Twitter Marketing – Here to Stay

Twitter marketing is not going anywhere.

As much as Elon Musk has encouraged the worst of Twitter, we still love the friends we’ve made on Twitter. As a result, people are not leaving.

You need to be on Twitter in 2023. Here is our comprehensive guide to success.

Establish a Twitter Marketing Plan

Without an established marketing plan, you won’t have any sustained growth or progress. Your Twitter presence won’t be identifiable, and it’ll be hard to establish trust and momentum. Here’s how to set up a plan.

Define Your Personality.

We advise our brands to spend some time thinking about their personality. To some, it is evident; to others not. You must develop some personality on Twitter to succeed.

Your Twitter brand should be:

• Genuine
• Offer Value
• Consistent
• Entertaining (when appropriate)

If possible, every Tweet should feel like it comes from the brand. If your Tweets are scheduled Tweets from some social media henchman of yours, you won’t go far.

Look at two of our amazing clients on how to do it right.

Anela Malik

Take our client Anela Malik as an example. She started her growth on Instagram and is over 100k followers there. But she is also building her brand on Twitter.

The world is full of bot-like food content creators that try and game the system to get you to read their “5 Greatest Instant Pot Recipes” or “3 Reasons to Travel to Cancun” posts.

You can get some good SEO going that way, but you are unlikely to build a loyal following on social media or elsewhere. With the advent of AI being used on websites (and even social media), now is the time to shine with your individuality more than ever. If you are yourself, you will stand out.

Anela does just that.

Anela constantly asks you to go on a journey with her. Who does not love that? Of course, we want to adventure with you. ( What is Black Food? )

Anela constantly asks you to think about your choices. ( Let’s Talk About The Uncomfortable Thing – Racism )

Anela has not only used these things to build a massive Instagram following, but she has also built an extremely thriving paid subscription service community with Magic at the Margins. (I highly suggest you join by the way)

Give to your fans/clients/customers, and you shall receive.

Mirriam Seddiq

Mirriam has been blogging since the mid-2000s. She is a lawyer, founding member of the Dulles Justice Coalition, started the first American Muslim Woman PAC, started a non-profit to help Afghan refugees, and is now writing an Afghan cookbook.

Her personal Twitter is a place she has shared her world views, thoughts on racism, problems with overcriminalization, and also her love for her fellow Afghans. And she does it all in style.

All of that hard work has paid off. Who helped her get the Afghan refugee non-profit off the ground? Her loyal Twitter followers.

Who has provided the lion’s share of funding for her cookbook? Twitter followers.

Provide value and a meaningful connection to your Twitter followers; when it comes time to need them, they will astonish you.

You are not either of the creators. You or your corporation must be yourselves. Think about what you want to put in the world; make it fun and helpful, and people will come.

Sometimes, you can relax and just post for the lols. Just ask Wendy’s.

Make a Content Calendar.

You need a content calendar if you have a busy life and don’t want to pay a social media management company.

Frankly, most creators and businesses don’t need to hire out. At least in the beginning. You should establish fundamentals first, then decide if you don’t have the time to handle it.

So what is a content calendar? Nothing complicated. It is just a calendar where you schedule content that you plan on posting on one or more platforms.

A content calendar will help you:

• make sure you have adequate content for the month
• help you share duties for different content posts (multi-member teams)
• help you set realistic goals for the volume of you or your team can produce

With the mercurial growth of digital marketing and social media, there is no shortage of choices for social calendaring programs. Some will even let you pre-schedule your Tweets. (a little overkill, I never use that)

I highly recommend Canva. Canva is a free-to-use online graphic design tool. You can use it to create social media posts, presentations, posters, videos, logos, and more.

I use it multiple times a day.

Their content calendar is simple and comes with Canva Pro or Canva Teams. Canva Pro is $119 a year, and Canva Teams is 149.00 a year. (Canva Teams is Canva pro but for up to 5 users)

Whether you are an individual or a corporation, you will use Canva. Why not use their calendar since you’ll spend time in their app anyway?

Set Goals and Then Check Your Analytics.

Goalsetting.

In 1981, George Doran, Arthur Miller, and James Cunningham came up with the “S.M.A.R.T.” method. Originally for management goals and objectives, the marketing industry has used and abused this acronym.

SMART stands for:

• Specific: What are you trying to do?
• Measurable: How will you measure what you are doing?
• Attainable: With the tools that you have, can you reach your goal?
• Realistic: Can you meet the goals you are setting forth?
• Timely: What is the timeline to meet your goals?

I don’t formally go through everything on this list every time I set goals, but it’s an excellent framework to keep in mind when trying to figure out what you want to accomplish.

