The Only Twitter Reference You’ll Ever Need!
Twitter is the world’s leading form of instant mass communication. It is definitely the fastest channel for businesses to interact with customers, and it’s becoming more and more popular for Customer Service issues to be handled in 140 characters or less.
But Twitter is so much more than a communication platform! It empowers you to approach and cozy up to the thought leaders in your industry, learn more about your niche market and how they’re engaging online, and establish yourself as a true authority in your field.
We were recently asked to compile a list of all the Twitter Techniques we use on a daily basis. Of course, we happily obliged.
FMP’s Twitter Techniques & Tips
1. Be Interesting
If you’re boring, you will be unfollowed. Pull out the personality! Post unusual links related to your niche, highly relevant stories, quotable insights, and interesting tidbits. Make it fun, encourage engagement and conversation, and you’re sure to stand out!
2. Be Social
Don’t just promote your own content. Too many direct sellers ONLY tweet their own thoughts, blog posts, events, etc! Social Media is all about being social, so curate content from other thought leaders. This will spread the love (which will be reciprocated), and can also get you in front of some bigger players in your market.
3. Follow the Leaders
Before you curate their content, follow the leaders! Follow people who are already active in the niche you’re promoting to learn more about your customers and what’s trending in your industry. Then you can send @mentions to gain their attention and boost your visibility.
4. Follow Competitors
Twitter is a friendly environment where competitors frequently follow one another (for example, Coke follows Pepsi). Don’t be shy about following your fellow direct sellers, network marketers, and even the companies that make a competing product!
5. Love the Humble Hashtag
Use hashtags to join trending conversations and keep your business relevant. Watch what other twitter users are hashtagging in your field, and do frequent searches to find what’s popular or going out of style.
6. Use the List Function
Lots of people know about Twitter’s lists, but unfortunately people rarely utilize this great feature! Making lists can help you easily target different groups with a specific message or angle. For example, make a list of everyone that retweets you, so you can safely assume anything you tweet to that list will get retweeted. Or if your product naturally attracts 3 different markets (“health”, “direct sales”, and “eco-friendly”), categorize your followers into those 3 separate lists and tweet targeted links and content to the different groups.
7. Advanced Search Option
Just like the list feature, this is an under-utilized tool that sits right in front of everyone’s face! The Advanced Search helps you fine tune your search for customers and competitors based on very specific data – hashtags, words and phrases they’re using, location (to target on a local level), and more.
8. The Powerful “Other”
If you’re doing an Advanced Search, you’ll notice a field labeled “Other”. This little section is a gold mine! It allows you to spy on your competitors and jump in where they may have neglected a customer. When you’re searching for competitors, check the box marked “Question?” to find out if customers have sent questions to the competitor that went unanswered. Then you can jump in and answer the question yourself!
9. Think Mobile
The majority of Twitter users are mobile users, so keep that in mind when writing any tweet and linking to an outside website. Where is the tweet sending them? Is it mobile compatible?
10. Post Images
Speaking of mobile-friendly… Twitter users LOVE images (and images LOVE Smartphones!). Make sure you have a good mix of text and image tweets on your Twitter feed.
11. Track the Favorites
Not everyone will retweet your posts. Many people will “Favorite” your tweet instead. That’s a good thing! It typically means they are saving your info to read at a later time. Tracking these people can become a valuable asset for your marketing efforts. You can find out what they do, what they tweet about, who their following is, etc. Then you can fine-tune a targeted marketing pitch to them and their followers. Use the list function to group these Favorite-ers together, according to the similar tweets they “Favorite”.
12. Automate
Use social tools to automate the tedious and time-consuming tasks. See this post for 13 free social media automation tools.
13. Don’t Tweet and Run
An initial tweet is great, but you are leaving so much on the table if people end up retweeting you and replying to you. Just because you’ve automated something doesn’t mean you get to be absent from the rest of the interactions. Replying to retweets and mentions builds authority, trust and relationships – which is all KEY to marketing success.
14. Find Your Prime Time
Use tools (like Tweriod) to determine the best times of day to tweet. If you tweet a killer post at 12pm, but your audience isn’t typically online until 2pm, all that hard work will get lost in the twitosphere by the time they’re online.
15. Vary Your Link Placement
Don’t always put your link at the end of your tweet. Putting the link in the middle, or even sometimes in the beginning of your tweet will get a better response. Dan Zarella of HubSpot did a study on the optimal link placement and we’ve even seen great results with this on our own FMP Twitter account.
16. Don’t Forget Your Profile
Create a background image for your Twitter profile. Everyone knows about the layouts, colors and backgrounds within a Twitter profile, but not many are taking advantage of fully optimizing it with custom images. Most people just throw in a profile picture and a cover photo. The background of your profile can have a custom image that can be your picture, logo, bio and website URL all on the left or right side (or even in the middle if the image sits there properly). This creates a HUGE branding opportunity for your direct sales business.
Do you have any Twitter Techniques we didn’t mention? Help out your fellow marketers and share them in the comments below!
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