With more than 145 million active daily users, Twitter is the fifth most popular social media network, and is popular with brands and individuals alike. It gained popularity as the first social media platform that enabled celebrities and their fans to directly interact, cutting out the paparazzi middle man that had, up until 2005, been the primary way to gain insight into the lives and minds of everyone’s favorite celebs. Since 2005 it has gone from strength to strength, becoming a favorite tool among politicians, brands, friends and celebrities. Notably, the 45th president of the USA used Twitter as his primary method of direct conversation with his support base. Twitter is a gold mine of customer insights and opportunities to build your brand, drive sales and win fans.
Why do people use Twitter?
Twitter enables its users to send and receive short posts called tweets on a public platform. What differentiates Twitter from other social platforms is its fast-paced, real-time nature, and it’s very conversational due to the real time dimension of the user’s timelines. Twitter is furthermore responsible for the introduction of hashtags into the social sphere, making it easy to discover new content.
With short messages as its primary communication format, Twitter is the ideal platform to create and be a part of a conversation. Tweets can be replied to and users can engage with each other around a topic of interest. Because so many people are on the platform and share content every day about their passions, what’s happening around them, and what’s happening in the world, it’s a vast source of information and entertainment.
Twitter facilitates a platform where you can curate your feed to display your interests, and is popular as a tools to access news and politics, sports, popular culture, influencers and utility (commuter information, disaster updates and support, customer service agents).These are only a few categories of interest that make up the major conversations on Twitter, but you can actually find a conversation for anything that interests you.
Twitter as a Marketing Tool
With so many people and interests, brands can leverage those instantaneous conversations to understand and share content to their target audience, even if their audience is niche. Twitter is born in the live dimension, which means people are on the go, sharing and reading things in real time, as they’re moving throughout their day. So, what that also means is that people are using Twitter primarily on their mobile device.
And it’s keeping up with the pulse of the world, evolving as time goes, with 280-character messages (originally 140 characters, increased in recent years) every second, telling us what’s going on around us. Twitter is the prime platform to stay up to date on news and current events, get news and deals from brands, discover new content, such as videos, articles, accounts, etc., engage in live commentary around events like the Super Bowl or the Oscars or the World Cup, and give consumer feedback.
A lot of people use Twitter for customer service, so it’s imperative that brands are paying attention in real time to service those customers.
The benefits of Twitter for digital marketers
1. Discover
You can first use the platform to discover what’s happening around you. Brands need to stay up to date with world news, trends, and customer interests. So, Twitter is the perfect place to see these things as they evolve and take note of how your brand fits within this evolving landscape. For example, if you are a retail brand and you’re looking for inspiration or insight on what your customers love, Twitter’s a great place to find out what colors, fabrics, and celebrities that people are interested in, so you can target your tweets accordingly.
2. Brand management
You can use Twitter to manage your brand’s reputation. Twitter is a place where people share all of their feelings. So, it’s a good place to keep track of what the sentiment is around your brand, and manage any negative commentary before it spirals out of control.
3. Increase awareness
Twitter is also a great place to increase your brand’s awareness. As mentioned, it’s a great place for people to discover content. So, people there are active and curious and want to know new things. So, brands in this environment, as long as you’re providing great content, it should be a great place to engage people with your brand and to spike interest.
4. Customer service
Twitter is a great place to provide timely customer service. People are on the go, and experiencing your brand throughout their day to day, and will use Twitter as a way to get immediate customer service. So, it’s important to be checking these tweets and comments on a regular basis, so you can service them in real time, and prevent any negative backlash.
5. Research competition
Twitter is a great place to research your competition. You can easily find out what they’re doing, what they’re saying, how they’re engaging their customers, and therefore find out how you can differentiate yourself and level up over the competition.
6. Connect
Twitter’s also a great place to connect with customers, brand advocates, and influencers. These influencers tend to have really large audiences. So, if you win them over, you’ll win their audiences over and it’s a great way to humanize your brands and remain authentic.
A Twitter marketing strategy is a plan centered around creating, publishing, and distributing content for your buyer personas, audience, and followers through the social media platform. The goal of this type of strategy is to attract new followers and leads, boost conversions, improve brand recognition, and increase sales. Twitter is an indispensable social media platform for worldwide users. Marketers are trying their best to harness Twitter for business opportunities. Why? Because of Twitter’s stellar speed of spreading information, your brand can indeed be an overnight sensation. But it takes months of effort to be consistent for that one tweet to go viral. A proper Twitter marketing strategy can take your business to the next level- get in contact with one of our consultants to discuss taking this step today!
