The Ultimate Guide to Twitter Growth
Introduction
In this Twitter growth hacking guide, you will learn all the tricks, hacks and tools you need to scaling your Twitter account to 10K and beyond and landing more clients.
Growing your Twitter following is super important, but it’s only the first step in creating a successful Twitter marketing presence.
Facebook reach is down tremendously and as savvy entrepreneurs we know relevant traffic = money in the bank.
Twitter can work and others are seeing this.
Would you like to know the tools they use behind the scenes to grow their Twitter accounts to reach heights faster than all the “experts” thought possible?
Well, here’s your chance:
In this guide we’ll reveal the different steps you need to take to turn your Twitter into marketing machine.
It will remove most of the stumbling blocks stopping you from reaching your full Twitter potential. You’ll be amazed at how easy and quick creating KILLER Twitter profile will be when you have those tools at your side.
You’ll learn how to build an experience around your brand on Twitter that entertains, inspires and informs.
You’ll see exactly how to:
- Perfectly optimize your Twitter profile page
- Plan and execute a winning content strategy for Twitter
- And, finally, measure your Twitter marketing results, tweak and adjust.
We’ll walk you through, one step at a time.
And … before you know it, you’ll have a powerful Twitter marketing machine.
Chapter One
Optimize your Twitter profile page
Twitter Profile picture: Use a Brand Logo or Human Face(s)?
What is your Twitter profile picture?
Your Twitter profile picture is the image you have chosen to represent you and your brand on Twitter. Any picture you choose is displayed as an avatar close to your account name and will appear anywhere your posts show.
Your Twitter profile picture gives users an instant impression of what the profile is about. This is why brands make sure to choose the best possible images for their profile pictures.
For a business, the profile picture should be a shining example of the brand’s ethos. This is why many business owners are stuck in the age old dilemma of whether to use the brand logo or a human face on their business profile.
We’ll addresses this confusion.
The argument FOR and AGAINST using a logo on your Twitter profile
The business logo is the most unifying symbol for any brand. It is what you want any prospects and customers to see when they come in contact with your brand in any way. Is it always a good idea to use your logo as your profile picture?
FOR
- It provides uniformity. Any profile visitor will immediately be able to recognize a profile to your brand as long as the logo, which they are probably already used to, is readily visible. You can use the same logo across all
your social media profiles to ensure uniformity. - It creates a professional appearance. A user is more likely to treat your brand as a serious business when there is a cleanly designed logo on your profile.
- It makes your brand more memorable. Most people remember what they see more than what they read. If your logo is on your Twitter profile, your brand will be more likely etched in the memories of your prospects for when they
need your goods and services. - It helps your profile to stand out. When a user is reading through their Twitter feed, a cleanly designed logo will stick out in the sea of faces. This increases the chances of your messages getting across.
AGAINST
- Social media users tune off to brands. Unless you are already a huge brand with massive followings, the average social media user will find it difficult to connect to your logo. Bear in mind that they are inundated with marketing
posts every single day. If your goal of running a social media profile for your business is to genuinely connect with users, you may rethink using a logo and coming off as just another brand. - There is the risk of the page turning bland. When you use a logo on your profile, there is the inherent push to keep things overly formal to maintain the professional stance. This means staying away from certain areas of Twitter
discourse. Unfortunately, such areas hit home the most with Twitter users.
The argument FOR and AGAINST using a Face on your Twitter profile
If you have always been against overly corporate accounts on Twitter and considering having a face to your business Twitter profile, you should consider the pros and cons first.
FOR
- People can relate more to the brand. When there is a face to a profile, people feel some sort of connection as they read tweets from an account with the face in mind. This increases the chances of users reading a post, if
such users tune off to brand messages. - It allows you to get more personal with posts. With a face behind a brand account, users are not seeing a brand but the voice for a brand. This means you can offer personal takes on issues and generally tweet in normal everyday
language instead of corporate speak. - You can create an emotional bond with your target audience. When users associate tweets to a face long enough, the emotional bond begins to appear. When this happens, they are more likely to respond to marketing messages.
AGAINST
- It becomes an administrative hassle when the face on the profile is no longer with your business. For instance, if you run the Twitter account of your startup as the CEO, it may be difficult maintaining this when the brand
gets bigger and responsibilities increase. This will create the need for a new face, public announcements to usher in the new face and other administrative problems. - People can draw conclusions about a brand based on a face. Subjectivity is a strong factor when a face is representing a brand. People can draw inferences relating to age, appearance, race or sex. This may or may not affect
the overall perception of the brand depending on the individual involved. - It could create the impression of a solo, small business. When there is a face to a business, some users can assume that the business is still growing and will thus be wary about conducting a certain level of business
with the brand.
What’s the Right Approach Then?
As you may have noticed from the arguments above, there is no right or wrong approach to this. The decision should be solely based on your brand ethos. Does your business plan support a firmly corporate appearance for your Twitter or a more
lax, personalised account? Look inwards and find the right solution.
A general tip for brands is to create a fully corporate business account and then use the personal accounts of staff members to push the business profile. Twitter users are likely to be more favourable to a brand if they know the individuals behind it.
Create a Brilliant Twitter Cover
The big question is how to make best use of the biggest piece of visual real estate on your Twitter profile – your cover photo! A cover photo can make a big difference for your business. It’s a powerful tool for brand promotion and user acquisition.
