Growth Letter #2 - Twitter
Greetings 🙌🏻
This is my second growth letter and it sheds light on how to market your brand effectively using Twitter. The tips and strategies shared in this growth letter are based on my experience with marketing brands on Twitter.
For the new ones here, do check out the other posts I have written if you haven’t
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Off to the topic,
Twitter Marketing
While working with Hackr.io, I made Java tweet about Hackr.io. It may take a while for you to start getting decent engagement on Twitter. Once you start getting the feel of it, you will spend more time on the platform.
Twitter is a powerful platform to build your personal brand as well as to strategically market your products and/or services. Things move very quickly on Twitter.
This growth letter on Twitter marketing sheds light on Twitter statistics, Twitter marketing tips and strategies, and tools and resources for marketing your brand on Twitter.
Twitter Statistics
75 % of B2B businesses market their products and/or services on Twitter.
40 % of Twitter users carried out a purchase after seeing the product/service on the platform.
The average lifespan of a tweet is only 18 minutes.
Over 6000 tweets are sent every second on an average.
Leading countries based on number of Twitter users as of July 2020
Gender Demographics - 35% of Twitter users are females and 65% are males.
Most users rarely tweet, but the most prolific 10% create 80% of tweets from adult U.S. users.
12% of Americans get their news from Twitter.
13% of Americans on Twitter keep their accounts private. People with private accounts tweet more often and favorite more tweets, on average. They are also more likely to be women.
85% of small and medium business users use Twitter to provide customer service.
Tweets with GIFs get 55% more engagement than those without. However, only 2% of Tweets contain GIFs.
The daily limit of tweets is 2,400 per day.
80% of Twitter users accessing the platform on a mobile device, and 93% of video views are on mobile.
80% of Twitter users are affluent millennials.
Roughly 42% of Twitter users are on the platform daily.
There are 262 million International Twitter users (users outside the US) which make up 79% of all Twitter accounts.
Twitter Marketing Tips and Strategies
The following strategies are tried and tested. Here’s what brands should do on Twitter:
Optimize your Twitter Profile
Before firing shots, work on your Twitter profile.
Have your logo as a profile picture, a cover image that portrays what the brand does, a short bio mentioning accounts (your partners/collaborators/etc) and hashtags (include keyword phrases in the bio), and a link to your website in the website field. Have a short username - your brand will have more chances of getting mentions from users, influencers, and brands.
Add your country as a location if you have global customers or if your customers are from your country, add your city as a location if your customers are from your city. Don’t forget about a translation of your bio if you’re targeting an audience from other countries. You’ll get more chances to make a desired conversion.
Include a link in the bio because when you hover over an account on Twitter, the bio is visible but not the website field.
Who should brands follow on Twitter?
A brand must have more number of followers than the accounts it follows (social proof that the brand is valuable). Follow key influencers, team members, partners, and other stakeholders. Follow back relevant accounts.
When you’re just starting out, you need followers who will engage with the content you share or reshare. Hence, follow accounts who engage with your tweets (who like, comment, or retweet your tweets).
Do not follow many accounts at a time to not get rate-limited.
Creating Content
When you’ve just started building your presence on Twitter, you do not need to tweet multiple times a day. Once or twice a day is enough. Create crisp content, include links and/or images. Tweet around events using relevant hashtags to get additional visibility. Twitter allows 280 characters per tweet.
To increase the reach, tag relevant accounts, and use relevant hashtags in your tweets. Use 1-2 hashtags per tweet. Tweets with 1-2 hashtags get 21% more engagement than those with three or more hashtags.
Find your most important hashtags using Twitter Analytics. Replicate key characteristics of popular tweets.
Use Hashtagify to find the best hashtags for your tweets before posting the tweets. Here’s the data from Hashtagify for the hashtag “#growthhacking”. See the complete report here. Use those hashtags that are fairly popular and have a +ve percentage of the monthly and weekly trends.
Tweets with images get 89% more likes. Use relevant images only. Use tools like Canva and Piktochart for creating images if you do not have any design experience.
Images outperform text, but videos outperform images on twitter. Videos are 6 times more likely to be retweeted than photos and 3 times more likely to be retweeted than GIFs. With videos, you can give your tweets a longer lifespan. You can also go live on Twitter. The live streams are automatically posted as tweets when the stream ends.
Use GIFs in your tweets (especially when replying to tweets posted by other accounts). Create polls and Fleets (Instagram-like stories that disappear after 24 hours).
On attaining few followers (say 50), increase the frequency of your tweets.
Tweet during peak hours. Tweets posted on Friday, Saturday, and Sunday have higher CTRs than those posted during other days of the week.
Your peak posting times will depend on your specific audience. Test how your content performs at different times and days. According to that time zone, post between 12 PM to 6 PM for maximum impact.
Use tools like Buffer or Hootsuite or the RecurPost Social Media Scheduler to schedule your tweets.
Create a tweet thread to make the audience remind about previous tweets related to a topic as well as for organizing the updates. To start a thread, click/press the comment button on your tweet.
Engaging with Content on Twitter
Retweet relevant tweets including tweets by influencers, media, team members, etc. Retweet with a comment to write your own commentary for the tweet you wish to retweet (see the below image).
Comment on tweets (as soon as they are posted) by relevant influencers, media, and other stakeholders of the industry.
Engage with recent and top tweets in relevant hashtags. Your goal should be to provide value. Do not like (or comment or retweet) many tweets in one go - your account may get rate-limited. Do not use bots and other automation services - you do not want to lose your account at any cost.
Using Advanced Search
Use advanced search to find accounts and tweets based on the following filters.
Creating Twitter Lists
Add relevant accounts into lists on twitter. You could have one list for media, one for the competitors, one for the accounts who actively engage with your content, etc. Here’s the feed from my marketing list:
See all my lists here.
Embedding
Embedding Tweets, Profiles, Lists, Feeds, and more on your blog or website using Twitter Publish. Here’s what all you can embed:
Just by embedding twitter lists, I made a tool for viewing tweets by Top Internet Marketers, Technology Influencers, and Serial Entrepreneurs in real-time. It’s called Tweet-Wall. Here’s how it looks:
Creating Twitter Cards
To make your website and blog links visually appealing on Twitter, create twitter cards. I have implemented the card for my website, here’s how my website looks when shared on Twitter:
Here’s the official guide to Twitter Cards. In case you get stuck, modify the below code (from my website) and put it in the head section of the HTML page:<meta name="twitter:description" content="<description-here>">
<meta name="twitter:image" content="<link-to-image-here>">
<meta name="twitter:card" content="summary_large_image">
<meta name="twitter:site" content="@<twitter-username-here>">
<meta name="twitter:creator" content="@<twitter-username-here>">
<meta name="twitter:title" content="<title-here>">
<meta name="twitter:url" content="<url-of-page-here>">
After adding the above lines of code, enter the URL of the page in the Card Validator tool.
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Sincerely,
Vikas