Your approach to Twitter can either make or break your marketing strategy. The least effective campaigns are nothing more than occasional tweets to update users on the latest product or service. On the other hand, some brands have mastered Twitter management to interact with followers in genuine, meaningful ways, leveraging user engagement for great benefit. These brands have figured out how to create effective Twitter marketing strategies without compromising brand essence.
As it turns out, there’s more to effective Twitter marketing than spending millions of dollars on social media marketing or relying on a legion of influencer connections. So how can lesser-known brands tap into Twitter management strategies in ways that are accessible to them?
What Is Twitter Management?
Twitter social media management is the process of overseeing and adapting your brand’s Twitter presence, and it encompasses account management, content creation, customer engagement, content creation, analytics, and more.
Why Twitter Strategies for Business Are Important
There are around 118 million business accounts on Twitter. Many of these are very active, creating a lot of noise. Brands that don’t have effective Twitter marketing strategies may simply be tweeting into the void rather than gaining followers, building authority, or forming important business connections. On the other hand, brands that develop and execute an informed strategy have a better chance of developing real relationships and eventually leveraging them into tangible gains.
How Do You Create a Twitter Management Strategy?
The first step to mastering Twitter management is understanding the platform and where your account currently stands. Then, you can find ways to create an effective strategy that integrates with your overall marketing goals.
Take Control of Your Accounts
Your business may already have a Twitter account. In fact, it may have multiple associated accounts since it’s fairly common for different departments to have their own accounts. For example, you might have a company-wide Twitter account, one for different stores or regions, and another for customer support. Before you can manage them effectively, you need to know what’s out there.
Once you take stock of your accounts, make sure you know the answers to the following questions:
- Who has the “keys” to each account?
- How often does each account tweet?
- Is the account a professional or official account?
- How many followers does the account have?
- What is the account’s engagement rate?
Now for the most important question: Are the Twitter accounts on brand? Does the tone, content, imagery, etc., align with what your brand has established as its persona? You may find outdated or irrelevant content within your accounts, particularly if someone has created a campaign or product-specific account.
Establish Twitter Marketing Goals
You’ll need to establish business goals to know that you’re making progress with your Twitter presence. You must clearly state these and associate tangible, measurable outcomes with each one. For example, if you want to increase your followers, determine a specific percentage by which you want to increase your follower account and over which period of time you want to accomplish this goal.
Conduct a Competitive Analysis
If you want your Twitter content strategy to be effective, you have to stand out. However, that’s nearly impossible if you don’t know what your competitors are doing to build engagement. It’s important to know how others succeed in content creation, follower engagement, and promotion. Then, you can determine which strategies may be adaptable to your own brand.
Create a Twitter Content Strategy Guide
To ensure that your team adopts consistent brand messaging, it’s important to set clear content policies to keep all creators on brand and prevent a potential reputation management crisis. You can look to your current brand style guide for a starting point, but remember that every platform is unique, so you’ll want to create specific guidelines just for Twitter.
Keep in mind that even with a thoroughly comprehensive and clear strategy, it’s still a good idea to implement an approval process that limits the number of people who have the authority to publish content. This will ensure that all content aligns with the brand’s values and voice.
Create Guidelines for Twitter Follower Management
Metrics like follows and retweets are important, but the real benefit of Twitter is the conversations that your content generates. An active comment section is a good thing. Of course, you don’t want discussions to get too off-topic or too heated, and that’s where Twitter follower management comes in.
Elements of a Twitter Follower Management Strategy
How do you manage your followers to avoid abuse and maintain brand safety while also encouraging interesting conversations? For one, you don’t want to rush in and delete every comment that is mildly critical of your brand. But you also don’t want to provide a platform for people with bad intentions to contribute nothing more than vitriol. As such, you’ll need a strategy for monitoring your engagement.
Rather than passively watching comment sections descend into off-topic banter, your strategy should include plans to participate in conversations and steer discussions in positive directions. After all, these conversations are the ideal place to build thought leadership, earn trust, and nudge people through the marketing funnel. Just be careful — if people feel like you’re using conversations to pitch your products or services, they may disengage.
Twitter Content Planning
Content planning on Twitter can be a bit complicated. On one hand, Twitter is all about taking advantage of trending topics and finding a way to make those relevant to your brand. So to some extent, your content strategy will need to be flexible so you can maximize opportunities to create engagement.
On the other hand, you don’t want to just wait for trending news to make an appearance. Like any other social media platform, consistency counts, so you have to show up every day with something interesting to share. Many brands accomplish this by using content calendars, allowing them to plan future tweets. You can also use tools to automate your tweets to ensure you don’t miss a beat.
Pay Attention to Twitter Analytics
Once your Twitter strategy is up and running, you’ll need to track your progress regularly. The best way to do that is by using analytics tools that are connected to your accounts. Keep your marketing goals in mind as you review the data that is relevant to you.
Twitter offers its own tools for business accounts, but you can also use third-party tools. These are especially handy if you need to track multiple accounts, allowing you to analyze the entirety of your Twitter presence through a single dashboard.
Maximize Features that Are Designed for Marketing
Twitter has built-in features that you can use to create a consistent, engaging presence. Here are a few that you can integrate into your strategy:
Build Your Community with Twitter Circle
Twitter Circles allows you to create a small, exclusive circle of up to 150 people. This is a great way to engage with industry influencers or create a space for VIP customers, generating more excitement about your brand.
Join the Crowd with Twitter Communities
Communities are spaces that may be built around a specific topic to generate discussion among members. You can join existing communities or create your own, but keep in mind that there isn’t a lot of direct promotion happening in these spaces, and they mostly exist for sharing ideas and experiences. Still, these are valuable if you want to develop thought leadership.
Go Viral with Twitter Trends
Twitter trends let you know which hashtags, topics, and search terms are generating a lot of traffic and discussion. Keep track of these so you can act quickly when something comes up that is in your niche.
Twitter Lists
A Twitter list is a feed based on accounts that you have decided are relevant to your brand or a particular topic. However, keep in mind that your lists are public, so if you want to create a list for competitive research, you should do that from a private account.
Strategy Is Key to Successful Twitter Marketing
The nature of Twitter encourages people to jump in and share whatever comes to mind. That’s great for personal accounts, but your approach to marketing needs to be a bit more measured and thoughtful. Getting a handle on Twitter social media management is a great first step.
However, if you want to maximize the impact of your strategy and use Twitter to achieve your organizational goals, you’ll want to dig a bit deeper. Start by staying on top of emerging social media trends. Then, contact Galactic Fed to explore how our experts can help you with your social media marketing efforts.