Many people waste this opportunity by filling that area with whatever fits. Instead, you should have a specific purpose and reason behind your cover photo.
Why is this important?
As a business, your target audience will form an opinion on your brand in the first few seconds of landing on your social media page. So be wise and grab their attention with an awesome Twitter cover.
The way you communicate your message (through text and image) could be the difference between landing a conversion (a follow or click through) and losing a prospect.
And you don’t want to miss the biggest opportunity for you to get people to click on your link, because your main objective on Twitter is driving sales.
Do you have an awesome Twitter cover? If not, take a look at how you can create one.
Use the Right Dimensions
The recommended dimension for your Twitter cover photo is 1500x500px. Following this guideline is important because the wrong dimensions could result in blurry images. With the right dimension, your Twitter cover will be crisp and clear both on mobile and on a desktop.
The approved file formats (for now), are GIF, PNG and JPG. There is no support for animated cover photos yet.
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Give Text the Back Seat
As a general rule, text is not recommended. The average social media isn’t going to read the text you have crammed into an image so why bother? There are plenty of other places within profile information to include relevant text.
The best Twitter cover photos are clean images devoid of texts battling for attention or ones with little, straight to the point heading.
For example the Uber’s cover photo clearly tells and is represented by bright colors and geometric patterns.
Give Thought to the Image
When someone new arrives on your Twitter profile, something about your profile needs to compel them to stick around.
Choose photos or illustrations that are striking and clear, with bright colors or bold contrast. The image should reflect the tone of your brand, whether you’re humorous, inspirational, tech-savvy, family-friendly, or adventurous.
Target’s cover photo perfectly complements and reinforces their brand logo with its interesting look and feel.
Images Don’t Always Have to Be Photographs
In the current visually charged environment, you could be missing out on a powerful Twitter cover if you are only waiting to use real life photographs. Depending on your business niche, illustrations and icons can serve an excellent purpose.
Top Inspiration for Your Twitter Cover Photography
Not sure about how to focus and give meaning to your Twitter cover photo? Here are top suggestions you can work with.
Season and Trends
You can create a Twitter cover photo that communicates your brand message but riding on the back of seasons and trends. Think about a retail business that designs a cover photo highlighting products that can be used for Christmas, winter or summer.
All such photography should feature your brand colours and overall corporate branding elements.
A lovely example is the Christmas spirit cover of Lego:))
Marketing Campaigns
Your Twitter cover photo area is prime advertising real estate. This is why you should consider making your cover photo an image that announces product launches for example or one that is used to communicate special offers to your profile
visitors. When going this route, don’t forget to avoid noisy imagery. Clear and short messages are vital.
Brand Personalisation
Think about it: Would you rather engage with a company that has a header image featuring a dozen of their happiest employees working together on a cool project, or one that relies on a plain blue rectangle to do the talking?
When your cover-photo is not just another product marketing image, you are telling your followers that you are more than just about a product. Seeing an authentic human face behind a product drastically reduces the emotional gap between a user
and a brand.
Show other Social Profiles
This is another interesting way to make use of the Twitter cover photo space. Create a design that puts together high definition shots of all your other social profiles for use as your Twitter cover photo. Do you have an app? It is also a great idea to include a shot of it in the collage. With this, you can get your Twitter profile visitors to follow your business on other platforms that might appeal to them more than Twitter.
Show Your Product in Use
Think about a sports shoe brand or a wearable tech brand using a neat photograph of people running or exercising as their Twitter cover photo. It is an excellent way to immediately show your audience how your products can fit into their lifestyle.
Show you expertise
If you own your niche, or you are an industry leader, your Twitter cover should show it. If you’ve written a book – share it. If you are a podcaster, you should say it clearly
Social proof
Social proof is essential decision maker and you can’t afford to ignore it. If you’ve been featured on magazines, have an impressive number of customers or subscribers to your mailing, use that on your Twitter cover. You’ve got enough space to impress your first time visitors.
Conclusion
Your Twitter cover photo is one of the most important elements of your profile. Give its design the right level of attention and use only targeted imagery to enjoy the benefits it holds.
To get a quick start, sign up for free for DesignPro and take a look at the pre-made design templates for Twitter cover.
How to craft a clever Twitter bio?
A Twitter bio is yet another important feature of your profile that will help you draw in the prospects. It might be a challenge, considering you only have 160 characters to explain who you are, what you do, and why your Twitter is worth following.
This chapter shows you how to write an attention grabbing Twitter Bio and give some awesome examples of clever bios.
Examples of Clever Bios on Twitter
Tell People Exactly What You Do In Your Bio
This may seem apparent but you would be surprised by the number of people who don’t tell explicitly what they do in their Twitter bios.
It can be hard for a writer to stand out among the sea of would-be writers in Twitter but Candice Walsh managed to do just that with her Twitter bio. She puts the two things that she’s known for as the first line of her bio
Show Your Sense Of Humor In Your Twitter Bio
Johnny Cupcakes is a popular Boston-based clothing brand and not a cupcake bakery, despite the name.
Their Twitter bio is a perfect example of the brand’s style of wit humour, which gave them a huge and active following.
Let your creativity flow and show your audience that you have a sense of humor.
Put a bit of Personality into Your Twitter Bio
Even though Skittles is a huge brand, they managed to add a bit of personality by using words such as “awesomeness” to describe their Twitter bio. It’s perfectly in line with their bright and colourful image.
