Leveraging Twitter for Professional Presence
The savvy business owner knows how to utilize Twitter to promote a professional presence.
Maintaining a strong public image for your business means taking to social media to promote your brand. Having a strong online presence not only helps to shape your brand, but it also makes your company more accessible to a wide client base. Among the wide array of social media sites, Twitter is a veritable giant. It’s used by celebrities, companies, and individuals. However, using Twitter for marketing involves so much more than just making a tweet every week. Here are a few ways you can utilize your business’s Twitter account to increase your followers and engagement and promote your professional presence.
Optimize Your Tweets
A great Twitter presence starts with carefully-crafted tweets. There’s a lot to compete with in the avalanche of content that is constantly streaming through the Twitter feed. Knowing how to optimize your tweets will help them to stand out and be found and shared. Making relevant, easy-to-find tweets also establishes your professional presence and makes your company more of an authority. There are a few ways you can optimize your tweets:
- Mention others. Take the time to reach out to industry experts by mentioning them in your tweets. This is a great way to network with other professionals and build strong relationships. When the person or company in question responds to your tweet, not only do they become aware of your brand, but so does all of their followers.
- Schedule tweets. You can use tools like Hootsuite and Buffer to schedule tweets for a time when you are free to sit down and chat with people who respond to your tweets.
- Do hashtag research. Hashtags are important because they make your posts visible to people who do not yet follow you. They’re a great way to grow your following, but your hashtags also have to be relevant to your tweet to be taken seriously. RiteTag is a great resource for helping you to choose the most relevant hashtags.
- Include an image. An image makes your tweet more visually appealing. Superimposing text on your image also helps your topic to stand out and works great if you happen to be also using Pinterest as a marketing tool.
React and Engage!
We all know that a shining professional presence on Twitter does not stop at just making great tweets. You can easily use your Twitter account to engage with clients and build strong client relationships. Set aside a time every day to check your Twitter account for mentions and replies. You can answer questions, thank people for following or sharing, and favorite, retweet, and follow other’s content. This is really the crux of what social media professional presence is all about: creating a personal and friendly client experience. It’s a good rule of thumb to talk about other content 60-70% of the time and talk about yourself 30-40% of the time. The focus of your Twitter should be on your industry and your clients, not solely on self-promotion. Doing so increases your engagement with others on Twitter and helps your brand to come off as personal and friendly.
Follow 50-100 People in Your Niche Every Day
Following 50 to 100 people in your industry every day is a great way to grow your network and connect with your target audience. Growing your following will give you more authority influence. Of course, taking the time to follow 50 to 100 people every day can be demanding. Luckily, there’s an app for that.
- Crowdfire. Crowdfire is a useful app for promoting your brand on Twitter or Instagram. Crowdfire helps you to unfollow inactive users, find new Twitter users in your niche, keep track of reactions to your tweets, and check the relationship between your Twitter and Instagram accounts. Crowdfire is so simple to use that you can easily follow hundreds of people while you are waiting on food to arrive in a restaurant or watching television at home.
- Klout. Klout helps you to identify the best industry influencers to follow. Your influencers are your most active and widely-connected accounts, so when you can’t follow everyone, it’s best to follow influencers. Klout ranks influencers by a Klout score, so you can see which accounts are most beneficial for you to follow. Klout also suggests content for you to share that your followers haven’t yet seen and also tracks how your retweets, likes, and shares impact your own Klout score.
- Twitter Lists. This is not an app, rather, it’s a useful part of Twitter itself. After you’ve followed an industry influencer, check out the “Lists” tab. Here it will list other relevant accounts to follow in your industry. This is a great way to reach out to the most relevant accounts in your industry.
Attend Live Twitter Events
Attending or hosting live Twitter events is a great way to separate yourself from your competition and reach out to followers personally. If you are looking for a great way to cement client relationships, then attending a live event is key. Here are a few different types of live Twitter events you can get your brand involved in.
- Twitter Chats. A Twitter Chat is held at a specific time and with a specific hashtag. Advertise your event heavily ahead of time, asking followers to send you questions at a specific time with a specific hashtag, like #ADVPchat. The hashtag helps you to find questions as well as binds together the entire chat for others to see. And don’t just host Twitter chats, take part in them, too! Check out Tweet Reports to keep up with the latest Twitter chats.
- Live Streams. Live stream an event or webinar by tweeting with the hashtag for the event. For example, if you are going to be displaying your company’s video game at Artscape, then you can send out moment-to-moment tweets using the tag #Artscape or #Gamescape. This is a great way not only to keep your followers updated but also to reach out to other people at the event. You can also promote your event for those who could not attend by streaming it live with the Periscope app.
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