Twitter best practices | Social Media Marketing

Twitter is the best micro-blogging network that is still in use by millions around the globe till date; let it be for fun, timepass, passion or promotion. In one way or another, most of the people in today's world enjoy tweeting. What to say about twitter ! It's the best place to promote any kind of business. The thing is; your brand/business will get noticed quickly in twitter. The major areas of game play being Internet, marketing, business, science, news, technology, gadgets, ecommerce, design, creativity, review sites, sales & services, promotions, politics, celebrity, entertainment and lot more to mention.

Frankly speaking; great brands like say 'DELL' and other electronics, marketing as well as product companies involves less in twitter or any other social media, it's the intermediate mediators/reviewers (small and medium scale organizations like us) who does the job of promoting their business!

Say, I'm writing about twitter marketing, it means I'm  promoting twitter business greatly than my own. By reading this people might get more interest on twitter account! If your web page is reviewing about a product say a mobile phone, then it's like you are supporting the product, thus indirectly helping them achieve more customers and hence profits. Lets go through a detailed list of best practices - to publicize our brand and do marketing through twitter.

Best practices

Be a business brand but not a single person

1. If you run a business, create a brand page in twitter to maintain official tweets. 
2. Don't include your personal tweets like your moods etc, tweet your personal interests with your private account and not with your brand account !
3. Create a brand icon or image, if possible use customized background image.

Frequency of tweets

• Tweet tweet tweet, keep tweeting
• Tweet not only about your own business but also about related business from others. This will make the followers understand the importance of following you. Also, the other business might recommend you to their people.
• Give frequent and honest replies to the one you are following. 
• Tweet out of topic subjects at times - like say about news, technology, health and reviews. This will make the followers active and hence allow them to engage with you regularly. People love to hear other topics too! 
• Be active in twitter chats. 
• Retweet your post - it's true, followers engage at different times, so retweeting about the same post many times helps to improve traffic by attaining greater reach. 
• Some analysis says that retweeting for the second and third time increased posts approach by 30 - 60 %. But the trick is to use different wordings for every retweet to make it look unique. 

Credits, Appreciation and feedback

• Appreciate those who re-tweet your content by saying thanks publicly. 
• Don't forget to put @ symbol before the names of the people. By doing so will allow both your followers as well as the retweeter followers to see that. So, more people will start retweeting your post in order to get appreciations from you ! thus indirectly driving more traffic and exposure. 
• If possible, give attributes to the top commenters or contributors of your web page on weekly (or even daily) basis in twitter.
• Post some related questions, ask feedback from the followers
• Give guidelines but don't put demands or rules !

Thumb rules

• Don't forget to use hashtags (#) before common keywords. Putting hashtags will help many new people find your tweets in the search bar. But limit the usage of hashtags to two - three times only. Including more will give dead look to your tweet.
• Utilize 140 characters more effectively to tweet your content with greater details, try to include major keywords and most importantly use shortened links. 
• A short and brief description about your content will help the users quickly navigate to your post.  There are many useful URL-shortener tools available online. Some of them are

1. Bitly 
2. OW
3. Google URL shortener 
4. TinyURL
5. Trim 
6. Cligs 

• Some of this shortener tools like bitly, hootsuite and tinyurl allows you to track the number of clicks of the URL. By going through the stats, you may choose what kind of content are being viewed largely. 
• Knowing this will help you to tweet as well as retweet similar category content regularly. I prefer google's goo and bit for my tweets.

Follow and let them follow back !

• Follow more people related to your brand niche. 
• Frequently look for people interested in you business area by using search bar and connect with more people. 
• The best practice is to send a warm regards/greetings to the new follower as soon as they connects with you/your brand so as to maintain long term connection. 
• Whenever you visit a blog or website related to your business or niche, follow the bloggers, writers and even the brand. This will enable a two way relationship - allowing the followers of the other to find you, as well as allowing you to find some people from their profiles to follow you. 
• Who knows, the other may recommend your brand to their followers !

Support your followers

• Offer discounts and purchase tips for your products. (if you are kind of sales marketer) 
• Organize events through twitters for more interaction and spread of your brand.
• Tweet frequent updates about events, webinars or conferences.

Design your profile

• First impression is always the best impression. It's the information in your profile that allows visitors follow you. So, giving details about your brand's area of service helps the visitors follow your brand. 
• Include appropriate and commonly used keywords with hashtags in front of them in the twitter page, don't forget to include your webpage link.
• It's not recommended to include your personal interest like "I love coffee .........", "I spend time with my puppy........" and any other similar things. Followers are not interested in your personal interests (unless you are a celebrity !). If you are representing a brand, include appropriate search terms as said above. Below, I have given two pictures for your reference.
• Include attractive twitter icons in your webpage so as to redirect the users to your twitter account. 
• Use your twitter profile in G+, Linkedin, FB and even as email signatures to promote you or your brand account.
• Ask your friends to promote your business. Give away your website links to them and ask them to tweet it frequently.

Image, videos and Infographics

• Remember, twitterers will be in a hurry and most of them tend to read only the tweet headline instead of visiting actual link or post. So, in order to grab their attention, preferably include images with link. Experts confirmed that tweets with images enjoyed more retweets than simple lines. 
• Infographics became the trend for this decade. So, there is no offense if you spare 10 - 30 minutes to make a simple and decent infographic so as to allow them navigate to your topic.

Hope this helps.

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