5 Best Ways to Increase Twitter Visibility
You run a small business and have finally decided to set up that Twitter account. Excellent. It’s the first step to getting your name out there. However, using Twitter for business is a different animal than using Twitter for personal use. It’s crucial that you understand the difference.
While the principles remain the same (using hashtags, posting appropriately, etc.), your goals and audience will be different. By following these simple best practice for using Twitter for business, you will increase both your visibility and brand awareness:
#1 USE LISTS WISELY
As you follow more and more people and have more and more people follow you, your Twitter feed will become more and more crowded with irrelevant Tweets. This extra clutter makes it difficult to target your audience and respond to the people who would follow your brand.
Since Twitter moves so fast, you’re likely missing out on a ton of interaction by not using the list feature. When you make a list, you can group together the people that you want to target into one accessible place.
If you’ve never used a list before, start by organizing your list with the biggest influencers in your niche. From there, you can add your more loyal customers and followers.
#2 GET INVOLVED IN CHATS
Twitter may just seem like a large stream of random messages with no direction. However, different Twitter chats are happening daily.
These conversations happen at predetermined times and focus specifically on various industries and niches. For example, Hootsuite hosts a social media chat every Thursday at 12 pm.
You can access these chats using the conversation’s hashtag (#HootChat, for instance). Joining in these conversations helps to increase your exposure on Twitter and contributes to creating community. Find the chats relevant to your industry and join them as often as possible.
#3 TAKE ADVANTAGE OF VIDEO
Are you only posting text with your Tweets? Maybe you use images too? It’s important to make use of as many different types of multimedia as possible. Video is critical to use on social media in general, and on Twitter specifically.
Videos have the highest rate of engagement and participation rates increase if you’re the one who created the content. Since many people having the autoplay feature turned on, be sure to post videos with subtitles so that they can follow along without using sound.
Just a few ideas for video content are answering customer service questions with video, posting footage from real life events, and telling your customer’s stories through video content.
#4 REMEMBER TO TAG PEOPLE
Tagging pictures isn’t only on Facebook and Instagram. In one of Twitter’s lesser-known features, posters can tag up to 10 people in their photos that they post on Twitter (without even affecting the 140-character limit).
However, it’s important that you don’t abuse this feature. Instead of tagging random people on random photos just to get their attention, save this feature for times that it works.
For instance, if you just had an event for your company, you could tag relevant people in pictures of this event. Take care to tag only the people that are relevant to your business or the event.
You could accept customer-submitted posts and re-post these pictures with appropriate tags. Or, host a contest on Twitter and tag the winner in the picture that you post.
Image tags are one place where you can get creative.
#5 CREATE INTERACTIVE POLLS
These posts get some of the highest engagement rates. Users love to interact with people’s posts and feel that their voice is heard.
Polls are also a great way for you to do market research with your customer base without bothering them with a survey. When you are thinking about adding a new product to your line, you can ask your clients what they think directly. Create a poll, and ask your audience what they think would be the best type of product to add to your line.