When you combine the potential that content marketing has to generate new business for your company with the interaction of a social media channel like Twitter — having an effective marketing strategy in place becomes an essential part of any business operation. That strategy will lay solid groundwork to grow your target market audience and increase your brand awareness within your industry. Here are eight steps that will help you create a successful content marketing strategy for Twitter.
Define Marketing Goals
An excellent starting point to creating your Twitter strategy is defining the goals that you want that strategy to accomplish. It gives you a roadmap that will guide your actions on Twitter. You can also utilize these goals to create checkpoints along the way so you know if your practices are matching up with the goals you set at the beginning.
Align your goals with the outcome that you want to see take place. Revisit your goals at various points along the way to make sure each one is still working towards helping you reach your target. You can make improvements as necessary to help keep your strategy on track.
Determine the Placement of a Twitter Content Strategy
There is tremendous power in social media marketing that can identify new customers, open new marketplace opportunities and develop a circle of industry influencers that serve as a sounding board for your new ideas.
It is impractical to think that all of this activity will only take place on Twitter. Therefore, you need to determine how your Twitter marketing strategy will fit in with the remainder of the marketing that you do across all of your social media channels. There are three main marketing functions that Twitter provides that may help you determine its marketing strategy placement.
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Traffic
You can use Twitter as a tool to increase the flow of traffic to your website.
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Conversions
Engage in integrated messaging to expand the audience reach for blog signups, subscriptions or enrollments in the products or services you offer.
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Sales
Share content that includes videos, images and blog articles that prompt potential customers to make a purchase from your company.
Pinpoint a Target Market Audience
You can have a powerful promotional message as part of your marketing campaign. However, if it goes to the wrong audience, your message will become lost. Twitter provides you with the opportunity to create lists for each portion of your target market audience. That allows you to send customized promotional messages to each segment as a way to increase audience engagement with your company.
To increase audience participation with your business, you need to be an active participant as well. Look up relevant hashtags for your industry to see what others are discussing and add your comments using the same hashtag. When new accounts follow you, take the time to say ‘thank you’ and follow those accounts back if they interest you. All of this action works to ensure your promotional messages are going before an audience that can benefit from what you are offering.
Identify Your Ideal Tweet Times
You want to have an effective marketing strategy for Twitter so that you make the most of the social media potential it provides. That means you need to be social and share content that your audience enjoys receiving.
That audience will not be on Twitter 24 hours a day, and you don’t want to miss the window of opportunity to catch their attention when they are on the social media channel. Monitor your timeline for several days to gain an idea of when your followers are the most active. Use that information to create a tweet time schedule to ensure your message is reaching your target audience.
Find New Content Ideas
Twitter can be an invaluable source of new content ideas for upcoming blog posts, podcasts, videos or other content pieces you create. Your target market audience has a problem that needs solving or a desire that needs fulfillment. They may be turning to Twitter as a possible solution point for resolving these issues.
Pay careful attention to the discussions that take place and see if you can identify the presence of a problem. Create your next content piece around that issue, making sure to illustrate how your company is a solution that your audience can trust. Share the content piece on Twitter and attach a relevant hashtag to ensure that tweet goes before your target market audience.
Conduct a keyword search that is relevant to your industry to see what discussions are taking place. It will give you ideas for upcoming content pieces that focus on topics currently on the minds of your target market audience. When you notice a central theme appearing throughout your timeline, think of how you can turn it into a content piece. You might be able to create a tutorial detailing how a product or service works to clarify an issue that your audience finds to be unclear at the moment.
Watch the Competition
A portion of the accounts that you follow on Twitter should consist of your closest competition. It may sound strange but it gives you an incredible opportunity to see what their thought process is and how they are using the social media channel to engage with your mutual target market audience. If you are uncomfortable following competitor accounts, make a private list that will still allow you to monitor their activities without making it publicly known.
You can get a firsthand look at what they are doing that works, and identify areas of improvement. Pay attention to the content they share with their audience and see how that audience responds to that information. When something comes across as not being popular with the audience, you have insight on what content pieces to avoid in the future.
Select Valuable Content to Share
Capture the attention of your audience by sharing content pieces that go beyond plain text. Twitter supports several different content formats that allow you to keep the audience engagement on a positive level. You can embed most of these content formats directly into your tweets to make content sharing as easy as possible.
Twitter is widely known for its restrictive practice of only allowing users 140 characters to create a message. Here are examples of content types that can help you maximize that restriction and still share great content with your audience.
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Text
Utilize plain text to send short messages to your audience that focus on company updates, the latest product or service news, quick facts, or to ask questions that prompt your followers to take a response action.
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Photos
A picture is worth a thousand words and this is certainly the truth with Twitter messages. Tweets that contain an eye-catching photo statistically receive the highest levels of audience engagement.
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Videos
Short video clips allow you to share new information, upcoming events or even a fun day in the office with your audience. These types of content tweets are always a big hit with your followers.
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Slideshares
Slideshare is a relatively new way to share content with your followers. It is a slideshow presentation that presents you with the opportunity to share a considerable amount of content without sacrificing quality or the 140 character limitation space.
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Links
Links are an excellent way to increase traffic to your website when you share a blog post link with your audience. For a wider reach within your target market audience, add a relevant hashtag to your tweet.
Content Promotion
The primary purpose of Twitter is to interact with your target market audience and share content that is important to that audience. Taking a creative approach with your content encourages your audience to share the content with their Twitter followers. It also works to keep audience engagement levels high and prompts them to interact with your company more.
Here are a few tips that can help you maximize the potential audience reach of the content messages that you create.
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Keep It Short
Create tweets that are 100 characters or less. It gives your followers an opportunity to add a comment of their own when retweeting your message to their audience.
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Include a Mention
When your message includes the name of an industry influencer or a member of your audience, include that person by name using the ‘@’ symbol in your tweet directly in front of their name.
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Ask Audience to Share
When you share a quality message, don’t hesitate to simply ask your audience to share it with their audience. Customers love helping you spread the word about a product or service they already love.
Twitter is a powerful platform to increase brand awareness and engagement with your target market audience. The practices that you have in place on this social media platform complement each stage of a content marketing strategy. Your efforts on Twitter will work to drive more traffic to your website and extend the reach you have within the marketplace.
A Twitter content marketing strategy will work to generate leads which lends itself to a steady stream of revenue generation that has a positive impact on your profit margin at some point down the road.
