

CIO June/July 2016 Digital Magazine: These CIOs mean business

Cover story: this year’s CIO 100 honorees are serious about winning customers and driving revenue.

READ NOW

1. Optimize your Twitter bio. "Make sure your company identity and voice are branded well," says Jon Ferrera, CEO, Nimble, a provider of social CRM. That means having a bio that tells people who you are and includes a link to your company website or a landing page -- and having "a consistent tone so that people clearly understand who you are and what you do."

2. Find out who the influencers and experts are in your target area(s) and interact with them on a regular basis. "Use Twitter search or a tool like Topsy [or Followerwonk] to find like-minded prospects, customers and influencers/media by searching keywords that relate to your industry," says Stacey Miller, social media manager at cloud marketing provider Vocus. Then follow and interact with them on a regular (daily) basis.

"Make a list of the 100 most influential people in your space -- journalists, thought leaders, potential clients/customers, big-name bloggers and writers, potential partners, etc.," says Shanelle Mullin, the director of Marketing at Onboardly, a provider of PR and content marketing for startups.

"Add them to a private Twitter list and engage with them daily. (Tools like HootSuite make managing this process much easier.)" And remember to "be casual [and helpful], not promotional," Mullin says. "Build a real relationship and then look for opportunities to collaborate."

3. Get colleagues involved. "The first people to help build your brand should come internally," says Amanda Cohen, marketing coordinator, Homescout Realty. "Make sure your coworkers are following you on Twitter and tweeting, retweeting, engaging, etc."

[Related: 15 Big Social Media Mistakes Companies Make and How to Avoid Them]

4. Tweet regularly. "Regular tweeting is a sign of an active, healthy profile," says Sandra Fathi, founder & president, Affect, a public relations and social media firm. "If you only tweet once a week, or once a month, you aren't keeping up with the Joneses [or the Twitter equivalent]. Worse, folks will forget about you," she says.

"I recommend daily postings and engagement so that you are top of mind on a consistent basis," Fathi says. Just be sure you are tweeting relevant or useful information, content your followers will read, click on, retweet and/or favorite.

5. Don't be afraid to ask for some Twitter love. Ask followers to retweet, mention or favorite your tweets -- or to share content with a fresh tweet.

6. Track mentions -- and respond if appropriate. "Track brand mentions and keywords to make sure [you know what's being said about you]," says Vikram Bhaskaran, director of marketing at Freshdesk, a customer support Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) solution. And be sure to respond in a polite, professional manner if appropriate. "After all, customer service is the new marketing!" And many customers now post their product queries and complaints on Twitter.

"Set up Twitter searches for terms relevant to your brand," adds Ginger Geoffery, director, Social Marketing, The Mac Groups, a social media agency.

"Monitor the conversations in that search and jump in to the conversations when appropriate," Geoffery she says. "For example, say you're a dentist in Buffalo. You could set up a search for the term 'dentist Buffalo.'" Then, when "you then see someone in Buffalo tweet 'I need to go to the dentist but it's so hard to get an appointment,' you could jump in and [tweet], 'We'd love to have you as a new patient.'"

[Related: 16 Tips for Ecommerce Holiday Season Success]

7. Retweet. "Don't be afraid to retweet as this will help link you with and cement your own thought leadership within your industry," says Mark Rushworth, head of Search atBlue Logic Web, a Web services provider.

8. Favorite tweets. "Many people don't know about favoriting tweets, but it can get someone's attention more than a retweet or a mention," says Amy Marshall, COO, Fathom, a digital marketing and analytics agency.

9. Follow trends/hashtags. "Look at the trending topics and hashtags and find a way to make a relevant connection to your brand," says Crystal Cantabrana, director of Operations, Grizzly Group LLC, which provides social marketing solutions. "By putting your business among the trending topics, your handle will be seen when people search tweets regarding that particular hashtag."

"Tagging our posts with one or two relevant and trending hashtags has [helped us] to reach new users," says David M. Burrows, vice president of marketing & PR, Cinsay , an online video commerce company. However, "hashtags should be used sparingly, as they can be seen as 'Twitter spam' when over used or attached to irrelevant content."

10. Offer discounts or special deals to Twitter followers."Run Twitter contests such as: 'The next 50 people that retweet me will receive a coupon for 50 percent off,' or have people post pictures of themselves in the store or using the product and do a random drawing," suggests Marshall.

11. Use images and videos. "Get visual," says John Lee, manager, Brand + Social Marketing, Webtrends, a digital marketing solutions provider. "Photos and videos drive three to four more clicks on Twitter."

"Images, videos and other rich media have proven to receive more views, clicks and shares than plain text tweets," saysMarko Muellner, vice president, Marketing, ShopIgniter, a social performance marketing platform.