I find realistic to be one of the critical steps. If you overload yourself with pie-in-the-sky ideas of what you will accomplish on social media, you’ll not accomplish anything.

Now that you’ve got a framework for setting goals, here are some tangible things to shoot for when growing your Twitter empire:

• Grow your followers by 100%.
• Improve your click-through rate by 3% over six months.
• Generate 100 leads by converting Tweet traffic to your email list subscribers.

Before you begin a focused Twitter marketing effort, sit down. Come up with a list of 5 goals you would like to achieve in 6 months. See if you can do it, and get “SMART” with it. (Cheesy, I know)

Twitter Analytics.

Twitter gives you free access to your analytics. True, it would be best if you were a genuine and helpful Twitter presence to have success, but the truth is in the statistics.

You can see how you are performing month-to-month, which are your top tweets and followers.

You should check your Twitter analytics once a month. See what is working, and double down on it.

Get Some New Threads, Be a Video Star, and Engage!

Now that you’ve got an identity, a plan, and some goals, let’s look at three specific ways to boost your traffic on Twitter.

Create Tweet Threads.

The digital marketing bros have abused long threaded conversations. Still, they can be extremely useful to your brand and, if done correctly, can lead to virality and hundreds and thousands of new followers.

Because tweets (at least for now) are limited to 280 characters, there is only so much you can get across in a single tweet. This is where threads come in.

Punchy Lead.

The key to a great Twitter thread is a punchy lead, a great story, and a zippy call to action.

First, you need a catchy lead. If you don’t grab the viewer on the first tweet, you’re done.

You can read Jodie Grace’s entire thread here. (you know you want to)

Grab them with emotion, grab them with humor, grab them with something they want to know. Do that, and they’ll be hooked.

People like to share funny things, helpful things, and things that make them cry. That’s why good tweet threads go viral. Think of the excellent story first, then write your killer hook to start it off.

Tell a Great Story.

You get them past the first tweet in your threads, but if your story stinks, they will abandon the thread, and they won’t share it with anyone else.

Humans have been telling stories since humans could communicate. Don’t use Twitter threads because they are trendy; use them because they are a vehicle to share something meaningful.

Here is a spooky story shared by Greg.

The complete thread is here. Greg has barely posted since 2019, and through the sheer success of this thread, he has over 100k Twitter followers.

Hook them, take them for a ride, and you shall be rewarded.

Get that Call To Action In.

What is a call to action? A call to action is a specific request by you to your viewer. These are important.

You can be popular on Twitter just to be popular, but that’s not why you are here. You are hoping to build a Twitter MARKETING presence. You want to be genuine in your tweeting, but you also want to alert your followers to things you have to offer. A call to action can be very simple. Here are some things you can ask folks to do:

• If you liked that thread, follow me.
• If you liked that thread, join my email list for more x.
• If you like that thread, check out my YouTube channel.
• And a classic, check out my SoundCloud.

Be a Video Star.

Video killed the radio star, and it also tried to kill Twitter.

Platforms like Instagram and TikTok have dwarfed the earnings of Twitter. That’s because video is compelling.

Posting videos on Twitter used to be annoying. But it is changing a bit. Musk is trying to change his platform to be more friendly to video creators. (As he should, he needs to make serious bank to cover that loan)

Twitter now includes videos (without mention of the content of the tweet) on the trending page. This is huge.

People have grown Twitter followers through great video content in the last couple of years. (See Trump impersonator Sarah Cooper)

Now, as far as HOW to create excellent video content. I’m not going to remake the wheel. Anela Malik, the owner of Feed the Malik (100k+ Instagram followers), has the most fantastic article on this topic.

She’ll have you producing compelling video content in a matter of days.

Engage with Your Followers

Some of this isn’t rocket science. It just takes some effort. That’s precisely the case with good engagement.

The people who love you want you to engage with them. The people who hate you want you to engage with them. That’s human nature. You can ignore the latter (but if you don’t, it can help you with impressions!), but not the former.

You can’t get away with low engagement if you are growing a Twitter presence. Your fans need to know you are somewhat accessible. This can be draining. You don’t have to respond to everyone.

Respond here and there and let your followers know you are there for them. Musician Jason Isbell does a great job of this and does it genuinely.

Not only is there a human reason to engage, but there is also a tactical reason to engage—all social platforms, including Twitter, reward engagement. Higher engagement means more eyeballs. More eyeballs are huge for social platforms because that helps them with advertising at the end of the day.

Need Help? Get a Free Consult.

The GTC agency offers a wide range of services for our marketing clients. For some, we do everything: website development, social media management, SEO strategy, and more.

If you want a full-tilt social media manager, we can do that. But if you want some coaching and planning sessions with no long-term commitment, we can do that too.

Click below, and let’s talk.