Promotional giveaways are valuable marketing resources, but social media is playing an increasingly large role in advertising. As more consumers create profiles and spend more time online, small business owners have to craft an effective web presence to ensure that they can reach out customers and new prospects.
One network that entrepreneurs should use is Twitter because of the site’s large user base. According to Twitter’s blog, the social network has over 200 million active users who generate over 400 million tweets per day. The difference between Twitter and similar websites is that the former restricts updates to 140 characters and relies heavily on external linking.
Small business owners who want to get started with Twitter marketing should follow these helpful tips.
Use promoted tweets
The key to success on Twitter is tweeting regularly. The more a company sends out messages to its followers, the more consumer engagement the business will generate. There are two primary types of updates – normal ones and promoted tweets, the latter of which are crucial to an effective Twitter marketing campaign.
Mashable explains that promoted tweets have a proven track record of advertising success. Adam Bain, Twitter’s president of global revenue, told the news source that the average sponsored message has an engagement rate between 3 and 10 percent. There is potential to reach even higher levels. For instance, Volkswagen had a 52 percent engagement rate for its promoted tweet debuting its new Beetle.
Promoted trends are also available to small business owners, but these aren’t individual tweets that are pushed to the top of a user’s news feed. Instead, this resource puts a company’s hashtag at the top of the trending list so consumers are exposed to a business’ content.
Perhaps the biggest benefit of promoted tweets and trends is the cost. Mashable points out that these advertisements are sold “at a cost-per-engagement rate,” which means that entrepreneurs only have to pay based on how frequently consumers interact with the content. As a result, small business owners won’t be responsible for covering an exorbitant bill for advertisements that didn’t motivate a response from consumers.
Remember keywords
Twitter only allows users to include 140 characters in tweets. The limited space requires small business owners to focus on brevity and only include pertinent details in every message. There are a few different features that can be included in an advertisements, including links, hashtags and retweeted content.
However, if there’s anything that should be included in every single tweet, it’s keywords. According to Entrepreneur Magazine, tweets can boost a company’s search engine optimization value. Google and similar sites index content from Twitter and use it to determine how relevant a business is to specific queries.
This means that a keyword strategy has to be developed for Twitter marketing. Small business owners should research what phrases and terms are important to their industries and companies. The most effective keywords should be included in as many tweets as possible to enhance an enterprise’s search ranking.
However, some restraint has to be exercised. Keywords must fit naturally into the context of a tweet and shouldn’t be forced into an advertisement.
Develop a #hashtag
Finally, having an effective hashtag is a key aspect of engaging consumers on Twitter. Though hashtags have been adopted by other social networks, Twitter was the first to use them to great effect.
Entrepreneurs should develop innovative ways to deploy hashtags. One solution is to always place the pound sign before the company’s name in every tweet to ensure that users will develop brand recognition from updates.