Social media marketing is best when it is strategic. The more thoughtful you are in how you present yourself on the network, the more likely your efforts become to result in actual, tangible business results.

More than 300 million users are active on Twitter at least once per month around the world. How can you make sure that your marketing efforts reach the right audience with the right messaging? The below components should be key to develop and launch an effective and sustainable Twitter strategy.

1) Establish Your Goals

No marketing strategy should start without a thorough understanding of what you actually want to achieve. Setting your goals is always the first step in building your Twitter marketing plan.

Ideally these goals should be measurable, which allows you to make adjustments if you fall short after a given period of time. Potential goals you can set for your strategy include:

• Brand awareness, measured by the monthly reach of your tweets.
• Web traffic, as defined by clicks from Twitter to your website.
• Lead conversions, more specifically by users who have originated on the network.
• Customer conversions and purchases, which is particularly important in e-commerce.

Choosing a single overarching goal of your campaign will inform all of other below components. Pick one that relates most closely to your greater marketing goals before you move forward in your planning.

2) Know Your Audience

Active users on Twitter tend to be young and college-educated. But beyond these general demographics on the network, a variety of very distinct segments exist. Your Twitter strategy needs to include a thorough understanding of who you are trying to reach.

That understanding, ideally, goes beyond demographics. Know which accounts they tend to follow, what type of content they like, and what messaging they seem to be most receptive to. This research may require significant time, but will pay off for other elements of your strategy.

3) Optimize Your Content

Next, it’s time to consider exactly what type of content will work best for your audience and marketing goals. Tweets that include visuals, particularly photos, tend to perform best. In fact, internal research by Twitter found that posts with photo attachments received 35 percent more retweets than any other content type.

The key is to not just be visual, but vary your content. Especially lead generation and web traffic will be impossible without at least some external link posts. Sprinkle in multiple content types for maximum engagement and reach.

4) Build Your Schedule

Ideally, your Twitter marketing should always be based on a content calendar. This document allows you to plan out your posting, ensuring variability in both messaging and content type.

Within your content calendar, you can also schedule particularly important tweets for times and dates that your audience is usually online. B2B tweets tend to perform best during business hours, while B2C alternatives improve performance on the weekends. 12pm, 3pm, and the time between 5pm and 6pm are particularly effective times.

Sample Twitter Posting Schedule | Source: HubSpot

5) Interact With Your Audience

Like other social media efforts, Twitter is not a one-way street. Far from it: your audience will regularly reply to your tweets, or mention your brand in their own messaging. Your goal should be to encourage and engage with these interactions, bringing your potential and future customers into the conversation.

To accomplish that goal, consider setting up a social listening strategy. A variety of tools help you monitor mentions of your brand on the network, even if your Twitter account is not specifically tagged in that tweet. Seek out customers who are talking about you, positively or negatively, and begin to engage with them to maximize goodwill on the side of your audience.

Social Listening Tools | Source: DigitalReview.Co

6) Insert Your Voice in Popular Topics

Don’t underestimate the ability to elevate your brand name by inserting yourself into the same conversations as thousands others on the network.

The key here is to not force a connection.

Rather than inserting yourself into a conversation irrelevant to your brand and value proposition, focus on the conversations most relevant to your own messaging and values. Don’t use this channel to promote your brand; instead, post relevant content your audience actually wants to engage with.

7) Evaluate Your Efforts

Finally, no Twitter strategy can be complete without a period evaluation of how close your current efforts are to reaching your marketing goals. To accomplish that feat, build benchmarks into your marketing timeline that allow you to step back, and check how well you are on pace to achieving the goal established in the first step above.

If you’re on track, you can keep the course or make slight adjustments. Otherwise, it might make sense to re-evaluate your current efforts within your strategy framework to see where exactly you can make improvements. Only regular evaluation allows you to make adjustments that can help you elevate your Twitter marketing efforts over time.

Are you looking to build out your digital marketing efforts to include Twitter? Or have you used Twitter in the past, but with limited tangible results? In either case, the above tips can help you get started in turning the network into a core part of your digital strategy.

Of course, you can also take further steps within that endeavor. Our various courses, for example, help you build a strategy that will help to grow your awareness, clicks, leads, and customer base. To learn more about the resources you can use to succeed sustainably, contact us.