Speak to your target audience
If you know your audiences well – who they are and what they are expecting from you, use this to your advantage.
Victoria’s Secret do a great job. Their Twitter bio states that it’s the place where “Angels, Bombshells & the sexiest followers” can get all their daily dose of sexiness from the lingerie company. Their fans can easily identify themselves in the brand message
Offer a lead magnet in your Twitter bio
Free online courses are a great lead magnet and a good way to build a list. What’s better place to attract peoples’ attention than the Twitter bio.
By offering users a free workshop, Melyssa Griffin managed to tell people about her work as a digital marketer while simultaneously including a link to her online course. Now that’s smart marketing right there!
Add a social proof in your Twitter Bio
The podcaster and digital guru Nathan Latka smartly talks about his career and how his The Top Entrepreneurs podcast has passed 4.5 million downloads in his bio. That’s a huge number and great social proof for anyone to check it out.
Are you ready to put your creativity side to work?
If so, first read a few more tips and mistakes to avoid while crafting your Twitter Bio
Highlight Intention
Why was your Twitter account created? The intention behind a business profile is most likely to spread the word about a brand and connect with the brand customers. Such a profile is not the place for a Twitter bio that discusses your love for football or rugby.
Talk about your business and why people should trust your brand. If you have worked with other brands, mention that. Include a link to your website but only in the part of the bio meant for website links. Multiple links in other parts of your bio will make it look too pushy.
Avoid Lies or Halftruths
Twitter as a platform is one where “calling outs” and “criticism” are perfectly normal. Avoid anything that automatically makes you a target. If your business can only serve locally, don’t include “nationwide delivery” in your bio. If you haven’t worked with a Fortune 500 company, don’t mention them. People will notice faster than you’ll expect and as a small business, you may never fully recover from the backlash that will follow.
Don’t Include Testimonials
Your bio is not the place to add testimonials. Your website (and occasional Twitter posts) are the right places to show off positive reviews about your brand. Your Twitter bio is the doorway to bring in people to those places.
Don’t Oversell Yourself
…But don’t sell yourself short either. Instead of calling your new catering business a “World Class Catering Service” for example, call it “A Vibrant Catering Business Serving the Bay Area”. The latter description talks exactly about your level without selling your brand short. This way, you can actually surprise with your service rather than underwhelm!
Conclusion
Your Twitter bio is a door to your profile and ultimately your brand. Be direct and persuasive while avoiding any claims that could take away from your brand.
How to Pin a Tweet and Why You Should?
Let’s start this discussion with the question “Why a pinned Tweet is so powerful in driving you a ton of traffic?”
Why You Should Pin Tweets
Pinned Tweet is one of the first things people will see when they come to see your profile. The number one area that people go to and click on is your very first tweet. That’s why it’s so powerful. That’s why you really want to control it.
Remember: what will turn your Twitter into business leads, traffic and dollars is HAVING A VERY GOOD PIN TWEET.
However, many people tend to overlook this. It is good to have an excellent profile and cover photos, as well as an excellently crafted bio but ignoring the option of pinned tweets is missing out on branding/marketing opportunities.
When you pin tweets, you are automatically increasing the number of engagements on that particular tweet. Normally, tweets disappear from people’s timeline as the day passes. So a tweet from two days ago (no matter how catchy) will likely be forgotten in 48 hours except for when it has generated many Retweets and Likes. Even in such a scenario, the interactions will most likely stop coming in after a short period of time.
Pinning that particular tweet, however, ensures that new people discovering your profile for the first time can still see that same tweet. People that already know about your profile can also be reminded.
The resulting effect is more clickthroughs and interactions.
What is a Pinned Tweet
A pinned tweet is a tweet that is “glued” to the top of your profile. Every visitor to the profile immediately sees it. It is possible to pin any tweet you have ever posted in the past and it will immediately go to the top of your profile. It will remain there, with all new tweets appearing under it, until you pin a different tweet.
How to Pin a Tweet
The process of pinning a tweet is straightforward. After you have published the tweet, take the following steps.
- Find the tweet
- Look for the downward pointing arrow to the extreme top right. Click on it.
- In the resulting dialogue box, choose the Pin to Profile option
- Refresh your profile to be sure the action was completed.
The process is the same when you want to unpin a tweet. Simply choose the unpin tweet option in the dialogue box.
It is important to note that pinning a tweet is not the same as reposting it. The time of tweet publishing won’t change so people aren’t going to see the tweet reappear on their timeline. They can only see it when they visit your timeline again.
What Makes A Good Pinned Tweet?
Now that you have learned how to pin tweets, it is time to consider what makes a good pinned tweet.
The two musts of a good pinned tweet:
1. A good photo/image
If you are not using image, your tweet takes so little space that it’s hard to be seen. People love images. They are extremely powerful.
The image in the example above is simple and the message is clear. It says it all.
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2. A great offer
It doesn’t matter what your business does, you should give your Twitter visitors something of value. So that they are going to click on it and then give you their email address (lead generations), listen to your podcast or YouTube video training; come to your retail store, or to your service business website.
Think carefully!
What tweets can be pinned?
The goal of your Twitter account will go a long way in determining what tweets can be pinned. Many brands use pinned tweets to create awareness, boost website traffic, increase engagement, generate more leads and more. This section looks at some great examples of Tweets that can be pinned:
Highlight a recent blog post
If you have a blog post that has gained lots of traction in recent times, it might qualify as one of your best work yet and should definitely be shown off to first time visitors to your profile.
