Tweet Tweet

With 200 million members, Twitter is one of the most popular social networks out there. But are you taking advantage of everything it has to offer with marketing? Used effectively, Twitter can help you promote your content, provide helpful customer service, generate leads and customers, and much more. In fact, companies that use Twitter generate 2x more leads than those that don’t, and 42% of companies that use Twitter for marketing have acquired a customer through it.

Use some of these helpful tips to take advantage of Twitter’s marketing benefits and become a Twitter marketing expert yourself.

1. Choose a simple username. Whether you're creating a company account or a personal account, make sure your username is professional, and do your best to avoid numbers and underscores in your username. Also, try to keep it brief. Users only have 140 characters to use per Twitter update, and long usernames will only use up extra characters in their tweet if they're including you in an @reply. For personal accounts, try a variation of your real name, and for company accounts, stick with your company name.

2. Optimize your Twitter profile. Besides what you say in your tweets, you don't have much space to tell potential followers who you are and why they should follow you. Make sure your Twitter profile is optimized with an enticing description (use keywords to help people find you), a professional-looking photo (for company accounts, use your logo!, and a URL (use your company website, blog, or link to a unique landing page you create specifically for people who find you through Twitter).

3. Create a custom Twitter background. Make yourself stand out by creating a custom Twitter background, which also gives you the opportunity to expand upon the information you can provide in your profile. Profile backgrounds are the largest piece of visual real estate you have to share with other users on Twitter. Consider creating custom templates for your company that your employees can use for their personal Twitter accounts as well. Themeleon offers custom themes, or you can have a designer create your own from scratch.

4. Promote your Twitter presence on your website/blog. Once you have a Twitter presence, promote it! Install the official Twitter Follow Button on your website and/or blog to enable site visitors to follow you on Twitter with just one click.

5. Avoid creating multiple company Twitter accounts. Don't make more work for yourself by creating more than one company Twitter account to manage. Instead, consolidate your presence into one account, and allow multiple contributors to manage the account if you want representatives from multiple departments involved. Doing this will eliminate the social media time of maintaining multiple accounts, help you attract more followers, and centralize your web presence.

6. Use third-party services to monitor, manage, and collaborate. If you do have multiple contributors for one account, it'll be helpful to use a third-party application like CoTweet or HootSuite to help you manage everything. The last thing you want is multiple people tweeting the same content or duplicating efforts. These tools are also great for monitoring Twitter and responding to tweets.

7. Add Twitter sharing buttons to your content. Encourage others to easily share your content on Twitter by adding Tweet Buttons to your blog, individual blog articles, landing pages, and any other content you create. This is such a simple piece of low-hanging fruit, and it will incrementally affect the reach of your content. (Research shows that companies that added a Twitter sharing button increased Twitter mentions sevenfold.)

8. Connect your blog to Twitter. If you maintain a business blog, save yourself a step in promoting your content by using HubSpot's integration or Twitterfeed to link your blog to your Twitter account. Whenever you publish a post, it will automatically get tweeted to your followers.

9. Schedule tweets in advance. Have an ongoing promotion in progress? Those same third-party Twitter applications you're using for collaboration and Twitter management (e.g. CoTweet and HootSuite) can also be used to schedule tweets ahead of time. If you have a month-long promotion, save yourself from remembering to tweet about it daily by scheduling tweets in advance. Just be sure you're monitoring and engaging with responses you get from the tweets you've scheduled. (Warning: Don't go overboard with automation in social media. Some automation is okay, but it's important to interact and provide a human voice as well. Don't be a Twitter robot.)

10. Optimize your tweets with keywords. Because tweets are publicly available, anyone can search for them. Use the opportunity to optimize your tweets with relevant keywords for your business to increase your chances of getting found via your tweets!


From The Hubspot, “The Ultimate Cheat Sheet for Twitter Marketing”