X, formerly known as Twitter, has been one of the giants of social media for some time.
With around 421 million active monthly users and more than 200 million activities daily, this hub of activity promises huge potential for any brand looking to engage their users with short, digestible pieces of written content and spirited debates about their area of expertise.
While the potential exposure from X’s vast user base makes it a great prospect for marketers, it’s also a hugely competitive space with a lot of brands vying for consumers’ attention.
If you want to make sure you’re going to see a tangible impact from your activity on this network, here’s six effective ways to optimize your Twitter marketing strategy and get better results.
1. First, Understand What Makes Twitter Unique
One of the most common issues affecting small business’s social media marketing is the tendency to come up with one content idea then try to make it fit across several different social media platforms. This fails to give due consideration to the things that make each platform unique, and how these features can impact your marketing best practices.
Before you devote any serious time and effort to optimizing your X marketing strategy, it’s a good idea to refresh yourself on what makes the platform unique, and the impact this will have on audience expectations.
Some of the key features of Twitter to consider are:
- It’s a primarily text-based, “micro-blogging” platform, both historically and now. As the content of a post can contain up to 280 characters, it’s best-suited to quick, succinct updates that the intended audience can consume quickly and easily.
- Unlike with some platforms, X’s algorithm gives a notable preference to new content, and tends to show tweets in reverse-chronological order. This makes it particularly well-suited to journalistic-style content and brands that like to give their audience real-time updates for ongoing events.
- Though hashtags aren’t unique to X anymore, it was the first social media platform to start using them, and they tend to play a more significant role in the way people use it. This might call for some nuance in terms of the way marketers choose and apply hashtags in a Twitter marketing strategy.
- X is branded as a place where open debate is encouraged, especially since its acquisition and rebranding by Elon Musk. This can make it a particularly good platform for brands that like to research the conversations their audience are having, or engage in debate with other industry figures.
2. Don’t Neglect Your Bio; Ensure it is Optimized
Though your profile bio is limited to 160 characters, you can still improve your visibility on X by optimizing it with super-relevant hashtags and keywords.
Include these kinds of high-popularity terms naturally, while giving your target audience a quick intro and a compelling reason to follow you, and you’ll instantly provide a little boost to your organic visibility that can have a major impact further down the line.
3. Adapt Your Brand Voice
Like in any other marketing channel, consumers are more likely to engage with brands that have a distinct, authentic voice that stands out from the noise and appeals effectively to them.
When you first sat down to define your brand, you probably didn’t have working within an 280 character limit at the top of your mind, and you may now be puzzling over how to adapt your brand identity to Twitter.
Though it can be easy to slip into the trap of looking at what other brands are doing and taking cues from hot trends, it’s important to take the time to adapt your unique voice to the platform and make sure you’re able to stand out from the crowd.
Stay true to your brand identity, while also respecting the format of the X platform, and your audience will be able to recognize you the instant they come across a tweet.
4. Figure Out When Your Audience is Most Active
Twitter is a very fast-moving platform, making it especially important to figure out the optimal time to post for visibility and engagement with your audience.
You can get started with this by researching the wealth of data available online in terms of when different audience demographics are most active on the platform. However, it’s important not to make this the be-all and end-all of your post scheduling strategy.
If you post at the same time as all your competitors, your content can quickly get buried in the noise and lose all hope of engagement. Post it when your audience is asleep, however, and your tweets may come and go before they have a chance to make an impact.
Scheduling and analytics tools like our own Highperformr suite can be a big help in this area.
5. Set Aside Time for Audience Engagement
One of the unique aspects of building a Twitter marketing strategy compared to other social media channels is that brands are expected to engage in two-way conversations with their audience.
Whether or not people reply and retweet your content is a major predictor of your long-term success from marketing on X, so doing everything possible to encourage this is essential when building your content calendar.
Some best practices you can use to encourage two-way conversations include:
- Retweeting larger accounts in your industry space and adding your own opinions on a piece of content.
- Leaving tweets open-ended or asking direct questions to encourage your audience to start a conversation.
- Keeping tweets as succinct as possible, or opening with a short, attention-grabbing sentence if you need to extend it into a more detailed thought.
- Address your audience directly in the first few words, e.g “attention, entrepreneurs!” or “dear dog lovers…”
- Formatting tweets in a way that imitates the major news sources in your industry to grab people’s attention and stop them scrolling past.
Whatever method you use to start the conversation, it’s important that you make time for replying to comments from your audience, being seen, and stimulating the conversation.
Showing that you’re a part of the conversation will affirm your status as an active account that’s worth following, and encourage your audience to make their own contributions. This, in turn, will increase the chance your content will reach new segments and stimulate further conversations.
6. Maintain a Detailed Content Calendar
The Twitter accounts that enjoy the highest engagement always have something interesting to say. However, you can’t always be expected to think up relevant, timely, and engaging content on the spot.
In order to keep an active account and make sure you’re seen when your audience is most active, it’s important to build and maintain a detailed content calendar where your tweets are scheduled ahead of time, ensuring an efficient posting schedule that avoids large gaps of inactivity.
Using tools like the Highperformr team collaboration platform will help streamline the process of composing, amending, and approving your X content, ensuring that you’re always a few steps ahead of your topical space and never caught out.
When you’ve got an active content calendar, you’ll also free up more time you can use to read industry news, engage with other accounts, and come up with ideas for posts that are aligned with hot trending topics. Having a mix of both timely and “evergreen” content will establish your brand as both a thought leader and a good source of industry news, helping to broaden your audience appeal and keep users more engaged.
Supercharging Your Twitter Marketing Strategy
Things move fast on Twitter, and sometimes it can feel hard to keep up. However, by understanding what makes Twitter unique as a platform, stimulating conversations when your audience is most active, and keeping on top of your content calendar, you can quickly begin optimizing your Twitter marketing strategy for healthier results.
For more support with your Twitter marketing, sign up to Highperformr for free today!
