How to Use Twitter for Business: A Complete Guide to Marketing on Twitter

With over 300 million active monthly users, Twitter offers immense potential to connect with consumers and grow your business But tapping into that potential requires strategy and skill

This comprehensive guide reveals proven tips and tactics to effectively use Twitter for business Follow these best practices to build your follower base, engage audiences, promote content, and maximize Twitter’s marketing power

Why Use Twitter for Business?

Before jumping into Twitter marketing tactics, let’s review the unique benefits Twitter offers businesses:

• Massive reach – Twitter’s millions of active users represent a huge audience to potentially reach. And its open nature makes gaining new followers easy.

• Valuable insights – Monitoring tweets and conversations provides useful consumer feedback and sentiment data. Learn what people love or hate about your industry.

• Trend discovery – Twitter reveals hot topics and trends faster than anywhere else. Capitalize on viral content early.

• Boosting SEO – Tweets can improve search engine optimization by signaling popularity and relevance to Google.

• Driving website traffic – Tweets send visitors to your site through shared links. Traffic equates to business.

• Thought leadership – Twitter allows you to demonstrate expertise and build brand authority in your niche.

• Customer service – Quickly address and resolve customer complaints on the public Twitter stage.

• Cost-effective marketing – Twitter provides free tools to reach and engage target audiences. Less expensive than ads.

The massive reach, real-time nature, and marketing powers make Twitter a must-use channel for serious brands.

Optimizing Your Twitter Profile

Your Twitter profile is the foundation for your presence. Make it appealing and effective:

• Profile photo – Use your logo or product image so your brand is recognizable at a glance.

• Header image – Banner-like image atop your profile provides prime real estate to reinforce branding.

• Bio – Concisely explain who you are, what you offer, and your value proposition. Include your website.

• Location – Share where you’re based to give yourself local discovery potential.

• Username – Ideally your brand name or something closely related that identifies your company.

• Link out – Drive traffic to your website by linking it in your bio, tweets, and other fields.

A polished, professional profile builds credibility and gets more clicks.

Growing Your Twitter Following

Gaining followers takes consistent effort, but pays dividends long-term. Ways to grow your audience include:

• Post Valuable Content – Tweeting content your target audience finds interesting or useful earns follows. Stay helpful and relevant.

• Follow Strategically – Follow accounts in your industry, competitors, influencers, media, and potential customers. Many will follow back.

• Share and Comment Often – Be actively engaged daily. Follow and interact with those following you.

• Run Follower Campaigns – Periodically ask followers to retweet a post spreading the word about your account.

• Cross-Promote – Market your Twitter account through your website, email lists, other social channels, etc. to drive more followers.

• Use Hashtags – Latch onto trending hashtags related to your niche to get discovered by new audiences.

• Advertise – Consider promoted tweets and accounts to reach beyond existing followers.

Slow organic follower growth adds up over time. Supplement with ads and campaigns as needed.

Engaging Followers

It’s not enough to just amass a huge follower number. You must consistently interact with followers to:

• Build relationships – Establish rapport and show you care about them. Engaged followers become loyal brand advocates.

• Provide value – Entertain them, make them think, teach them, and enhance their day somehow. Deliver content they benefit from.

• Get feedback – Ask questions to find out what followers want and need. Listen to what resonates or falls flat.

• Gather insights – Pay attention to the challenges and interests mentioned to identify opportunities to assist.

• Respond – Personally interact when followers reach out with questions and comments. Quick personalized responses delight.

Nurturing an engaged audience multiplies the power of your followers since they’re more apt to retweet, click, and convert down the line.

Creating Compelling Twitter Content

Posting great content is how you engage your audience and get results on Twitter. Ideal tweets:

• Entertain – Humor, trivia, polls, quizzes, social commentary, relatable observations, etc. Appeal to emotions for engagement.

• Educate – Share tips, how-tos, reports, statistics, and insights to position yourself as an expert.

• Promote – Talk up products, services, offers, and your distinct value proposition. Balance with other content.

• Curate – Repost (with credit) relevant articles, quotes, stats, and stories from influencers in your industry.

• Inspire – Uplifting thoughts, quotes, images, and stories build goodwill and brighten someone’s day.

• Discuss Trending Topics – Capitalize on hashtags and conversations already buzzing to tap into engaged audiences primed to interact.

• Be Visual – Tweets with images, infographics, videos, GIFs, etc. perform much better than plain text.

Monitor what best resonates with your followers and refine your content mix accordingly. Provide variety and usefulness.

Live Tweeting Events

Live tweeting conferences, webinars, and other events your audience cares about is an excellent engagement tactic.

Share key insights, memorable quotes, and highlights as they happen. Include event hashtags for maximum visibility. Interact with other event tweeters to join the conversation.

Your followers feel like they’re right there with you, getting value in real-time. Plus this positions you as an industry insider.

Hosting Twitter Chats

Twitter chats are scheduled live discussions focusing on certain topics valuable to your niche.

Promote the chat ahead of time with a consistent hashtag. Then pose questions and prompt discussion for a set timeframe, like an hour.

Twitter chats let you demonstrate thought leadership while engaging directly with your audience. The live format breeds connection.

Running Twitter Contests

Contests incentivize fans to interact for a chance to win prizes. Require followers to retweet, like, comment, or submit something by a deadline.

Publicize the rules widely with a contest hashtag. Post reminders leading up to the end date. Contact and reward winners.

It’s a fun way to grow reach and get followers active on your account.

Twitter Ads

While organic methods are ideal, investing in paid Twitter ads makes sense for certain goals:

• Promoted Tweets – Push important content, offers, etc. out to wider audiences beyond just followers.

• Promoted Accounts – Get your Twitter account profile in front of more potential interested followers.

• Promoted Trends – Pay to attach your brand, product, or hashtag to currently trending topics.

Coordinate paid and organic strategies for amplified results. Test different ad types, targets, budgets and measure ROI.

Tracking Performance

It’s crucial to monitor the performance of your Twitter activities using built-in analytics:

• Impressions – Number of times tweet was seen
• Engagements – Likes, retweets, clicks, etc.
• Mentions – How often others interact with or discuss you
• Follower Growth – Rate of gaining new followers

These metrics reveal what tweet types and topics resonate most. Find out when your followers are most active. See overall engagement and traffic referrals.

Use insights to keep refining your Twitter strategy.

Customer Service on Twitter

Angry customers often take to Twitter to voice complaints. But this public call-out presents an opportunity.

Respond promptly and professionally to negative tweets. Apologize for the issue and offer to remedy it through direct message.

Providing great customer service publicly demonstrates your responsiveness and care for consumers. It turns detractors into advocates.

Key Twitter Marketing Tactics to Use

To maximize results, be sure to make use of these powerful tactics:

• Threads – Tell a story or share lots of related info by replying to your own tweets in sequence.

• Twitter Cards – Embed content previews like images, videos, and descriptions into tweets to make them more engaging.

• Twitter Moments – Curate tweets into slideshow-like collections about specific events as they unfold. Great for awareness.

• Twitter Spaces – Host or join these live audio chat rooms to collaborate with industry peers and customers.

• Twitter Newsletters – Convert popular tweet threads into newsletter format to reach audiences outside Twitter.

• Pinning – Pin important tweets like promotions to your profile to keep them highly visible to visitors.

Combine numerous approaches for a robust, well-rounded Twitter presence that provides value on listeners’ preferred terms.