Pin your most popular tweet
No better way to show off your Twitter clout than pinning your tweet with the most interactions. This is popular across private Twitter accounts but many brand accounts are going with this trend. Show off a tweet with 50+ interactions (Retweets and likes). If people are engaging with the tweet because they liked it, new visitors to your profile will equally like it. Additionally, Twitter users feel better about following people or brands they can regard as influencers.
Pin your product (or service)
If your brand sells any product or service, your pinned tweet section is a great place to use as a constant reminder. A good tip is to avoid generic posts as your bio (if done correctly) should already state what you do. Go deeper with the product mention.
Showcase your followership or subscriber base
If you have a healthy social proof, create a custom picture that shows this off and pin it to your profile. No better way to show off your brand power than to let profile visitors know that you have thousands of followers spread across several platforms. This will automatically enhance your trust score in the eyes of a prospect, increasing chances of straightforward progression through the conversion funnel.
Showcase a Testimonial
Potential customers always want to see what other people think about your products or services. Pin positive testimonials. Got lots of tweet testimonials? You can combine them into a two minute video collage.
Show off a case study
Do you have a carefully crafted case study that shows off how a customer was satisfied with your product or service? Showing it off works wonders in terms of increasing customer trust. Such case studies belong to your pinned tweet section. If you’ve got a few of them change things up once in a while. Use a new case study every fortnight but with catchy introductions that trigger interest.
Pin Twitter Cards to Generate Leads
A twitter card that is designed to collect contact details from profile visitors works great for the pinned tweet section. When properly designed, users can sign up for your offers straight from the tweet without visiting your website. This works great because the shorter the process a customer has to go through in the process of handing out details, the higher the chances of them providing it.
Pin an upcoming event
This could be an upcoming webinar or an upcoming promotional sale. Pinning the tweet announcing it is a great way to bring more attention to it and increase the number of respondents or attendees. Other events you can pin are offline meets or a Twitter Q&A session.
Pin Questions
Social media users like to get on puzzles and questions so you can use it to boost engagement rates. Ask thought provoking questions and, to sweeten the deal and push interactions through the roof, add a giveaway for correct answers. A good way to know questions that will resonate with your followers is to delve into your Twitter analytics to find niches that are of the most interest to them.
Pin a Poll
If you have a poll that needs more attention, pinning the tweet is a great way to do just that. Twitter users are always ready to offer their opinion on a poll as long as the topic is one that they can relate to.
Show off the human side of your brand
It could be a video of your employees at a cook out or a collection of images showing the faces of your employers at work. Such tweets go a long way in creating a bond between you and your followers.
Chapter Two
Content is King
Research Your Competition & Grow Twitter following
Competitors. Admit it or not, they’re out there and they’re working hard to steal your customers. While it might seem unfair, you might want to consider devoting the time and energy into keeping an eye on your competition, find their strong and weak sides, what work for them and then apply that into your Twitter strategy to outstrip them.
In this chapter we’ll discuss how to research your competitors on Twitter and how to grow your Twitter following with real and targeted audience. The more targeted your audience is, the more rapidly your Twitter account will grow, the better marketing results you will get.
So read carefully.
How can you find your target audience?
If you are a fitness instructor for example, you want to build a follower base of people who are interested in fitness, right?
Twitter Advanced Search is the first place to go:
You can type in anything that you want. Let’s take the hashtag #fitness for example
You will be sent to the Top tab that is showing all discussions going on around social media, but what interests us more is to see who is talking about fitness LIVE (see the Latest tab):
If you go down through the suggested tweets, you will see people who are having discussions using this hashtag. You can easily see what people are talking about, what type of content they are posting and what hashtags they are using to reach their targeted audience.
Write down all that information because it will be useful for you not only to pick the hashtags, you will use to grow your twitter, but you will get a clearer idea of what you should tweet about. (As you know, you need to keep a steady flow of tweets every day)
Do you know who the influencers in your business niche are?
This tool knows the answer. Go to http://www.rightrelevance.com/ and type in fitness. The tool suggests some relevant keywords and searches. Choose fitness instructor for example.
Then click on the Influencers tab
And then click on Person:
This page shows the influencers in your business niche – what they tweet and what keywords/hashtags they use.
Take a look at Other related topics as well:
Related topics actually are other keywords that you might want to use and explore. Look down them.
You see the words Bodybuilding, Diets, Weight Management, etc. Some fit well your business niche, other do not. Weight Management is a very good example. Most people who are looking for fitness trainer, they are also interested in losing weight, right?
But now let’s get back to the suggested influencers in the fitness field. The first name is Tony Horton. Click on his name and you will find out more about him and the topics he talks about. If you click on his Twitter handle, you will be directed to his Twitter profile.
It’s going to bring you to Tony Horton profile. So when you look down, you can start seeing all of the awesome content Tony shares and the hashtags he uses. Write your findings and thoughts on your worksheet.
Another area to take a look at is Tony Horton’s followers.
What many people do is blindly follow the followers of their competitors or the influencers in their niche. If it sounds like a good idea to you, let me explain why it is not and what you need to do instead.
More often than not, the followers might not be active on Twitter. They may not really take time to put on their headshot and Twitter cover or fill out their bio. (These are all attributes of an active account.) They might have just a few followers and a couple of tweets.
