Twitter Marketing Basics, Strategies, and Examples

If you have a business, it’s important to market wherever you can. One of the best places to get noticed by consumers is on social media. Social networks like Facebook, LinkedIn, and Instagram can give you access to a huge audience base and help you seek out users interested in your industry.

Twitter is another social media platform that lets businesses share their views, promotions, and personalities with their audiences within a 280 character limit. In this article, we’ll go over everything you need to know to create an effective marketing strategy using Twitter, including:

• What is Twitter marketing?
• Main benefits of Twitter marketing
• How to create a Twitter marketing strategy
• B2B vs. B2C: Twitter marketing strategy differences
• Twitter marketing best practices
• Examples of great Twitter marketing strategies

What is Twitter marketing?

Twitter marketing is how businesses use Twitter to create and disperse content to targeted audiences and build community interest for their brand—and hopefully generate sales. Twitter helps companies get in touch with a wide pool of potential customers from around the world. In fact, more than 300 million monthly active users are on Twitter.

Building a targeted and effective Twitter marketing strategy is a multistep process. The first step involves creating buyer personas for your ideal customers. After that, it’s a good idea to do Twitter research to get to know how your target audience acts on the platform and what they’re interested in.

When you have some idea of what your intended audience wants, it’s time to start making content for them. However, keep track of how users respond to your tweets. Monitoring your tweets’ performance can help you adjust and improve your strategy and find your brand voice.

There are also several small details that can contribute to the success or failure of your Twitter strategy. For example, when you post can be just as important as what you post. It’s vital that you release content when your target audience is likely to see it.

Main benefits of Twitter marketing

There are several benefits to marketing with Twitter. The platform allows you to increase awareness about your brand, communicate and engage with potential customers, and keep up with important trends and developments in your industry. Below is a list of some of the top advantages of using Twitter for marketing:

• Brand awareness: Twitter helps alert consumers to your company’s existence and educate them about your business and products.
• Customer engagement: Twitter gives customers a quick and easy way to reach out to you. This helps your business build relationships.
• Drive website traffic: Twitter is a great tool for guiding users to your business website.  
• Thought leadership: Twitter lets you start conversations with your audience and share your opinions and views with them.
• Customer research: Twitter has several tools that can help you research how your target customers act on the platform and see what they respond to.
• Business sales: Twitter is great for advertising your products and can help generate sales for your business.
• Develop community: Twitter helps you form a community of fans and supporters of your business.

How to create a Twitter marketing strategy

For your business’s Twitter marketing strategy to be as effective as possible, it’s important to put some serious thought into it. Creating a successful Twitter campaign is a multistep process that requires research, planning, implementation, and evaluation of your company’s content.

The steps to creating a successful Twitter marketing strategy include:

1. Research audience and behavior on Twitter

After deciding who your target audience is, see how they operate on Twitter. Find out when they’re on Twitter and what accounts are popular among them.

Researching how your audience acts on Twitter can help you create a coherent outline for your marketing strategy. It lets you start making decisions, like when to post and which tweets you want to model yours after.

Twitter Analytics can help you see other pages your followers like. It can also show you things like what age groups your followers fit into and what they do for a living. Tools like Twitonomy can help you see the engagement statistics for your competitors.

2. Know what kinds of content resonate with prospects

Using your business Twitter account, type in a few keywords related to your industry. Take a look at what type of content brands like yours are posting and see which of their posts get the most engagement.

Get a feel for what generates engagement in your field. Are the popular tweets funny? Are they sincere? Are they informational? The types of tweets that get attention will vary depending on your industry.

For example, if you have an e-commerce clothing store, you might find that many popular tweets for the keyword “fashion” contain pictures of models or advertise sales and promotions.

Reviewing the content from profiles your audience already follows can help you understand the needs of your potential customers. That way, you can create your own content that satisfies those needs.

3. Schedule out tweets in relevant themes

Holidays, sports events, and current events are all opportunities for you to reach out to your audience. You can even schedule tweets that include any special deals or promotions you’re doing for a holiday.

Let’s say you have a restaurant. On Veterans Day, you might tweet something like “Happy Veterans Day to all our troops! To show our appreciation, we’re giving every service member 50% off of their bill.”

Tweets with themes like the one above can endear your business to your audience and help build a positive reputation for your company. Themes can also increase the visibility of your tweets and increase brand awareness.

