May 24, 2022
By:Emily Harper
You may snicker at the thought of using Twitter for business. However, this highly explosive, contentious, passionate, and noisy social media platform has its merits for businesses. It humanizes your brand as an entity because of the way interactions are designed.
When someone hears from your brand or writes to your brand, it isn’t like writing to a corporation but like reaching out to highly attentive individuals instead.
The company has been responsive to the needs of businesses who seek to use the platform for their brand marketing strategies. Twitter for business is commonplace among businesses of all sizes.
Several other social media platforms have their profiles on Twitter as well, such is its utility. It so happens that @YouTube is the most popular brand handle with over 74 million followers, beating @Twitter itself with 60 million followers.
Like any marketing platform, Twitter is great for business because it has a massive user base. As of 2022, 329 million users are present on the platform. This number is only set to rise.
Nearly 30% of Twitter’s audience base are women. Nearly a quarter of all US adults are on the platform, which is more than those who use TikTok.
The top three benefits of using Twitter for business are:
It’s a free site. While you also have the option to advertise via ads, using the features of Twitter is not a bad option. Many celebrities' Twitter handles have amassed their follower bases for free.
Unlike Instagram, Pinterest, and, to some extent, even Facebook, Twitter is primarily a text-based platform. While it does allow you to use images in posts, it promotes the usage of words.
Here’s a cool way to improve the way you search on Twitter:
This makes it easy to search for users who have used particular phrases or words. Hashtags are native to Twitter, which also aids in looking up exactly the kind of users you want to target or follow.
In all likelihood, your competitors are already on Twitter, and there’s no way that they can block you out from seeing their marketing efforts. Keep a check on their profiles, and see what they’re doing well and what they’re not.
There are 6,000 tweets going out every second. Every second! This illustrates just how popular it has become as a means of exchanging ideas.
Businesses may get consumer information from these interactions. Twitter can help you investigate audience trends and themes to better reach them. These 11 ways to use Twitter for business will set you in motion to engage with consumers in an authentic and humanizing way.
You have only one chance to make a great first impression, and your Twitter profile can either help people understand you or lead potential users away. These are some ways you can curate a cohesive Twitter profile and watch your results improve immediately.
Your profile picture is the face of your profile. This is where you should don your brand’s logo design or a recognizable mnemonic.
Some brands have horizontal logos that may not fit into the profile picture placeholder on Twitter. For this, they create a shortened version of the logo that may just be the first letter or a design element from the logo that is recognizable.
A header photo or cover photo on Twitter can be changed more often, unlike your more permanent profile picture. You can showcase a new product or campaign that you are running, here.
It makes the most sense to go with your business name or a title most people know you by. Don’t try to be too clever, lest your audience completely misses who you are.
Handles are preceded by the ‘@’ sign and are your unique ID on Twitter. It may be difficult to find a unique handle for your brand, especially if your brand has a generic name. Shorter handles tend to be easier to use and remember.
Here’s where you describe your brand and offer a clickable URL within just 160 characters. Be wise in how you use this space to be as descriptive as you can be.
If the link to your business is too long, try shortening it at bitly.com. The link is essential for directing people to your business page.
Bitly lets you shorten links so that you have more room to write about your brand in your Twitter bio.
Be classy. Even if you run a fun brand like a youthful bar or peppermints, you need to be mindful of how seriously you want your audience to take you. Use impeccable grammar and attractive visual content.
Twitter allows you to pin a tweet to the top of your timeline. So, if you have a tweet that you would like to have up there as the first thing a new visitor sees, then you can use this feature to its fullest.
Do you want to use Twitter for customer queries? Do you want it to be a platform where you converse with other brands in your space? Do you want Twitter as a search platform to understand your share of voice? A marketing strategy will help you make better use of Twitter for business.
One easy way to begin is to identify what kind of content you want to post and on which days. This helps you achieve a balance between meaningful, promotional, and fun content without going overboard and overwhelming your followers.
Twitter’s algorithm decides how well your audience receives your content. The more engaging your content is (measured through likes, retweets, shares, and clicks), the better the algorithm favors you. This helps Twitter deprioritize spam-like messages. Now you know what to avoid.
There’s no point in trying to use Twitter for business if you aren’t interacting with anyone. One great way to get started is by building a community of followers and accounts you want to follow. This has to be close to the space your business operates in.
Here are some great hacks to build a Twitter community:
So, if you are a beverage-maker, you want to follow DIY food and beverage accounts, or maybe large enterprises that inspire you. Make sure that you introduce your business to them and tag them in conversations.
There’s no shame in responding to a whacky question by an influencer or a large brand that bears a blue tick. If they bite the bait and continue the conversation forward, your business’s handle can gain greatly from even one mention or response by them.
Have conversations, don’t spam. If a brand or individual’s page isn’t showing any interest in engaging with you on Twitter, back off. You do not want to annoy them because they have a powerful weapon — clout. This is an important rule when you set out to use Twitter for business.
Be predictable with the frequency of how you tweet. Avoid blank and silent spaces on your profile. Chart out a tweeting schedule and follow it consistently. Make interesting content! Avoid saying anything when you have nothing new or worthwhile to say.
Hashtags are a powerful tool. While they can help you filter out tweets regarding a certain topic, they can also put your brand on a larger bandwagon.
Learn more about how and when to use hashtags on Twitter:
If everyone’s talking about something that is currently trending and using a hashtag with it, you could put out a tweet with the hashtag too. Do keep in mind the guardrails of context, relevance, and decency.
One of the most common purposes of Twitter for many brands is customer service. The ability to @ brands directly gives users more confidence to reach out to them directly. For brands, it gets easier since they can easily track their brand mentions here.
Some basic ground rules for running customer service on Twitter:
Conversations that can affect a brand’s reputation can be redirected to direct messaging. Since Twitter is a primarily text-based platform, it is easier to measure sentiment here.
Twitter Spaces introduces the aspect of voice to the textual platform. It’s interesting to see how Twitter Spaces can fair in your business space. If you make eco-friendly products, you want to have a conversation with your followers about it.
You can organize an AMA (Ask Me Anything) session and open up the floor for more questions about your brand or even have an influencer introduce you. The advantage of the latter is that they bring their organic following with them.
This is one of the most obvious choices that brands turn to when they opt for Twitter for business. While all the above methods are organic and can be achieved without you spending money on Twitter directly, you can also turn to Twitter’s paid advertisements.
Twitter allows you a variety of formats to advertise. Twitter supports image ads, video ads, carousel ads, moment ads, and text-only ads.
You can learn more about them here, and how they can be used to their fullest on the basis of your goals.
Twitter is a great platform for communication. It’s more liberal than other platforms, and freedom of speech and opinion are respected by most of the users of the platform. While this is good to hear, it comes with a highly opinionated userbase. Being present on Twitter isn’t all. You have to be participative as well.
The platform’s short history has taught us that brands and individuals can be made and broken on this platform. It’s truly like the wing of a tiny bluebird, flapping away with the tides of time.
So, why not try out this exciting new platform and see where it takes your business?