In fact, if your followers are not active, they are not going to see your tweets, right? This means that following the followers of other people isn’t a very good strategy all by itself.
You could still follow the followers of your competitors, but only those you make sure are actively using their Twitter profile.
Twitter has over billion people signed for the platform, but only 3 million are using it actively each month.
If you want your Twitter profile to have a real marketing impact on your business, you should make sure that the people who are following you are active and will engage with the content you are going to share with them.
Let’s face it. If you need to go to the profile of every Twitter user and consider if it’s active or not, if they might find your business interesting or not, you will have to spend couple of hours on Twitter on Twitter to grow you following.
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Do the homework. Find the answers to crucial questions:
Who are the influencers in your niche and what keywords/hashtags they use when tweeting.
Who are the bloggers in your niche? What type of tweets they post and how frequently?
Research your competitors. What do they post? What is their audience interested in?
Try to find some of your customers on Twitter. What are they doing? What they like? What can you do to appeal to them?
Answering all the above questions will serve as a foundation of your Twitter Content strategy. So take your time, it’s important!
Create an Effective Twitter Content Strategy
Simply put, an effective Twitter content strategy is one that delivers a steady stream of tweets that can capture and possibly retain the attention of a Twitter user. On the surface, a Twitter content strategy should cover the following:
- Share information about your brand that is useful for current and potential followers
- Share information that helps build confidence in your business
- Show any profile visitor that you have interest in others and communicate effectively through questions, responses and general engagement
- Share links to posts from your website or posts to other relevant content in your niche
- Shows excellent customer service
- Regular posting schedule
How Often Should You Be Tweeting?
If you’d like to join the top 12% of Twitter users that generate billions of impressions a day, you need to be tweeting 15-17 times a day. Before you run off, however, you need to understand that audiences are unique. While a multimedia brand can get away with tweet 20+ times a day, a startup brand selling a specific product might end up getting muted or unfollowed for doing the same thing.
Before you settle for a specific number of tweets, go back to your Twitter Audience Insights. This will show you the breakdown of your audience based on a wide range of metrics. After the analysis, you can decide if a certain number of tweets will be too much for them or not. An audience made up of largely 35+ year olds might be less fussy about multiple tweets from a startup brand compared to a younger demographic.
Even when you decide to tweet 10+ times, your analytics will show you focus points to tweet from to avoid losing followers.
A good rule is to start off with 5-7 tweets per day, sent out at the most optimum times, then slowly work your way up to the 15-17 tweets range. As you change the numbers, keep an eye on how your various tweet number changes your metrics. If you find out that 5-6 quality tweets do better than 10-15 tweets laced with fillers, stick to the former.
One last important point you should keep in mind, avoid leaving gaps. Consistency is vital when it comes to Twitter. You are only as relevant as your last tweet.
Elements of a good tweet
Writing a Tweet is easy. Learning to write a Tweet that inspires action and gets people to click through to your content is a whole different story.
Unlike other major social media site, there is literally no limit to the number of people you can reach with Twitter marketing. That means there is virtually no limit to the amount of traffic you can drive to your site using the platform.
So it’s time to learn how to post tweets that will get those valuable clicks.
Simple, clear message – create curiosity
Twitter may have recently increased the character count to 280 but this doesn’t in any way reduce the importance of brevity in tweets. All your tweets should have one key element that is readily visible in the first sentence. A good percentage of the most retweeted tweets you will encounter on a day to day basis are often below the 140 character limit, never mind 280. Compress everything and use the fewest possible words.
Make sure the first few words, which are basically the title of your tweet, are as curiosity inducing as possible. There dozens of tweets appearing on every timeline per second. Give your target audience a compelling reason to read yours.
Here is a great example of a tweet that gets clicks:
Is someone you know and love struggling with worry? My #WorryNoMoreBook can help bring peace: https://t.co/fKH2UWBIGR pic.twitter.com/lpRGRbzacZ
— Bruce Van Horn (@BruceVH) February 10, 2018
Bruce started out explaining who this book is for and what problem it will solve – readers will learn how to bring peace in their lives. And who doesn’t want that? Stress is a huge problem.
The message is reinforced with the image showing not only the book itself, but a lit candle jar. Lit candles symbolize peace, balance and harmony.
So now you are fully convinced (on a rational and emotional level) that you want to read this book, right?
Good image reinforcing the text
Images bring words to life. Images act on an emotional level and give more meaning to the text.
It is no surprise that tweets with images are twice as likely to get shared over tweets without images. This is not to say that you should flood your timeline with image laced tweets. You will lose that edge. If you share 50 tweets a week, do not add images to 5-7 of them and compare results. Testing, testing, testing – every marketer knows that this is the only way to success.
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Use hashtags to boost the visibility of your tweets
Wise use of hashtags works a great deal.
Don’t use too many hashtags.
Do not use a hashtag in every tweet.
Do not use long made up hashtags either as this immediately highlights your inexperience in Twitter usage.
A good tip with hashtags is to only use it for one or two keywords in your Tweet. This will make it easy for people in your niche to find the tweet when they use the search function.
Additionally, go through trending hashtags from time to time and construct relevant tweets around them. It can lead to increased impressions for your profile.
Short URLs & Google Analytics
Use Bit.ly to shrink the links in your tweet. Twitter does a decent job at automatically shortening links but you can’t leave it to them. A short URL makes the tweet neater and less salesy.