Let’s say your restaurant is running a Halloween promotion. Anyone that comes in wearing a costume gets a free appetizer. You design a Halloween-themed tweet with the trending hashtag #HappyHalloween to advertise your promotion. Now, your tweet will appear in the search results whenever someone types in “Happy Halloween.” ‍

4. Target for specific KPIs and outcomes

You can’t track your success unless you measure it. Keep track of certain key performance indicators (KPIs) to see how well your posts are performing. You can use Twitter Analytics to see some of the results of your tweets.

Choose which KPIs are most important to your business and try to focus on them. Perhaps the goal of your Twitter page is simply to promote brand awareness. However, you might want it to make sales directly. Here are a few KPIs you should keep track of:

• Engagement: How many people are interacting with your tweet in general? ‍
• Retweets: Are people sharing your tweet on their own Twitter pages?‍
• Follows: Which of your tweets are bringing you the most followers?‍
• Website traffic: You’ll want to include links to your business website in your tweet. Which links drive traffic to your website the best? ‍
• Brand awareness: See how often your business is mentioned by Twitter users. ‍
• Sales: How much of the traffic brought to your website is converted into sales for your company?

‍5. Review your goals and evolve

You’ll likely be reevaluating your strategy and changing your content continuously as you see what works and what doesn’t. Create goals for what you’d like to achieve with Twitter and how the platform fits into your company’s marketing scheme.

Make sure your goals are specific and measurable. The best way to do this is to connect them to your KPIs. Here are a few examples of some clear goals you might have for your Twitter page:

• Add 5,000 new followers who are aged 35 to 49.
• Increase the number of people who follow a Twitter link to a landing page by 10%.
• Get 2,000 retweets.
  

Be sure to review your goals periodically to make sure they’re still challenging but also realistic. Setting clear objectives for your Twitter strategy can help keep you motivated and focused, and can give you something to work toward. Goals can also provide a measuring stick you can use to evaluate your results.

If you’re not making progress toward your goals, take the time to figure out why and adjust your plans. For example, you may need to change the type of tweets you’re posting. Tweets with images and videos typically generate a lot more engagement than tweets with text alone.

B2C vs. B2B: Twitter marketing strategy differences

Although business-to-consumer (B2C) and business-to-business (B2B) marketing both aim to generate sales, they do so in different ways. They also work on different time tables:

• B2C marketing usually involves building excitement for a product or showing what problem it can solve for a user. Average consumers aren’t typically interested in the science behind why a product works. For example, a user might see a shirt they like and simply click a link to your e-commerce store to purchase it.
• B2B marketing is much more in-depth. Business leaders might be investing a large portion of their budget into a product, so they may want to know everything they can about that product. B2B sales rarely happen right away.  Let’s say your company sells customer relationship management (CRM) software to businesses. The purpose of your Twitter page would not only be to show businesses what your product does but also to educate them about it. You might include a link to a white paper for your product.  

Twitter marketing best practices

In the next few sections, we’ll go over a few best practices and Twitter marketing tips that can help you boost brand awareness and increase engagement.

Audit your Twitter

Look at the Twitter analytics for your own page to evaluate how your posts are performing. Take note of how many people are engaging with your tweets. Are your hashtags relevant and effective? Are you reaching your intended audience?

Knowing which tweets are working can help you adjust your content strategy for the future. For example, if you have a pet store, you might find that tweets with pictures of cute animals generate large amounts of comments from animal lovers sharing pictures and stories about their own pets.  

Have a consistent brand voice

As a company, it’s important to discover your brand voice and be consistent with it. Your company’s brand voice is how you interact with people and express your personality.

Depending on the nature of your business, your brand voice might be lighthearted, sincere, or even sarcastic. For example, if you run a bar, a funny tone will attract followers looking to have a good time. If you run an animal shelter, a heartfelt tone will attract people with a soft spot for animals.

To develop your own brand voice, start by checking out how competitors in your industry express theirs. You might decide to make your voice similar or create something totally different. Your brand voice will change over time as you see what people respond to.

Verify your brand profile

Getting your company verified on Twitter shows users that your business is for real. It can also protect you from people trying to pose as your business. When your profile gets verified, you’ll get a blue checkmark next to your Twitter handle.

