Twitter is one of the most popular social media platforms, and represents an opportunity for you to grow your brand following and connect with potential customers and industry peers. Its fast paced, conversationally driven format makes it perfect for engaging with people in an informal way, and to develop brand awareness, as well as drive real business ROI by turning it into a channel that drives web traffic and sales conversions. Follow these strategies below to add Twitter marketing to your brand’s strategy:

1. Understand the Anatomy of a Tweet

Tweets are social posts on Twitter, and understanding their makeup is critical for leveraging the opportunities they present. This includes understanding the ability to include hashtags, videos, and location tags, as well as recognizing their limitations like the 250 character count limit and the relatively short period of time they appear in people’s newsfeeds.

Learn more about the anatomy of a Tweet in this blog post: "The Anatomy of a Tweet - Twitter Marketing Tips"

2. Setup a Twitter Profile for Your Brand

Even if you already have a personal Twitter profile, setting one up for your brand is the first step to leveraging Twitter to help it grow. Follow the simple steps of choosing a Twitter handle with your brand name, filling out your bio to explain to profile visitors what your brand is and what they can expect from it, and filling out other key fields like your brand’s website URL, and uploading a profile image and cover image.

Alternatively, if you are using Twitter for personal branding instead of branding for a company, consider these "10 Content Ideas For Building Your Personal Brand On Twitter"

3. Use a Social Media Automation Platform

Social media automation platforms like Sprout Social, Buffer, and HootSuite. The main features of platforms like these are the ability to draft and schedule Tweets ahead of time to automate your publishing cadence, conversation tracking and listening tools to see who is talking about your brand and industry topics, and analytics dashboards for measuring Tweet engagement and account growth. These platforms also have additional features like Buffer’s browser add on and mobile apps to make Tweet scheduling and publishing seamless within your day-to-day schedule.

4. Conduct Hashtag Research to Guide Your Strategy

Understanding the types of conversations that take place within your industry on Twitter, and the frequency with which they occur is a valuable datapoint for guiding your Twitter marketing strategy. Conduct research on the most used hashtags in your industry to track these conversations and look for opportunities to join them. Make a list of the most used hashtags and their volumes, and come up with a priority ranking for them so you know which hashtags you should make an effort to include in your own Tweets. Utilize hashtag analytics tools like Hashtagify to find the most popular hashtags in your industry.

5. Cross Promote Other Marketing Content

Sharing other marketing content like blog posts, videos, and graphics will add variety to your Twitter content feed. It will also drive traffic to those resources and enable you to get more ROI out of them. Try mixing in links to your blog content and whitepapers with your other content types to develop a diversified Twitter publishing strategy.

6. Brand Your Profile

Creating a branded profile image and cover photo for your Twitter account will add an extra level of professionalism to the appearance of your profile for visitors. Use design tools like Canva to create a profile image with your logo and a cover photo that will have the perfect image size and aspect ratio to display properly on Twitter.

7. Join Relevant Conversations

Thinking of Twitter strictly as a publishing platform for blogs and other content will lead you to miss out on organic engagement on the platform. Twitter’s true value comes from its conversational nature. Comment on popular Twitter threads in your niche, answer questions posed by accounts you follow, and Tweet questions of your own to spark conversation. These more informal Tweets will lead to impressions, new followers, and a positive reputation for your brand’s Twitter account.

8. Measure and Track Twitter Performance Metrics

The Twitter marketing and automation platforms mentioned above feature reporting and analytics tools for measuring your success on Twitter. Tracking follower growth, engagement levels, and identifying your most engaging content (I.e. what works) will give you valuable data points for refining your Twitter strategy and increasing those metrics. 

9. Study Other Brands on Twitter

Studying how successful brands utilize Twitter can yield a variety of tips and references for everything from Tweet formatting to post frequency. Big brands also have a plethora of resources behind their social media marketing efforts, and are more likely to be up on new trends and features. Studying their content will give you a heads up on what they are finding to be valuable, or new strategies they are trying out that you can use yourself.

10. Follow Others in Your Industry

One of the best ways to jump start your Twitter following is to follow other accounts from people and brands within your industry niche. This will likely lead to new followers for your own account, and fill your Twitter feed with relevant content to engage with. 

11. Leverage Multiple Accounts

If you have multiple Twitter accounts you can cross promote content from both of them to grow their respective audiences. An example of this would be if you have a personal account for yourself, and one for your brand. Be careful not to overdo it so each of your channels remains unique and doesn’t feel duplicated. An example of following this strategy correctly would be to Retweet a Tweet from your brand account on your personal account, and adding an extra bit of insight or a comment in the first person.

12. Share Thought Leadership Content From Your Industry

Becoming a trusted voice will make your Twitter followers more likely to turn to your brand and its products. A good way to start establishing that trust is to share helpful information about your industry. Employing this PR strategy called ‘news hijacking’ involves taking industry news from 3rd parties and sharing it on your own channels to help your followers track important information. This is a low lift strategy that can be used while you are still developing your own thought leadership content like self authored blogs and whitepapers.

Get more inspiration for your Tweets with these "Tweet Examples to Use in Your Twitter Marketing Strategy"

13. Use a Combination of Scheduled Posts and Real-Time Engagement

While scheduling Tweets ahead of time ensures you have a consistent publishing strategy, it is also important to join conversations and engage people organically on Twitter. View your scheduled posts as the pillars of your Twitter strategy, and fill in around those Twitters with organic engagement by responding to Twitter threads and Tweets that are relevant to your brand.

14. Always Acknowledge to Positive Comments

Responses to your Tweets present an engagement opportunity because they surface your Tweets to additional people within the network of the follower who commented. They also give you the opportunity to continue the conversation by responding yourself. Not only will responding to comments you receive add more life to your Tweet via additional impressions on people’s Twitter feeds, it will also organically build your brand recognition and positive reputation among the followers you respond to.

15. Publish Tweets at the Most Optimal Times

Use tools like Tweriod to find out when your Twitter followers are online in the highest frequencies, and use that to guide your publishing strategy. Tweeting when more of your followers are online will increase the likelihood of Tweet impressions and engagement. Automation tools like Buffer also have suggested Tweet times as a built in feature.

16. Use Bookmarks to Save Valuable References

Bookmarking is a useful feature in Twitter for saving posts you want to reference later. Whether you stumbled upon a future blog topic or found a thread you want to respond to at a later date, use bookmarks to save references for yourself.

17. Explore Using Twitter Fleets

Stories features are now prominent across platforms beyond Snapchat and Instagram, with Facebook, LInkedIn, and now Twitter adding 24hr ‘fleeting’ posts to their platforms. Twitter’s Fleets include many of the same features common on the other social platforms, like the ability to share and highlight Tweets from your newsfeed, posting images, text and graphic overlays, and tagging other accounts. Include Fleets in your Twitter marketing strategy to add a flexible, informal mechanism for quickly engaging with your followers.

18. Twitter Ads

Paid Twitter ads present an opportunity to receive extra engagement, brand exposure, new followers, and website traffic. Try different ad formats like video and image ads within your promoted Tweets to see what best accomplishes your ad conversion goals.

19. Participate in Twitter Chats

Twitter chats offer great exposure for your brand, and give you the opportunity to show your industry expertise and connect with your community. Either host your own Twitter chat, or participate in regularly scheduled Twitter chats hosted by established brands and influencers in your industry.

20. Leverage Images and Video

Tweets containing images and video outperform Tweets without them. According to Buffer, Tweets with images receive 150% more retweets than tweets without images.

For more marketing strategies, visit the Brand Credential blog, or check out Brand Credential’s Marketing Resources.