Whta’s more, Bit.ly and Google Analytics help measure the impact of your tweet. They will give you information how many people have actually taken the required action – visit your site, buy a product, or give their email in an exchange of something you gave them for free.
If you go to your browser and place your Bit.ly link and put a + after it, you will be able to see useful stats about this tweet.
If you have Google Analytics set on your site, I strongly advise you to track your links. You will find more on the topic in chapter 3.
Tag people
That’s not mandatory. It’s just an option to keep in mind. You can tag people, if you think it’s relevant and you want to make a connection with them. Tagging influencers is used by many to get more exposure. So it’s worth giving it a try and see if this tactic will work for you, too.
What Should You Share?
What should be the makeup of your tweets? The secret is simple: you need diversification and you need to post constantly.
You need to mix up content – blog posts, quotes, promotions, product reviews, ebooks, testimonials. It’s all about mixing it up and make it the whole day.
I hope this doesn’t scare you. In the next chapter, we will discuss how to share your own content on Twitter spending 3-4 hours per month with a consistent system that will drive you traffic.
Product Advertisements
You are on Twitter to bring more attention to your brand. Advertise your products and services in tweets. Create nice images around them to increase the overall appeal.
Get Customer Feedback
From time to time, you can ask your customers what they think about your brand or where they think you can improve. However, this is only effective when you have built a healthy follower base. If you ask for feedback without any responses, it is a negative social signal.
Reply to Enquiries
…Or give attention to positive tweets. Your customers love it when you respond to their messages. Take out time to respond to as many mentions as possible. When you find a negative mention, do not ignore. Do your best to address the problem.
Join Trending Hashtags
Every day on Twitter, different hashtags makes it to the trending topics page. Go through them and find those that are relevant enough to be tapped into. You may need to be witty to tie your business to the hashtag and you have to absolutely get it right. Failure to do so, it will come out as forced.
Talk about offers
Do you have any special events coming up? Are you organizing promotional sales? Have you just launched a new product? Get your followers talking about it by announcing it.
Share motivational quotes
This works best for brands in media or advocacy but regardless of your niche, you can find quotes that will resonate with your target audience. Make sure all quotes you share are in line with your brand’s ethos.
Announce job openings
Your Twitter timeline is one of the best places to talk about job openings in your business. Apart from the fact that it makes it easy for potential employees to find the position when they use the search function, other users sharing the job opening is a way to spread the word about your brand.
Talk about brand achievements
One of the best ways to use Twitter as a brand is to cultivate the feeling trust within the ranks of your target audience. One of the best ways to achieve this is to advertise any awards and accomplishments achieved by your brand. It will improve the level of trust and credibility for your brand.
Share Niche News and Current Events
You can tweet about all the latest happenings around your niche. It is the perfect way to show that your brand is connected to its roots, is committed to relevance and is committed to developing trends.
Hold Promotions and Contests
Your followers will always be up for a contest. Tweet about contests with worthy prizes at the end and you are almost near certain to generate buzz.
Take full advantage of this, even when your profile has become popular. A contest where people have to follow your brand, retweet a tweet or take pictures with your product is a great way to ramp up the impressions for your Twitter profile.
Apart from the obvious advertising appeal, contests are an excellent way to build a connection between you and your fans.
Retweet Tweets from Your Customers and Influencers
On Twitter, you don’t have to always come up with original content. If you have been mentioned in a positive tweet by a follower, simply retweet. You get to use free, unsolicited positive comments to build your social signal a bit further.
You can also consider retweeting epic content from influencers. That will make your account trustworthy.
Get Playful
This is dependent on your assumed social media language. However, some of the most influential brand profiles on Twitter are those that know how to blend the corporate speak with some wit and fun. Find a way to connect jokes to your products from time to time.
Divulge Relevant Brand Information
You can talk about your brand history, partnerships and anything else you can think of. Your follower base can relate more to your brand when they have such knowledge.
Share Behind the Scenes Information
Once in a while, show off the human faces behind your brand. A short video showing a normal day at the office, a video showing products getting delivered to a happy customer, a brief video of a staff dinner party and any other such images you have can go a long way to build a bond between your brand and your social media followers.
Build a Twitter Content Calendar The Easy Way (plus FREE planner)
Creating a Twitter content calendar from scratch is one of those tasks that seems ridiculously complicated at the beginning but once you put the groundwork, you will see that it will take you less and less time in the weeks to come.
You already know that you should be tweeting on a daily basis. But do you know that individuals who make millions of impressions and are driving HUGE traffic from Twitter, are actually those individuals who tweet more frequently?
They typically tweet 6-7 times more frequently than the rest 80% of the folks on Twitter. And they are not driving 6 or 7 times more traffic as you can assume. Actually they are driving 40x more traffic. Can you imagine that?
For you to get the same result you should actually spend some time to set a consistent system to drive that traffic and this FREE Planner will help you devise one.
It’s time to organize your tweets with a comprehensive social media calendar. Here’s how:
- Download the template below. It’s a free Excel spreadsheet, pre-built with everything you’ll need.
- Learn how to use it by following the tips in this post. We’ll walk through the entire workflow that will help you get more done in less time.
Let’s get started.
