The huge number of Twitter followers have slowly and steadily taken over the social media space. Twitter’s monthly users have been raised to 330 Million in 2017, providing simple, spam-free and convenient features. Small businesses to large enterprises use Twitter to share information about their products and services regularly. However, Twitter use for marketing and especially for brand building remains hugely under-exploited. Apparently, the lack of quick results does not let people see its full value.
Learn quickly to stop focusing on the wrong things. It is noteworthy that this is the prime reason for not getting results. Therefore, do not treat your business handle as another personal profile on any social media channel. More presence on the platform does not guarantee heavy traffic. It is evident that a dormant account brings no results.
Always make an effective connection with the present and prospective customers, by following a well thought out strategy. This strategy results in brand introduction, as well as brand building. Though there are several suggestions available in public domain, the following strategies prove to be the most effective ones.
Strategy #1: Engage your audience and start with building traffic
Begin with deploying this strategy. It works if you are taking this route for the first time or have been getting limited traffic. Furthermore, use this strategy if you have been spending time commenting on each post but with no success yet. Although following posts is a well-known technique, we will discuss this later.
Create a professional looking profile to attract more Twitter followers
This must be your first step. Subsequently, make it speak of your business objectives concisely. Thereafter add information about your business. In addition, add a description to let people know who you are and what your purpose is. In any case, do not leave the profile or background image blank. With your profile description, create a brief, effective summary of your business. Include relevant keywords (for Twitter search) and a backlink to your site. Remember that a casual site visitor’s attention span is limited and they will only be attracted if the first look is catchy.
Starbucks twitter page rocks!
On the other hand, loosely done profile is a non-starter. The visitor’s interest is killed on the first look itself. Consider social media advertising like word of mouth advertising. In effect, it creates or destroys traffic by itself.
Keep your profile updated always
An outdated profile reflects badly on your professionalism. An updated profile reflects that you are alive in your business. Create a strong first anchor of engagement. A professional looking profile does all that.
Focus on posts which have a large followership
Some of the aspects in social media marketing can be drawn directly from the stock market. The stock market rides on sentiments. People in stock markets buy or sell stocks as per the market sentiment. Make use of this fundamental aspect in social media marketing. Ride on the power of post which have a large followership. The heavy flow will take you miles downstream. Enhance your visibility instantly. You are much more likely to succeed by leveraging. Some of available tools like BuzzSumo helps in achieving this. Focus heavily on posts which have already gone viral. Sequentially, this is the next step. It has been identified as one of the easiest tips for increasing traffic. Follow as many people in your industry as you can. As a result, this will enable you to connect with relevant people building a positive circle.
Create an online poll
There are various other ways of enhancing traffic. Besides several other ways exists for engaging present and prospective customers. One of them is creating online polls. Designing a simple poll is a simple task. Subsequently it can be administered on a wide variety of topics. In addition, administering an online poll is also an easy task. It does not take more than a click for the users to participate in a poll reflecting its convenience to participate. Conclusively improve your traffic algorithm by administering online polls. Furthermore, ensure even better engagement by automatically sending the results of such online polls.
This simple, funny and brand-oriented poll, posted by Evernote, is a great example of entertaining their customers, while correlating the brand with a huge advantage when using their services.
A clever way to make your customers think about your brand, understand it’s philosophy, increasing brand awareness at the same time!
Evernote Twitter Poll
The promotion schemes and doling out of gifts have proved to fetch returns on investments many time over. Try running a seasonal promotional campaign. Logically use the season’s theme.
Paying others to tweet about you
Well, it’s not a secret. Paying someone else to tweet about you is another time-tested method. This could be a strategic move to engage a wider customer base, but there are a few things you need to check out before having someone else tweeting about you.
Use video
Pictures speak louder than words. Furthermore, videos score better over pictures in communicating ideas. This is true on social media as well. The traffic levels are higher in picture posts while it is even higher in posts containing videos. Try posting pictures and videos to enhance traffic.
Use Call to Action
A Call to Action (CTA) is a must-have to move your audience from passivity. It compels your audience to act as per your goal. Typically, it is like throwing a bait and waiting for the fish to swim to it. Involve your audience by including CTAs in your tweet. As a result, you will get more traffic. Once a good traffic level is achieved, turn them into sales leads. Begin posting social messages, which speak to your customers. Your audience should find these messages informative, helpful and even exciting.
According to Twitter, one of the most effective call to actions is to ask for a download. Promoted Tweets in timelines that explicitly ask people to download accompanied by a link increase URL clicks by an average of 13%.
