The Marketing Eye’s Top 5 Twitter Blogs

How to achieve your busi-ness goals

How to achieve your business goals on twitter

Twitter recently celebrated their one-year anniversary of the Twitter Ads self-serve platform in the UK and Ireland.

Whilst getting to year one, they naturally went through some changes and growing pains along the way. One of those changes was to introduce objective-based campaigns, designed to make it easier for businesses to achieve their desired goals.

How do objective-based campaigns differ from what came before?

In the early months, promoted activity on Twitter came in two forms: Promoted Account and Promoted Tweet.

A ‘Promoted Account’ ad promoted your business in the ‘Who to follow’ section and showed your account more favourably in searches by users you target with your campaign.

A ‘Promoted Tweet’ ad was like any other tweet you send. The difference though, was that the tweet would appear in user’s timelines who WEREN’T following you, thus allowing you to target a specific audience.

Ok, so what are objective-based campaigns?

As mentioned, an objective-based campaign is designed to make achieving specific business goals easier.

Here are the five objective-based campaigns:

Followers

Want to get more followers? With ‘Followers’ you create a message that highlights the benefits of following your account.

The user when presented with this will then have the option to click the face with the plus sign icon, and in doing so, will be added to your followers. The plus side for the user is they never have to leave their own timeline.

How to achieve your busi-ness goals

Website clicks or conversions

This objective-based campaign is centred on generating traffic to your website. With this campaign, you will enter the URL of the page on your website you want people to visit. It will then generate a fancy looking ‘website card’ which you can add an image to with a call to action to encourage users to click through to your website.

Tweet engagements

Tweet engagements are very similar to the original Promoted Tweet ads with added customisation.

App installs or app engagements

Here is a great way to increase downloads of your app. Especially since the majority of users access Twitter through their phones - sending them directly to the app store on their phone or tablet to download.

All you have to do is add the Google (Android) and/or Apple ID of your app and Twitter will do the rest.

Leads on Twitter

This one’s pretty cool! Twitter allows you to generate a tweet in the form of a Lead-gen card which allows you to obtain their email address when they click on the button attached. This is great for future targeting in the form of email campaigns etc.

Twitter hasn’t exactly re-invented the wheel with these objective-based campaigns. After all, it’s something Facebook have been doing for some time. However, these were necessary changes and changes that can have a very positive impact on small businesses looking to attract new leads and customers.

I’ve recently joined The Marketing Eye as a Trainee Marketing Executive, meaning I indulge in a little bit of everything that marketing has to offer.

As a starter task I was given the responsibility of writing social media updates for an event, opening my eyes to the world of social media from a company’s perspective.

Through this I’ve compiled a list of Do’s and Don’ts when it comes to using social media to promote business matters and not just for tweeting random thoughts of the day!

DO’S

• Tag appropriate people/companies using the ‘@’ symbol to spread awareness of your tweet. This will alert the company in question and increase the chances of gaining a ‘retweet’ or a ‘favourite’, thus spreading your tweets across Twitter.

• Attach photographs that are relevant to the message your tweet contains. The average attention span of an adult is as low as 8 seconds, a photograph will either intrigue your audience or sum up you tweet in less time.

• Double check all spelling and grammar BEFORE you publish your tweet to the whole world, some mistakes are painful to witness and being limited to 140 characters is NO excuse!

• Make it personal. ‘Hi I’m *name* and I’m here to answer any questions you may have today’

• Look for connections. See who has been ‘recommended’ for you to follow, see who they follow and so on.

Twitter for Business

DON’TS

• Don’t use slang or shortened down words. I understand you’re limited to 140 characters but slang words will make you look unprofessional.

• Don’t follow everyone and anyone, to look successful on twitter you should be following LESS people than you have following you.

• Never use twitter to slate your competition. Customers may appreciate a friendly conversation between rivals but nothing that will result in you looking petty.

• Don’t overuse hashtags ‘#’. One hashtag with the potential to trend is all you need.