But Twitter doesn’t just hand out blue checkmarks. Your profile has to meet several requirements to be eligible. Here are a few qualifications your profile must have to be verified:

• Your profile must be authentic. You’ll need to prove that your business is really you by providing Twitter with a business website, personal ID, and official email address.‍
• Your profile must be notable. Twitter only verifies profiles from popular industries, like business, entertainment, sports, government, activism, and journalism. These profiles must have follower counts in the top .05% of profiles in their region or be mentioned in more than 95.95% of the profiles in your area. ‍
• Your profile must be active. Your profile must have a name and picture, and you need to have recently logged in to your account.
  

To apply for verification, go to the account settings on your Twitter profile. You should see an option to request verification. The form will ask you a few questions about your business. It will also ask you for a few things, like your ID, to confirm your identity.‍‍

Use hashtags correctly

Generally, tweets with hashtags can receive over 12% more engagement (follows, replies, and retweets) than those without them. You can find some of the most popular hashtags for your industry with Twitter Analytics.

You can also use unique ones that represent your business or certain promotions you’re running.  For example, if you own an online record store, you might include the hashtags #VinylLife and #vintagevinyl on a tweet about a store promotion. Hashtags begin with a “#” symbol and can’t have punctuation marks, symbols, or spaces.

Don’t clutter your tweets with too many hashtags, though. One or two can do the trick. Using too many hashtags can distract users from your message. It can also make your tweets look less sincere.

Find reputable scheduling software

Businesses that use Twitter successfully tweet consistently. Some companies post well over 10 times in a day. To make sure you get optimal performance from each tweet, it’s important to post when your audience engages on the platform.

The right time to tweet can vary depending on your business. For example, B2C company tweets might see more engagement on weekends when consumers are off work, while B2B company tweets typically see more engagement on the weekdays when their clients are at work. Do your research to decide the best times for your business.

There are several scheduling tools that can automate the process of publishing tweets at particular times each day. All you have to do is organize a content calendar for the week or month, upload it, and the scheduler will do the rest without you even having to think about it. Here’s a list of a few great scheduling tools:

• Sendible‍
• SEMrush Social Media Poster Tool‍
• SmarterQueue‍
• TweetDeck‍
• Sprout Social

Test out which content resonates more with your audience

The relevant content you post on Twitter is likely to change over time. Be sure to check your Twitter Analytics periodically to see how well your posts are engaging your audience.

Get creative with your tweets to see what people react to. Try posting funny GIFs, interesting statistics, your company’s views on current events, emojis, or even Twitter polls. Eventually, you’ll get a clear picture of what works and what doesn’t.

Learning what types of content resonate with your target audience can help you build relationships with them. Another benefit of experimenting with different types of content is that, over time, your business will develop a brand personality that makes your company recognizable to consumers.  

Consider branching out to relevant Twitter profiles

One of the best things about Twitter is that it gives you an easy way to communicate with your audience. Replying to comments from your audience and having conversations with them is a good way to drum up attention for your business.

You can also reach out to Twitter influencers to see if they’ll promote your product. This can help you take advantage of the large followings some influencers have. If a popular influencer already follows you, you already know they support your business or product.

Use Twitter Lists to make sure you don’t miss tweets from influencers, reporters, and possible clients that can help build awareness of your business. The function lets you prioritize the tweets of your most influential followers.  

‍Review the competition’s strategy

There are a few reasons to keep an eye on what your competitors are tweeting. It gives you ideas on how to increase the engagement of your own audience. It also helps you find ways to carve out your market share.  

Use Twitter Lists to create a private group of competitors so you can keep up with all their tweets. Perform a SWOT analysis (Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, and Threats) of your own profile to see how your company measures up to the competition.

Stay relevant with social listening and trends

It’s important to keep an eye on what people are saying about your business on Twitter. Monitor social interactions to see whether people have positive, negative, or impartial sentiments toward your business.

Social listening tools like Agorapulse and BuzzSumo can make it easy to monitor conversations about your company. These marketing tools can help you evaluate your reputation so you can maintain or improve it.

Staying up to date with Twitter trends can help you build your following. You can see what’s trending on Twitter under the search tab. Be sure to do your research before posting anything about a trending topic, though. Accidentally posting an offensive tweet about a delicate topic can be disastrous for your company’s reputation.  

You can also anticipate trending hashtags to design tweets for the future. For example, if you run an e-commerce store that sells baby toys, you might want to create a special post for Teddy Bear Day on Sept. 9.   ‍

Measure your results with UTM and Twitter Analytics

Measuring the success of your tweets and Twitter ads is a vital step in optimizing your Twitter marketing strategy. An Urchin Tracking Monitor (UTM) is a tag you can connect to a URL for your Twitter page (or any other source).