"While community managers may be doing a great job engaging followers, a banal post about enjoying the weekend is much less effective than rich, in-stream content in which someone can, for example, view a film trailer and find out where the movie is playing in their neighborhood," Muellner says. "In fact, research shows that rich tweets have significantly lower negative feedback rates as consumers appreciate interactivity and content designed for their social mobile context."

12. Use Promoted Tweets. "Be sure to directly target your audience with Promoted Tweets," says Bryan Shaw, community manager at 3dcart, an ecommerce platform. "Failing to define exactly who you're trying to reach [could] cost you time and money."

Just "be sure that your promoted tweets aren't spammy," says Aaron Endré, a marketing and PR expert helping B2B tech startups. "The goal is to provide value that establishes trust and credibility, not trick people into clicking a link."

And "Keep it fresh," adds Alicia Antoniolli, account manager, Social, 3Q Digital, a digital marketing services provider. "Make sure your promoted tweets don't run for too long." If you want to continue to get that message across, find a slightly different way to say it.

13. Make sure Twitter is integrated with your other marketing efforts. "Twitter, like other social media platforms, is much more effective when integrated with your other marketing activities," says Mark Schmulen, general manager, Social Media, Constant Contact, an engagement marketing company. "For example, if you're running a promotion or contest on Twitter, let your email subscribers know about it, as they are another customer base who have already let you know that they want to receive messages from you," he says. "Inversely, by occasionally tweeting out the link to your mailing list, you can also tap your Twitter base into your email content."

14. Use Twitter analytics. "Use Twitter's native analytics daily to get a grasp on what's resonating and what's not with your audience once you've built it," says Miller. "In the analytics dashboard, you'll be able to tell what your best days to tweet are, the types of content that are more favored and the demographics of the followers that you're attracting," she says. Then you can "replicate what's working and rework or reevaluate posts that aren't."

Optimize Your Facebook Posts With Facebook Audience Insights

Why Facebook Audience Insights?

Facebook Audience Insights is a social media marketer’s dream come true. It was designed as a tool for targeting Facebook ads, but it also provides a treasure trove of data on your current audience, target market and competitors’ customer bases.

Discover how to optimize your Facebook posts with Audience Insights.

Listen to this article:

Audio Player

00:00

00:00

Use Up/Down Arrow keys to increase or decrease volume.

Listen now: Play in new window | Download

Simply plug in your page or a heap of desired demographic data, including age, gender, location, interests, finances, employment, income, family structure, purchase behavior and more.

Here are some ways to tap into this data to optimize Facebook posts for your audience, increasing organic reach and engagement without advertising.

#1: Use Lifestyle Data to Create Personas

The Lifestyle data in Audience Insights creates mini-personas based on demographic data, purchase behavior, brand affinity and interests. Though the personas are rather broad, they lay the foundation for a comprehensive picture of who your audience is.

The Apple Pie Families lifestyle persona comprises 7% of the U.S. Facebook audience over age 18. Facebook defines this persona as “upper-middle class couples with school-age children . . . homeowners, often minivan drivers and avid radio listeners.”

Lifestyle insights develop mini-personas based on demographics, purchase behavior, brand affinity and interests.

From this snippet of information, you can picture the lives of this audience. You can envision parents driving their children to school in the morning, listening to the radio. After family dinners, the children retreat to their rooms to do their homework on weeknights. You can speculate these are parents who are highly present in their children’s lives. They are involved, informed, and in some ways, defined by their status as parents.

So how does this information translate into writing posts that will capture this audience’s attention and motivate them to act? You do it on their terms. Consider what is likely on their minds right now, and how your brand can assist in quelling their anxieties and make their life better overall.

When it comes to audience personas, it’s all about framing. Say you’re running a promotion. Could you adjust the timeframe and the scope of the promotion to frame it as a back-to-school campaign? Or more broadly, how could the campaign speak to the everyday joys and challenges of parenthood?

For example, the largest Facebook audience segment for Kraft Foods is Apple Pie Families. In this August post the company includes a link to kid-friendly recipes.

Kraft links to kid-friendly recipes to appeal to their target audience.

Understanding that at the time, a large segment of the audience was likely focused on sending the kids back to school, Kraft Foods adjusted their content not only to grab their audience’s attention, but also to provide information people could put into action.

#2: Gauge Interests and Affiliations With Page Likes

You can learn a lot about an audience segment based on the Facebook pages they like. Think of this information less like a report on other businesses and more like a key interest breakdown.

The Page Likes section of Facebook Audience Insights is comprised of the top pages liked in each category and the pages most likely to be relevant to your audience. This combined data helps you continue piecing together a comprehensive persona.

Page Likes let you see insight into what your audience’s political affiliations are, which media outlets they follow, where they shop, what organizations they support,what apps they use and more.

From a macro perspective, study this data to get into the heads of your audience. Add to the picture you started to form from Lifestyle data. What do these people talk about with their friends? How do they spend their spare time? What issues do they care about?

