If your Twitter social media marketing efforts haven’t borne the fruits that you hoped they would in the past, then the start of this new year might be the perfect time to clean house, turn over a new leaf and make a new start. To help you do that, I’ve put together these 4 tips that – while they might not be a complete cure-all for any and all social media marketing woes, will certainly help you get things started off on the right foot – take a look!
Step 1: Create a Great Business Profile
So the first thing you want to do to help your business find social media marketing success on Twitter is to make sure that your Twitter profile is filled out properly, Include a detailed business bio – tell people about your skills your product, your professional experience – not where you grew up and your pet goldfish. If you have a particular standout link that you want people to visit, maybe try to find space for it here too – that way there’s a clear and direct connection between your social media marketing and your business website – you can funnel people straight from social media to the place you most want them to be on your website.
Step 2: Be Consistent With Branding
The second tip I have for you is one that’s especially important if you’re building or operating a brand on multiple social media marketing platforms or other online locations like a website. If this is the case for you then you’re going to want to use the same set of graphic design work across your Twitter, Facebook, YouTube – whatever social media marketing platforms you’re on, use the same look and feel to help build a singular consistent cohesive message and image for your brand.
Of course, different platforms have different size requirements for their images, so you might need the dimensions of these social media marketing images to each be slightly different in order for them to be well-tailored for the individual platform they are to be used on, but it will definitely help your platforms and your business find social media marketing success if everything carries the same overall theme and appearance.
Step 3: Increase Traffic
Implementing the social media marketing advice in my first 2 points above may well get the ball rolling, and you could well start seeing success at this point. However, if you’re like me, you’re probably still going to be looking for ways to increase or enhance your numbers, especially with more traffic.
I'm sure you've gone through a lot of the same steps too. Social media marketing success – heck, success in digital marketing in general relies on getting people to visit certain pages, certain areas of your website, and as a result at one time or another you too have probably given it everything you’ve got in an attempt to either ‘SEO’ your way to more converting traffic and leads, or you might have dabbled in paid ads, sharing content to various social networks, and other methods too. I got fooled into thinking these solutions would work automatically as well – but the truth is, it’s hard to get traction with social media marketing until and unless you can build a large targeted following.
Step 3(a): Build a Large Targeted Following
So, that then begs the question, ‘how do you get a huge following outside of being some kind of celebrity?’ Simple. You follow as many people as possible. There’s a touch of ‘speculate to accumulate' here, but in general the more people you follow, the more people will follow you back. That doesn't mean you just go out and indiscriminately start following everyone everywhere - that doesn't help anybody. You need to follow people in your niche if you want to find targeted traffic that will help you find social media marketing success. So, how do you follow just people in your niche? Well, you search for people by keyword or you simply follow the followers of a celebrity in your niche.
Now that's one of my most top-secret methods that will allow you to start getting more traction with your social media marketing, and more opt-ins, sales or new client prospects too. It’s hard work, it takes time to grow organically and build that audience, but once you do you can really reap great rewards from this method.
Tip 4: Ask for Retweets
Depending on where you’re from in the world the old saying might be ‘the squeaky wheel gets the grease’, ‘if you don’t ask you don’t get’ or something else entirely – but the basic message remains the same. If you want a social media marketing campaign to be really successful you need to get on your soapbox and shout about it. You need to shout long and loud, and one thing that can help you do this is by having other people join in with the shouting.
On Twitter, the way we do this is via retweets. A key thing to remember here is something that’s a big part of marketing in general, and not specific to the online world – the power of the ‘call to action’. You see, humans love to do as they’re bidden – if you ask or tell someone to ‘buy now’, ‘don’t wait’, ‘call me’ etc. they are more likely to do it than if you don’t. We can’t help it, it’s a subconscious reflex action that’s really hard to ignore – but it’s also one that you can use to help your social media marketing campaigns to succeed.
All you have to do is either ask or remind people to retweet your post, by putting language to that effect in your tweet. It doesn’t have to be a big, long, formal request - and in fact you’d be surprised how effective spending a few characters on an ‘RT’s appreciated!’ can be. If someone who sees those few characters decides to act upon your request, then they open your content up to a whole new group of people who might do the same, and from that point the effect only gets bigger and bigger – just what you want for social media marketing content!