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Twitter For Business

Twitter – Best Practices for Business

Post #1 of 6 in the series: Social Media Best Practices

According to Digital Insights, Twitter has over 255 million active monthly users and over 1 billion total users sending out 500 million tweets per day. 78% of Twitter’s active users are on mobile devices and 46% use it at least once per day. With Twitter usage on the rise, we have compiled some tips and tricks to optimize the use of Twitter for business. This is the first in a series of best practice posts with tips for other channels coming soon.

1. Determine the business objectives specific to Twitter. Twitter can be used for many different objectives. Here are a few: post news and information, share promotions or deals, share photos/videos/owned content, drive users to an event, deliver location specific information and much more.

Porsche Social Media2. Combine interesting and engaging content with a unique tone that encourages others to connect. A great way to make sure tweets are engaging is to use images, videos and links.

3. Create a calendar. Keep tweets under 140 characters, shorten links and be consistent and timely. Calendars can include promotions, special information about your business or staff members, customer spotlights and testimonials, tips & tricks, sharing news and events. Here is some additional information and examples for content calendars.

4. Engage with others. Utilize Favorites, Retweets, Direct Messages, Twitter Cards and @reply to get your brand out there and connect with users. Follow accounts that are interesting to you or your business. Participate in trending topics and join global conversations.

5. Add Value. It is not always easy to provide real value to anWhole Foods Social Media audience. Several brands have gotten this right. Whole Foods is a great example. @WholeFoods has over 3.8 million followers. They consistently tweet valuable content including recipes, videos, quick dinner ideas, organic food tips and more. As a result, they get many retweets and shares.

6. Utilize tools. Twellow and Followerwonk help identify like-minded users. Xobni and Rapportive integrate directly with mail tools like Outlook and Gmail. Tweetdeck, BufferApp and Hootsuite can help with scheduling posts, moderating and managing Twitter.

7. Calls to action are key. When posting tweets, consider the action you want the user to take and ask for it. Charity Water, a socially savvy non-profit, has leveraged Twitter heavily in raising over $15 million in three years. They frequently include strong calls to action. Here is an example.

artifact social media8. Last but not least: Analyze. Use Twitter Analytics or third-party tools to gauge the value of the tweets you are publishing. Are people clicking, retweeting, and favoriting tweets? Are certain times of day more effective? How do weekends perform compared to weekdays? Is top Twitter a referrer of website traffic? This important information can help drive the optimization of Twitter as a marketing channel.