Grab the FREE Excel Twitter Planner
It’s time for a handy Excel planner to help you plan your social media updates and create the images for them. This planner has space for ideas, planning, tips and tricks for creating visual content easily and quickly – even if you are not a designer or a marketer. It’s the one I use with my team, so grab your copy now and refer to it while you read this blog post.
The Goal of a Twitter Content Calendar
A Twitter content calendar is meant to help you plan all Twitter activities well in advance. Pre-scheduled social media content will become your new best friend. Some people prefer to get it all set for a week, other for the whole month. It’s up to you to decide what approach suits you best.
The benefit of using the calendar format, rather than just a long list of content to be published, is that you can visualize how your content is distributed. This allows you to:
- plan content around key events in your industry, important dates, or big holidays;
- mix up different content types for better results;
- see where you have gaps in your plan.
If you combine your Calendar with a scheduling tool like SmartPublisher, you will soon see how efficient and effective this solution could be. SmartPublisher will add a level of automation (plus other powerful features) that spreadsheets can’t match.
HOT TIP: At the beginning, a week ahead planning is the right way to go. Why? You still do not know what will work and what will not. You need to test things out. Create a posting schedule for a week and at the end of the period, you will be able to assess the results of your efforts and based on your conclusions to plan out the next week.
Remember, with the help of SocialGrowth you will get a steady stream of new followers every day and with the right planning of the content you will get those targeted users to buy your products, click on your posts or subscribe to your email lists. As with everything else, building relationships takes time. So just keep going.
Building a Content Calendar in Four Easy Steps
Below is a simple 4 step system that will help you create your calendar with ease.
Step 1: Identify your topics
To turn your Twitter into marketing machine, all you need is diversification. If you’re only pushing your own content, you’re unlikely to drive much engagement. The same is true if you’re only publishing one type of content.
You need to mix up the content and schedule it to get posted regularly throughout the day – blog posts, quotes, promotions, product reviews, ebooks.
Here’s what your content mix might look like:
Look at your business. What are your key selling points? What’s your unique value proposition? Do you have customer testimonials or product reviews? Any social proof? What’s your best selling product or service? Do you offer free webinars? Free trials/samples?
Answering all those questions will give you an idea of the content you want to post regularly because it’s essential for your business to drive traffic to it. This is where your money comes from.
- Landing pages where you capture leads, offer freebies, or sell an ebook
- Promotion of products, services, free trials, or samples
- Showcasing customer testimonials
You can’t just post promotional stuff and expect people to stay engaged with your company. As you already know, mixing up different content types is what works on Twitter. Here are a few examples:
- Quotes
- Data (Infographics, statistics)
- Blog posts
- Video (hot, hot, hot!)
- Gifs/Memes
- Behind the Scenes (a look into your business)
- Tips and How-To’s
- Questions
Three Tips For Keeping Your Twitter Calendar Full
Keeping your calendar full can be hard. However, there are some tips you can follow to make it easier.
Write Multiple Posts Promoting One Article Or Product
You have an awesome blog post or web page to promote. Consider writing multiple messages and creating a couple of images for that one page. This can cut down on the number of links you need to share.
Reuse Messages
Consider resharing your best posts on an ongoing basis on your calendar. With SmartPublisher, you can save time and schedule those posts to go live on different days and times of the day.
Curated Content
Retweet other’ people content. That’s the best way to keep your feed filled with valuable content that will appeal to your audience. If you wonder how to find relevant tweets to retweet, you can use TwitterGrowth to give you suggestions for tweets that are relevant to your market. You can go every day to your TwitterlGrowth and retweet the ones you think are insightful and will spark interest.
Step 2: Create the content
It’s time to prepare a bunch of eye catching posts with well-crafted copies.
Write Your Post Message
If you don’t want to write your posts directly into your spreadsheet, use Word, Google Docs, or whatever you like. Lay out your document like this:
Post 1 Message: [ENTER POST]
Post 1 Image: [INSERT IMAGE NAME OR URL]
Post 1 Link: [INSERT URL]
Post 2 Message: [ENTER POST]
Post 2 Image: [INSERT IMAGE NAME OR URL]
Post 2 Link: [INSERT URL]
Continue until you’ve completed all your posts for the week.
Create your image
Next, you’ll need to discuss your ideas with your designer and get their creative input.
If you do not have a designer, you can create awesome images yourself with DesignPro – intuitive graphic design tool for non-designers.
Step 3: Fill out your Calendar
Now let’s explore how to use the calendar step-by-step. If you haven’t downloaded it yet, you can do so now:
The calendar is an Excel file that you can either download to your desktop or upload to Google Sheets (TIP: a great option if you collaborate with other people)
Enter a starting date
When you open the Twitter calendar, the first thing you need to do is update the date. After you enter the starting date, your calendar will be set for the next 7 days automatically. You can always add more days, if you need.
You can enter the date in different formats, Excel will recognize it. For example you can type in “1 mar 2018”, or “01-03-2018” or even just “mar 2018”.
Add All Your Content Onto Your Calendar
You have already prepared all the content for the week. It’s time to place it all on the calendar.
There are several different colored tabs at the bottom of the spreadsheet. Each of those tabs is dedicated to a specific content type and is color-coded for easier recognition.
Here’s a quick breakdown of each type:
- Holidays – Here you can list all upcoming holidays that are relevant to your business.
- Campaigns – If you plan running a 7 day campaign for a holiday you can plan each days leading to the holiday itself.
- Evergreen – all your best performing posts will be here. Make sure to republish them regularly.
