The Power of Twitter
Social Media Marketing is not a new consideration by any extent of the imagination. Businesses have been leveraging social media since MySpace – and now Facebook, Twitter, Google +, Instagram, Pinterest, and LinkedIn are all utilized to reach companies’ target markets.
Lately, a lot of people have been overlooking Twitter due to lackluster financial performance, the starlight of Mark Zuckerberg, and the speedy growth of newer arrivals, like Instagram, but those are not hitting the real power of Twitter. Let’s focus on what matters then and explore 3 ways that twitter accelerates your online visibility!
According to AdWeek, Twitter didn’t invent Hashtags but they certainly took it to new heights in popularity. The hashtag goes hand and hand with micro-expressions though and just as Twitter made it easy for smaller messages to stand out compared to Facebook, it also made it easier for micro-topics to stand out in the midst of all the peripheral “noise”. There is so much going on in the digital sphere that it is often difficult to find exactly what you were looking for. With relentless burst of Tweets at every moment of every day – fun fact, there are about 6,000 Tweets per second – being able to embed your Tweet in a conversation is extremely useful. This is excellent for companies looking to delve into a market or area of conversation, or to build their brand.
My suggestion is to leverage your #Hashtags into categories – keep a branded hashtag and focus another one on something that is getting a lot of conversation or that your Tweet directly correlates to. This way you build your brand while simultaneously building on your reach. Be active – you may not need to have a dominate share of the 6,000 Tweets per second, but you need to break through somehow – about 5 or 6 Tweets per day is a great benchmark. Pick it up on days where there is more to talk about and decelerate on days where conversation is dry.
For about a year now, Google has been showing Tweets in their search results! This is a marketers dream, crossing two of the most important functions to online marketing – social media marketing and search engine optimization! Keeping your Tweets up to date and focusing on topics of popular events, gives you the opportunity to not only reach people that are already following you or a new audience based on your popular hashtags but also puts you in front of a search audience! This is huge news for people on the forefront of current and popular events!
You don’t have to be a news anchor to be on the frontline of current events. In fact, staying up to date on breaking news on popular news sites, Google topics and other Tweets will give you all the information you need. Do you have an opinion? Get that in the conversation!
Twitter separates itself from the Social Media platform crowd because of the resourcefulness of the tools that can integrate with it. Most social media channels have tools and APIs that can connect but very few can strike a good balance. The balance is usefulness for the user without being overbearing for those that are out there. One such Twitter tool is Staged – connecting you to a targeted group of Twitter users and re-purposing video content to promote your brand.
Staged allows you to address your competitors’ Twitter pages and gain targeted followers – and by targeted followers, I mean those that are already following your competitors! The reason being, if they are interested in your competitors’ products or services, then chances are they could be interested in yours!
One Staged feature is a “Managed Followers” account, which actively puts your account in front of up to 200 new people per day. Using Twitter best-practices, properly building out your profile and actively putting your brand in front of perspective customers is one of the best ways to build branding and to drive revenue.
Sure you could spend a few hours each day taking 3 or 4 YouTube videos you like and using the embed codes to put those on landing pages you’ve built and then Tweet them there. And, that would bring a lot of people to your brand! But, it because a question of time and value for money. You better bring in a lot of sales if you are going to spend 20+ hours a week on it. Or, you can just use Staged auto-video poster which takes YouTube videos and puts them in “Stages” or just landing pages you’ve designed at the beginning. All of this is done in an hour or so of setup and revisited on occasion. No need to spend 20 hours a week on it but you’ll still get the same results!
Twitter is still a great tool for businesses. The power it has to connect your company with prospects and to build your brand is really second to none. Whether you are looking to build your brand via hashtags, build social awareness in SERPs or leverage tools that help you out – Twitter is the way to go! What suggestions do you have for accelerating online visibility with Twitter? Let me know your comments on any of the above! I always enjoy hearing from our community!
