Social media has transformed marketing and e-commerce over the last decade and given an easy to use tool for practically anyone looking to promote and grow a business. This is particularly true for Twitter, where a large following can help to promote your business and its services.
It's one thing to have a good product, but if you don't promote it well enough it's a waste. Today millions of companies use sites like Twitter to promote services, push products and engage with customers. Small businesses also use the social media site as a tool to generate interest in their services and find others to partner and invest in.
However, it's not a case of creating an account and then sending out spam to the first fifty people who mindlessly agree to follow you. You need to plan a social media strategy, build up your followers and tailor your content for maximum impact.
The more followers you have, the better your content is and the shrewder your timing, the more chance your posts will be retweeted and liked, feeding your business, your product or ideas into the public consciousness.
Twitter is a great way to get your message out effectively with value for money. Here is our guide to boosting your followers.
Post good content
It sounds obvious, but the best way to increase your Twitter follower count is to frequently post high-quality tweets. What makes a tweet high quality is very much a subjective thing though. However, think about how a tweet is engaging to your target audience and how relevant it would be to them. A video is one good idea, so is running up a poll or asking questions of followers. The key is in interaction with followers.
If your tweets are interesting and informative - as opposed to a non-stop sales pitch - people will be more likely to follow your account. The last thing you want is to come across as spammy.
Use hashtags
Hashtags can be a great tool for getting your content in front of more people, but this doesn't mean you should jam as many as possible into every tweet. Instead, be selective about which hashtags you use - make sure they're relevant, and that they're broad enough that a decent amount of people will use them.
If you can, use appropriate hashtags to link your content to current trends or conference events. Another option is to use hashtags relating to an industry or field, like #cybersecurity or #DevOps. People searching for these hashtags will see your tweets, and may give you a follow. Alternatively, hashtags can be a great way of tracking participation in contests or feedback from customers around a certain topic.
Engage with people
Twitter is a social network, but it can be very easy to forget the 'social' part. People don't want to be bombarded with carefully-constructed marketing copy; they want to have actual human interactions.
By starting discussions with followers, or with well-known industry figures, you can give your Twitter account a sense of personality beyond that of a robotic corporate mouthpiece, which will make people more willing to follow you.
Cross-promote
A good social media strategy means using all of the various tools at your disposal in service of a greater whole. Cross-promoting your social media accounts on other services allows you to make sure as many people as possible are following all of your feeds.
Make sure you're putting links to your Twitter feed in the bio of your Facebook pages and Instagram accounts. You should also make sure that your website has a prominent button on every page allowing people to share your content and follow you on Twitter.
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