Twitter is one of the most valuable marketing tools available for creating brand awareness and engaging with customers, making it an integral part of any business marketing strategy. However, using the platform without a clear understanding of it will not make your brand stand out from the competition.
Don’t miss out on the benefits of this platform! We’ve compiled five of the most common Twitter marketing mistakes your business should avoid.
Engage With Your Audience In Real-Time.
Interacting with your followers is one of the easiest and best ways to build loyalty among your fans. Make sure to react in a timely manner when users tag or mention your brand on a tweet. Your followers want to feel acknowledged and engaging with them can look anything from replying, retweeting, retweeting with a comment or GIF (…and we think Oprah reaction GIFs are everything), to simply liking the tweet.
And while everyone loves being praised, a common mistake we see on Twitter is companies not addressing negative customer feedback. Choosing to ignore customer comments in a public forum, rather than having an open conversation, will be detrimental to your business and give the customer one more reason to dislike your brand. Use this as an opportunity to turn your customer’s experience around.
Don’t Jump On All Trending Topics.
Tapping into trending topics is a great way to remain relevant, such as creating a #DollyPartonChallenge meme, but unless you’re an established badass AF brand like Penzeys Spices, maybe don’t alienate half of your customer base by spending thousands of marketing dollars on sponsored posts addressing our current political climate.
Before participating ask yourself, “Is this topic relevant to our brand? How can we tie this topic back to our brand? Does our brand have anything to gain or lose by joining the conversation?” If you answered no, step aside.
Don’t Overdo It With Hashtags.
In 2007, Chris Messina, then a tech product designer running his own internet consulting company, changed social media history by introducing Twitter users to the #hashtag. At the time, Messina was active on Twitter but found it difficult to isolate tweets around a certain topic and posed the question to his followers of using the pound sign. Since then, hashtag use has expanded to other social networks and has entered our lexicon.
As a general rule of thumb, we recommend using up to two relevant hashtags per post to expand a tweet’s reach and serve a purpose. Using too many hashtags or hashtagging #every #single #word will make your tweets look spammy, so use them sparingly and wisely.
Optimize Your Content For Twitter.
For content to be effective it needs to resonate with the social channel, as things like caption length, image formatting, the way URLs are shared, tone and language, and how users interact vary by platform. If you do not have the ability to create new content for each social media channel, repurpose it.
As an example, if you’re posting a vertical infographic on Facebook, make sure to repurpose it as a horizontal image for Twitter. Each platform has a unique audience with its own expectations on the format they’d like to see on it.
Don’t Go On Auto-Pilot.
We’ll only say this once, so repeat after us. Don’t set it and forget it! Many businesses on Twitter often schedule their tweets to go out and do not interact with their followers. It is important to continue monitoring for engagement because it will help in growing your following.
Additionally, we do not recommend linking your social media accounts because posts do not translate well across multiple platforms. The goal should be for users to interact with your brand on Twitter which will eventually lead them to your website, not link out to an Instagram or Facebook post. We’re not ashamed to admit that we’ve done that in the past, but we’ve changed – we swear!