- Content – list of interesting content worth sharing with your fans
- Products – promotional posts for your own products
- Engage – list all funny and engaging post ideas here. It is important to keep your fans engaged.
- Other – in this section you can add all content that don`t fit in the other categories – like webinars, eBooks, ect.
You might not need all those tabs. It depends on the types of content you plan to post. You can always customise the tabs based on your own your preferences.
Now you should enter your content.
In the example above, the selected tab is Holiday and the content is a tweet related to Valenine’s day. All necessary fields are filled out: the date it should go live, message, link and image.
Repeat as necessary until you’ve entered all your content. Follow this same process for every post you create.
Twitter Calendar Planning
Once you added all your content, it’s time to start planning the different time slots.
For that purpose, you should go to the “Twitter Calendar” tab where you can see an overall snapshot of your upcoming Twitter posts. It’ll help you keep organized and coordinate with other collaborators.
Planning ahead
Your first step is to plan what content type you will publish in each time slot. In order to do that you need to simply copy a cell with the content type color and paste it in the “type” column for the time slot you want.
Once you have planned the type of content, you need to populate your calendar with the actual posts for any of the time slots. In order to do that you just:
- open the content type tab (or click on the link from the right navigation)
- copy the piece of content you like
- go back to the “Twitter Calendar” tab (or use the “BACK TO THE CALENDAR” button)
- paste the content in the desired time slot
Reap that step until you’ve planned all time zones for the week.
And voila! Your calendar is ready.
Step 4: Schedule Your Tweets For a Week Ahead
The final step is publish your tweets. One best way to approach this task is schedule all your tweets for a week ahead with a scheduling tool like SmartPublisher . It’s easy and fast. And it saves tons of time.
Chapter Three
Measure, Tweak and Adjust
Measure Social Media Success With Google UTM Tags
Believe it or not, putting Google Analytics to work for you is not a complicated task. Actually, it’s quite simple and we’ll prove it.
But first, here’s why you should care: as you know metrics like engagement (shares, retweets, likes, and comments) are important but what matters most is the traffic that comes to your landing pages, products or services.
Do you know your best social media post that’s driving the maximum traffic and business to your website?
Most probably not. But you should.
Certainly, you are keeping tabs on various referral sources inside your Google Analytics (GA) reports. But, think. Wouldn’t it be better to have an advanced tracking option that gives you in-depth data regarding every post you share on social media?
That’s where Google tracking parameters come into play…
What are UTM (Urchin Tracking Module) parameters?
Kissmetrics has a very concise description:
“UTM parameters are simply tags that you add to a URL. When someone clicks on a URL with UTM parameters, those tags are sent back to your Google Analytics for tracking.”
To make it clearer, here is how a url with tags looks like:
How to generate custom URLs for social media campaigns with Google’s URL builder?
The first thing we need to do is create the links with unique UTM parameters. There are several ways you can do this but the most apparent is with Google’s URL builder.
It’s a simple form that you can complete (see the screenshot below) to set up your URLs.
Here are the 6 form fields that you need to complete:
- Website URL – this is the URL of the exact page you want to track. This might be for example the landing page where you offer your free ebook. Make sure you enter the entire URL of the page.
- Campaign Source – this is the referrer (where the traffic is coming from). So it could be Facebook, Twitter, MailChimp, etc.
- Campaign Medium – this is marketing medium, such as social media, a sidebar ad, pay-per-click, affiliate, etc.
- Campaign Name – this identifies the specific campaign you want to track. Like a specific product promotion for example.
The other two fields are optional and depend on the purpose of your campaign
- Campaign Term – You’ll use this mainly for tracking your keywords during a paid AdWords campaign or in your display ad campaigns to identify aspects of your audience.
- Campaign Content – this is a helpful metric when A/B testing ads/posts to differentiate the different parameters you are testing. You can also use it to differentiate links that point to the same URL.
If you are still a bit confused, we’ll use a simple example of A/B testing on Twitter with UTMs. Let’s pretend we want to measure the click-through rates to a blog post from Tweets. We will test a tweet with a simple image versus the same tweet with a short video.
Cleaning Up UTM Links with a link shortener
Once you’ve generated a custom URL, we recommend that you shorten them, using tools like bit.ly or Google Link Shortener. A long and bulky URL looks a bit spammy and does not make for a good user experience.
Track your UTM links inside a spreadsheet
Yes, I know it’s a tedious task, but keeping a record of the tagged links will ensure that you will never miss a thing. When you look into your Google Analytics you will be able to easily recognize every single campaign, so just grab this free spreadsheet template by Sam Wiltshire or this free link tagging tool by Rafflecopterto get started.
How to find the UTM data in Google Analytics and measure the results
Log in to your Google Analytics account and then from the left sidebar go to “Acquisition” > “Campaigns” > “All Campaigns”
By default you will see your traffic separated by “Campaign Name”.
If you want to dive deeper to see the source and the medium for each campaign, you need to go to “Secondary dimension” > “Acquisition” > “Source / Medium”
Now you can see the source, medium and the campaign name on the same screen ordered by the amount of traffic they have brought.
Conclusion
Start posting your content with UTM parameters and you will soon get extremely valuable insights about your traffic. Armed with that data, you can adjust your marketing efforts according to what works and what doesn’t.
Your next step is to tweak your posts and refine your overall marketing strategy until you boost your sales significantly.