To get more granular, look at each category individually for opportunities to develop content around it. In the example below, the Page Likes data reveals that people who are interested in Ponce City Market (home to restaurants, shops, offices and apartments in Atlanta) are also likely to like the Atlanta BeltLine (a walking and biking path through the city).

The Page Likes data gives you insights into the interests of your audience.

Many of Ponce City Market’s Facebook posts, therefore, focus on outdoor and walkable activities around Atlanta and give an occasional nod to the BeltLine.

Find out what pages your audience likes and use that information to create relevant content.

#3: See How Your Audience Interacts With Content

The Audience Insights Activity section tells you how your audience segment is most likely to interact with content on Facebook. You can see how likely they are to like, comment on and share pages and posts, click on ads and use specific devices to access their accounts.

The audience segment below comprises the 2 to 2.5 million monthly active users in the United States who are interested in L.L. Bean. The blue represents the audience segment’s frequency of activities, and the gray represents all of Facebook. As you can see, this audience is substantially more active on Facebook than the general Facebook population.

Look at the audience segment’s frequency of activity compared to that of all Facebook users.

From this data, L.L. Bean could conclude that their audience is primed for an engagement campaign. In the last 30 days their audience was about five times more likely to comment on a post than the general Facebook audience. That likely means they’re more willing to share opinions, information and content than other audiences.

In June L.L. Bean launched a multi-channel, user-generated content campaignencouraging fans to share photos of their favorite summer moments on the retailer’s social channels.

L.L. Bean encourages fans to share photos of their summer vacation.

Using Facebook Audience Insights to assess how your audience is highly engaged, especially when it comes to something as personal as commenting, is a smart first step before any major call to action.

It’s also important to note which devices your current and target audiences are using to access Facebook. While nearly all of your Facebook content should be optimized for mobile anyway, how people are accessing your content can tell you a lot about their mindset when they interact with you.

It’s important to know what types of devices your audience uses most often. Image: Placeit.

For example, if you’re a brick-and-mortar store and your audience is mostly accessing Facebook via mobile, consider a geo-targeted Facebook campaign to drive foot traffic from people in the area.

#4: Delve Into Audience Households

Facebook Audience Insights can and should be used for more than just assessing the state of your current audience. You should also use it to profile the characteristics of the people you want to reach by looking at the income and make up of their households.

For example, if you managed Nellie’s Sports Bar‘s Facebook page, you might plug in users who are older than 21, live in Washington, D.C. and are interested in the three major sports teams in the area.

If you look at Household data, you can see that 54% of their audience lives in a household with only one or two people, which means they’re probably single or childless. Also 61% have a household income of less than $100,000 per year. Most of them own their homes, which are most likely to be worth between $200,000 and $500,000.

The number of adults and children in a home and household income can tell you a lot about the decisions people might make.

This gives you quite a bit of information to work with. The data is helpful in both supplementing other interests and personas gleaned from Audience Insights and gaining a new perspective into this audience’s lifestyle.

In the post below, Nellie’s Sports Bar reminds fans that the bar opens at 11:00 AM on Saturday. Why is this relevant?

Their audience is comprised of adults who likely don’t have children, so going to a sports bar for brunch is completely reasonable. Although they make a good enough living to comfortably enjoy meals and drinks out, they’re not so wealthy that they’re likely to have standing brunch dates at four- and five-star restaurants.

Analyze Household data to gain insight into what content will appeal to your audience.

Rather than just capturing people’s interests, Household data gives you an insider’s look into how people live their lives. The structure of someone’s home and how much they earn can tell you a lot about the big decisions they might make (like where to live) and their day-to-day choices (like where to have brunch).

#5: Use Purchase Behavior to Explore Spending Habits

Purchase Behavior insights work a lot like Lifestyle and Page Likes insights. Essentially, this data lets you see what people care about, what they prioritize, and most importantly, how they spend their money.

PoolSupplyWorld is an online pool supply company that has become somewhat famous for their engaging and witty Facebook page, which boasts over 99,000 fans. Broadly speaking, if you managed this Facebook page, you might be interested in the purchase behavior of homeowners over the age of 25. According to Facebook Insights, this demographic is 17% more likely to purchase pet products than the general Facebook population.

Look at purchase behavior data to gauge the spending habits of your audience.

Because of this segment’s tendency to purchase pet products, the Facebook post below makes perfect sense.

Create content that focuses on what your audience cares about.

There are other purchase categories ranked on Facebook Insights. You can explore Food and Drink, Clothing, Subscription Services, Health and Beauty, Kids’ Products,Home and Garden, Sports and Outdoors, Business Purchases and more.

Though these are broad categories, they shed light on how people prioritize different elements of their life, and how they prefer to spend their time.

Conclusion

Regardless of the nature of your business, Facebook Audience Insights can give you a leg up on audience research, and ultimately social engagement. This powerful tool offers valuable data at no cost to you.

What do you think? How do you use Facebook Audience Insights to drive your Facebook strategy and grow your business? Tell us in the comments below!