Strategy #2: Automate your posts
How good it would be, if a mechanism existed to automate our posts. A hugely popular trick with Bloggers used to be timing their posts for maximum visibility. One of the top Blog-master suggests publishing posts specifically on Thursday afternoons. This utilizes the availability of visitors over the weekend. This concept naturally flows from the world of movies. Movies are released on a specific day of the week. Time your posts, just like timing stock market, for maximum gains. There are tools available on the Internet which can do this for you. Besides, you can automatically recycle your popular posts. Use algorithms from Web- Tools like Post planner. The web automation frees you from drab work. Utilize this time in other activities even when your business is getting visibility even while you sleep.
Ask for retweets in your posts. While it may seem desperate for some, people would actually be happy to retweet if you ask them, if your content is valuable. In effect, you will gain more traffic by compounding. In fact, according to HubSpot’s “Science of Social Media” research, using the words “Please ReTweet” in your tweets will generate 4x more retweets.
Source: Hubspot
Finding loyal customers is automation in itself. Enhance your customer base by find loyal customers. A returning customer becomes your advertising agent and begets more traffic. The power which loyal customers can bring is immense. They are engines for generating traffic by themselves.
Strategy #3: Listen to your customers-ALWAYS
Remember that the basic objective of a strategic marketing campaign is to connect with your customers. Nowadays, customers expect you to be on social media. They are taking this route more often for customer support. An instantaneous 24/7 support is the need of the hour. Twitter provides a platform for real time communication both ways. You are notified as soon as a customer leaves a message. As a result, the customer gets a quicker reply. Strive to gather relevant information for making the best business decisions. Draw from to what your customers are saying. Nevertheless, all customer queries must be responded quickly. The customer service satisfaction is heavily affected by your response time.
Communication is a two- way process. Uphold your primary responsibility of closing the communication loop. Consider yourself to be the prime benefactor. Do not just keep posting. Care for your customer’s feedback. On the other hand, do not wait for people to come look for you. Always try reaching out to your audience. Send updates about your business. Create avenues to keep your customers engaged. Businesses investing in time to reach out and get personal with their customers typically have bigger success.
While working on your followers, make sure to analyse the competitor’s followers. You can see details about how frequently they post. Follow some of the people so that they follow you back.
Ask for a reply to your posts. Evidently, this is one of the CTAs mentioned earlier. Majority of your audience would be happy to reply, increasing your traffic.
An effective campaign establishes you as an Industry Leader and Influencer.
Strategy #4: Focus on Quality
Always do a proper homework before jumping the band-wagon. In comparison, the results between well prepared and not prepared is quite evident. A social media marketing Mission Statement must be in place before venturing out in this zone. The Mission Statement provides the direction of approach for a business. Logically, this is the basis of quality content on the social media platform.
Write a Mission Statement mentioning clear guidelines. Consequently, your unmindful followings must end. Especially relevant, do not allow further posting of direction-less contents.
Another important aspect is to follow the latest trends. Conclusively, trending up is on popular topics. Both have a close inter- relation with each other. Logically, ride with the flow to ride the popularity surf. High trending provides an insight into your market needs. It gives you direction for your next move. Twitter Analytics lets you analyze how many views and how much engagement your tweets are getting. When you look at your analytics, you can see what your audience responds to best (image posts, Hashtags, Videos, Links etc.). You need to constantly work on building your engagement levels. Studying and working on your Twitter account analytics will help you do this.
Most of all, clearly segregate various customer segments. Design your responses directed at different customer segments. As a result, give each segment a sense of attention.
Knowing your customer takes constant effort. You need to invest your time to understand their liking. The investment made in knowing your customer returns heavy profit over the time.
Notwithstanding any of the strategy suggestion above, it works only if you have a well laid out website as back-up. You cannot rely 100 percent on the posts alone. Your handle must lead to your business website. Even if the website is of one page. This website must reflect what you must offer to your audience.
CONCLUSION:
Social media marketing is not an option in today’s world. To begin with, it needs to be a Mission specific effort by an organization to best utilize the full power of the existing platforms. The phenomenal rise in the number of Twitter followers has made it noteworthy. Even in this space, some of the ground rules of customer engagement remains the same as in other online or offline platforms. The basis for a good campaign is a well laid-out website, even if a brief one. Probably building up traffic does not automatically translate to lead generation. Although enhancing your traffic is a first step.
The customers will remain engaged if they are constantly attended to. You need to attend them with a service mentality. A social media customer support is a 24/7 support. Adhere to this to be successful in this campaign.
However, it is the quality which makes you a Leader and Influencer. Quality is required in selecting your posts to segregation of your customer responses.
We hope that the above guidelines will come in handy to launch and effectively operate your social media marketing campaigns.
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