• Don’t waste time tweeting information that has no link to your company, it will only confuse readers and could lead to an ‘unfollow’.

I could go on for ages but those are the essentials and remember, you are what you tweet!

How to target your competitors’ followers

Advertising on social media is a popular and cost-effective medium for small and medium-sized businesses.

It helps breakdown the barriers that once stood between larger and smaller businesses when it came to traditional advertising channels.

Twitter is one such medium that has helped bridge the gap - allowing businesses to target users by age, gender, location and interests to name a few. But, there is also another targeting method.

Twitter custom audiences allows you to upload a list of specific users Twitter handles, thus allowing you to target directly to these handpicked users.

Now, you could literally trawl through Twitter selecting particular Twitter accounts and adding them to your list, but let’s face it, you would like a quicker and more cost effective method - right?

Target your competitors’ followers

Is there a competitor or a business delivering a similar proposition in your market? Or, a business offering a service that you think you can complement. For example, a firm that offers property development loans and you offer loans to commercial property.

Custom audiences will allow you to build a database of another Twitter accounts followers. Which you can subsequently use to target with your promoted Twitter campaign(s).

How do I build this list?

Again, you could go through their followers one by one, adding each @handle to a spreadsheet. Alternatively, you could use a nifty little tool called ‘followerwonk’. Followerwonk will extract a user’s database of followers - all you have to do is add their @handle.

Here you can download a csv file, although this will require a subscription. The free alternative is to copy and paste the followers into a spreadsheet.

It is worth pointing out that if you’re targeting followers of an account that is similar to yours, you may well find that some of the followers are already following you. It is at this point that it might be worth scanning through the list and removing any users that already follow you to avoid wasting your advertising budget.

Once you have created your spreadsheet you can upload it onto Twitter

Now you’re free to use this list to target your campaigns! There are numerous benefits to using this method of targeting, be it to kick start your business’s social media presence or to counteract a competitor promotion. You can also dissect the list(s) to target even further. As Twitter continues to innovate, useful tools like ‘followerwonk’ will continue to exploit these innovations and offer small businesses even more ‘level-playing field’ advertising opportunities.

There are numerous benefits to using this method of targeting, be it to kick start your business’s social media presence or to counteract a competitor promotion. You can also dissect the list(s) to target even further.

As Twitter continues to innovate, useful tools like ‘followerwonk’ will continue to exploit these innovations and offer small businesses even more ‘level-playing field’ advertising opportunities.

Twitter analytics for all

Wish you could see what your tweets are doing? Previously only available to verified Twitter users and those participating in promoted Twitter advertising, all

users can now see the effectiveness of their tweets.

The recently unlocked activity dashboard gives insight into the performance of individual tweets, followers and overall account performance - for FREE!

What can I see?TweetsThe first thing you will see when you login is a list of your tweets, starting with the most recent: Here you can see the number of times users saw your tweet and how many times a user physically engaged with the tweet (retweet, favourite, link click etc.).

FollowersHere you can get a really good insight into your followers; their interests, location and gender:

Why does that matter?If you are going after a certain clientele, then naturally, you want them to be following you. For example, what’s the point in being primarily followed by male users whose interests are in the sporting arena, if you’re a retailer who sells high-street fashion women’s clothing?

Twitter CardsAgain, similar to monitoring the performance of your tweets, you can see how well your Twitter Cards are doing. Here it is possible to measure URL clicks.

OverviewThere are also a couple of really useful overview bar charts, which let you look at your twitter performance from a daily and monthly point of view. Furthermore, they tell you how your current performance rates against your previous performance.

Great, now what?The real benefit of Twitter analytics is that it tells you what is and isn’t working, and where your focus needs to be.

Here are a few things you can do to help increase engagement:

TimeIs there a particular time of the day where your posts do better than other times e.g. are you getting a better reaction at tweets sent at midday then you are in the evening? Or vice versa?