When a user follows a link that has a UTM to your website, Google Analytics records where that traffic came from. That way, you can see how many website visitors you get from sites like Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram. You can set up UTMs using a tool like Google’s Campaign URL Builder.  

Twitter Analytics shows you metrics that can help you assess the effectiveness of your tweets. It shares information like how many impressions (how many times your content is viewed) your tweets have gotten and which ones have the highest engagement rates.

Document your strategy and research

One way to document your Twitter strategy is to organize it into content pillars. Twitter content pillars are collections of the types of subject matter your business will tweet about. All your content pillars should relate to your business objectives.

For example, if your development company creates project management software, you could use the following business goals as your content pillars:

• Teach consumers about your products.
• Motivate consumers to increase their productivity.
• Engage your audience in a conversation about project management.
  

Create your tweets with these pillars in mind. A tweet designed to motivate consumers might contain an inspirational quote about productivity from a famous entrepreneur. For example, you could use Henry Ford’s quote, “Nothing is particularly hard when you divide it into small jobs.”

Content pillars help you deliver consistent messaging to your followers. As you research your old posts, you’ll get a picture of which tweets and content pillars your audience engages with the most. Your content pillars could evolve over time based on how your followers respond to them.

Examples of great Twitter marketing strategies

There are several companies that have mastered marketing on Twitter. In the next few sections, we’ll go over a few businesses that have utilized the platform particularly well.

Wendy’s

Wendy’s uses comedy and razor-sharp wit to engage with Twitter users. Whether they’re making fun of McDonald’s or getting into a rap battle with Wingstop, Wendy’s proves that making people laugh is one of the best ways to get their attention.

Wendy’s responds to their followers’ tweets in hilarious ways. One of Wendy’s biggest wins on Twitter came in 2017 when Carter Wilkerson asked how many retweets he’d have to get to score free chicken nuggets for a year. Wendy’s jokingly replied that it would take 18 million.

Users started retweeting the post and asking Wendy’s to make Carter’s wish come true. The hashtag #NuggsForCarter was born. #NuggsForCarter brought massive attention to Wendy’s. The tweet was even featured on a skit for “The Ellen DeGeneres Show.”

In the end, the post was retweeted more than 3.2 million times, making it one of the most retweeted tweets of all time. That year, Wendy’s saw their net profits grow by almost 50% over the previous year. Their profit growth was likely due, in part, to their effective use of Twitter and other social media platforms.

Chipotle

Chipotle also has an engaging Twitter presence. Chipotle personally responds to around 90% of follower posts about the company with funny and thoughtful tweets. For example, when one user complained the restaurant was out of guacamole, Chipotle responded they didn’t mean to “guac in and out of” her life.

Another way Chipotle uses Twitter is to publicize its promotions. Quitters Day is a not-so-festive holiday that occurs every year on the second Friday in January. It’s the day when people are most likely to abandon their New Year’s resolutions.

In 2020, Chipotle decided to celebrate Quitter’s Day by inspiring people to hold on to their resolutions to eat healthily. The company started releasing codes on Twitter that its audience could use to receive free Lifestyle Bowls (salad-based Chipotle bowls with other healthy items).

Promotions like these helped Chipotle increase its total revenue by about 7% to over $6 billion in 2020 while many other restaurants and chains struggled just to stay in business. Platforms like Twitter also helped Chipotle grow its digital sales by over 170% in 2020.

Gary Vee

Gary Vaynerchuk is an extremely successful marketing entrepreneur who posts inspirational and educational content on his Twitter feed. However, unlike some users, he’ll sometimes publish the exact same post several times in a day.

He does this so that more people will have an opportunity to see his tweets. For example, he’ll publish the same tweet various times for different time zones so people can read his posts.

Vaynerchuk’s mastery over social media marketing and other forms of digital marketing has seen him become one of the top voices in the realms of entrepreneurship as well as self-help.

Conclusion

Creating a great Twitter strategy is deceptively hard. A lot of work goes into creating brief tweets that will engage and attract an audience. But if you do your research, create targeted content, evaluate your results, and keep updating your strategy, you’ll be able to optimize a Twitter marketing campaign that will help build your brand.

If you’re looking to avoid social media mistakes and make the most of your business’s Twitter profile, Upwork can connect you to the best independent social media marketers. They’ll be able to help create a Twitter marketing strategy that works for your business and helps your brand personality shine through.

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