Has your social media agency shunned Twitter? After all, it can be chaotic. But experienced social media managers know how to differentiate with different types of content. Check out these tips for deciding what to tweet.
Twitter marketing is one of the most popular forms of digital marketing.
It is also one of the most controversial.
Do you like Twitter for marketing? Do you know how to generate high converting traffic from Twitter? (I belong to this marketer group on Twitter.)
Or are you one of those who think Twitter is just for fun and messing around and is a waste of marketing budgets?
Then you’re probably doing it wrong.
The truth is that Twitter marketing takes time, creativity and patience.
I haven’t had much success with Twitter advertising (although I’m getting better at it), but I definitely love Twitter for its organic potential.
In fact, Twitter is one of the few social media platforms where you can still generate traffic and leads without investing in advertising.
The first step is to create an effective tweeting and sharing strategy, and don’t forget to save time with thoughtful automated replies.
Here are some tips when wondering what to tweet.
1. Create in-depth content using Twitter topics
Those social media managers who hate Twitter for its character limit will love this tip: You can actually share long-form content using Twitter threads.
One of the latest examples of this comes from @RyanMcCready1 who shared this case study on Twitter, which gave him plenty of engagements and recognition:
Twitter Threads in Action: This is an actual article shared in tweets
to create a Twitter threaduse the “Add another tweet” option.
You can add as many tweets within a thread as you want:
Link multiple tweets together by creating a Twitter thread
Twitter topics work well for thought leadership content, allowing you to build your brand as a knowledge graph.
Use Twitter threads to share case studies, lessons and analysis of recent reports or trends.
2. Create a memorable context for your brand
Consistency is key on Twitter.
If you develop your own recognizable voice on Twitter, your brand will be able to build a close and loyal community, as well as create highly cited content.
Most importantly, through consistent tweeting style, you will be able to build powerful associations that would make your brand memorable.
My favorite example here is @MoonPie, who has developed a unique voice by inserting the brand into conversations related to the space, trends or current events.
MoonPie’s tweets have a unique style
In fact, the company Twitter feed it’s hard to put down: It makes for an engaging and interesting read. Notice how uniquely MoonPie comments on the latest news (especially related to space) and how creatively he celebrates the holidays – all within his signature “comic and cosmic” style.
This “Out of this world” strategy goes by the name “Pyre of the Moon” and opens up a universe of possibilities.
Creates a deep connection with the brand’s audience through shared interests, humor and an unexpected voice.
The brand’s positioning has also allowed her to “own the space,” which was most notably seen during the 2017 eclipse, where her Snacks Hostess clapback gained national press attention and notoriety:
Thanks to Twitter marketing, Moon Pie has built a strong connection with the space that caused the success of this tweet.
3. Answer the questions
This takes time, but can generate very effective clicks, leads and even brand ambassadors.
Carefully monitor your target keywords on Twitter and jump in regularly to offer help, advice and guidance.
Agorapulse offers a nice social listening feature that can help set up and simplify this process:
Use social listening to monitor discussions and specific questions
This is one of my favorite tactics to generate high converting traffic. Using long-tail keyword research is a great way to discover questions to tweet about.
Here’s an example of a tweet that came as a result of monitoring questions on Twitter (and resulted in an engaged click as well):
Drive people to your site by being helpful.
This strategy brings more to the table than clicks. This allows you to better understand the struggles of your target audience and discover good content ideas on the spot.
Using Agorapulse, you can assign some tweetable questions to your content team to cover in their newly created assets.
4. Use seasonality to help decide what to tweet
Seasonality is another great Twitter marketing tool that can skyrocket your engagement metrics.
Twitter Strategy Based on Seasonality:
Here’s a neat example from the aforementioned Twitter account that used humor to welcome its seasonal product line:
To get help brainstorming, use Text Optimizer to spot interesting links to seasonal trends and holidays to use in your Twitter content:
Text Optimizer identified these strong links to “Acknowledgments”. Use these to create content on Twitter as well as create popular hashtags
For more inspiration, check out “trending research” from Unsplash.
That section will give you a solid overview of what Unsplash users have searched for over the past 30 days. Turn some of them into seasonal content as well as Twitter hashtags!
“Trending Search” by Unsplash
When timed well, Twitter content that focuses on recent trends or upcoming holidays will generate both retweets and clicks.
InVideo’s online video creator offers a variety of seasonal templates for you to easily create timely content for all your social media channels:
If you follow seasonality every year, you will always be able to reuse your content next year.
The seasonality-based strategy will work even better if you include influencers.
5. Monitor and learn from your successful updates
As you experiment with content and formats on Twitter, you’ll find that some of your tweets perform better than others. By all means, learn your Twitter marketing lessons and find out what to tweet specifically for your audience.
There are plenty of analytics options on Twitter, including Agorapulse that provides a close look at how your content is performing:
Identify your best performing tweets with Agorapulse reports
Agorapulse lets you set your date range to go back weeks and months to analyze your Twitter content.
You can then sort the data by the number of overall engagements to identify the best performing tweets.
Do this regularly and identify the common rules and patterns that contributed to that particular piece of content success. Can you turn that learning into a strategy to amplify that success?
Another useful metric to track is the actual traffic you’re getting from Twitter. Finteza provides a detailed report on traffic sources and how those site users are interacting with your sales funnel:
Conclusion
There’s a lot more to Twitter marketing than the 280 character limit. It’s all about creativity and experimentation.
If you create your own style and commit to it, you’ll likely find that Twitter is the most effective of your marketing channels.
At the end of the day, Twitter is the most open and flexible platform, and that’s why I admire it so much.
* * *
Start saving time and energy on your social media management! Check out our free trial of Agorapulse to help you plan, track and measure all your social media efforts.