FrequencyAre you posting too much or not enough? Is your voice getting lost in the clutter of others? Are you tweeting so often that its clogging up users Twitter account?

HashtagsYou might be producing great content, but not enough people are getting to see it. Remember, it’s not only those that are following you who can see your tweets. By using relevant and popular hashtags, you reach a wider audience. For example, you’re talking about a subject, but you’re not directly referencing the subject in the text. Here’s an example:

The subject matter is #FinTech, but the term isn’t referenced in the text. By adding it in as a hashtag, you will reach a wider audience, as well as adding context.

Tone of voiceIs your tone of voice right? If you’re adding a link to your tweet, you naturally want people to click it. So the trick here is to only give a teaser of what you want to say - like a newspaper headline. If you’re giving away all the information in the tweet, why would anyone bother clicking to read more?

Or, you could introduce a ‘call to action’ to try and elicit a click e.g. ‘find out more’, ‘click here’ etc.

Video/photosCould your tweets do with an added spark? Adding a photo or a video may do a better job of grabbing the attention of Twitter users.

Twitter is a very powerful tool. A tool that has now been made more manageable and accountable thanks to the introduction of analytics.

Why should I follow you?

With over 255 million active users worldwide and £10 million of those in the UK, it is not hard to see why companies continue to flock to Twitter to take advantage of

this huge nest of people.

Twitter is great for businesses wanting to connect with current and new customers on a regular basis. However, having a Twitter account is one thing - having a Twitter account that generates leads and interest in your business is something else.

The first port of call for achieving this is getting other Twitter users to follow your account. But how do you get people following you?

Here are the top 8 reasons people follow businesses on Twitter:

I like/love the brand - 70%It’s difficult for many B2B businesses to achieve this status of ‘love’ on a global scale. This is generally reserved for your Apple’s and Samsung’s. However, it is possible to be known and admired locally or within a sector.

I like to learn about new products - 58%Do you have an exciting new product? Then tell people about it. There is nothing wrong with self-promotion on Twitter. As you can see, it is the second most reason people will follow you.

I get discounts/offers - 54%Everyone likes a good deal - don’t they? Discounts, offers on bundled services and free trials are some of the ways you can attract more people to your company page.

To enter a competition or a promotion - 42%Similar to the above - competitions and promotions in conjunction with activities such as company surveys are a useful way of enticing people to not only follow your page, but try your product/service.

‘Hold on! I can’t afford to keep running promotions and competitions.’ Fair comment and you don’t have to. Instead of running lots of competitions and promotions, you could spend more on one by utilising promoted Twitter ads.

To get information I can use - 39%Useful and insightful information is an excellent way of generating followers. The ability to react to the latest goings on in your field can turn your company into a must watch (follow). In addition, utilising popular twitter hashtags can put you right in the mix with larger companies who are also talking on a similar subject.

To learn more about products that I already own - 29%A great way of retaining customers and heightening your reputation is to offer continued information and insight into products or services a person or company already possesses.

For customer service - 23%Twitter has turned customer service on its head. The ability to interact with businesses is a big aspect of a user’s choice of who to follow.

Let us take a moment to recognise that not all followers are following businesses for positive reasons. They maybe following in order to make a complaint - so here’s the opportunity to show you can react to complaints in a quick and professional manner. Treat it as a positive, not a negative. A good response here can turn that frown upside down.

Their tweets are funny - 22%Humorous tweets will help generate followers. Although if you are not funny - don’t try to be. The negatives will far outweigh the positives and could lead to more than you bargained for. All publicity is good publicity, right? Wrong.

The above list is a good way of approaching a Twitter strategy for your business or re-evaluating one you already have in place. It helps answer many questions from ‘what shall we tweet about?’ to ‘how do we get people interested in what we do?’

The main benefit you’ll get out of using this list and gaining followers is the brand awareness you will generate as a result.

The more people who follow your company page, the more people get to know about your products and services and the more your revenue and profits point

upwards.

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