3 Ways Twitter Can Accelerate Your Online Visibility
Social Media Marketing is not a new consideration by any extent of the imagination. Businesses have been leveraging social media since MySpace – and now Facebook, Twitter, Google +, Instagram, Pinterest, and LinkedIn are all utilized to reach companies’ target markets.
The two amazing points that these social channels bring about is the amount of time people stay engaged on them and the clear demographic difference that uses each platform.
- Facebook is tried and true, so it has the most-well rounded of demographics.
- Pinterest leans heavily towards female users. Instagram is favored by those under the age of 29.
- LinkedIn is the obvious business professional choice.
- Twitter is favored among urbanites and young adults (Pew Research).
Lately, a lot of people have been overlooking Twitter due to lackluster financial performance, the starlight of Mark Zuckerberg, and the speedy growth of newer arrivals, like Instagram, but those are not hitting the real power of Twitter.
Let’s focus on what matters then and explore 3 ways that twitter accelerates your online visibility!
Popularity of Micro-Expressions and Hashtags
According to AdWeek, Twitter didn’t invent Hashtags but they certainly took it to new heights in popularity. The hashtag goes hand and hand with micro-expressions though and just as Twitter made it easy for smaller messages to stand out compared to Facebook, it also made it easier for micro-topics to stand out in the midst of all the peripheral “noise”.
There is so much going on in the digital sphere that it is often difficult to find exactly what you were looking for. With relentless burst of Tweets at every moment of every day – fun fact, there are about 6,000 Tweets per second – being able to embed your Tweet in a conversation is extremely useful.
This is excellent for companies looking to delve into a market or area of conversation, or to build their brand.
My suggestion is to leverage your #Hashtags into categories – keep a branded hashtag and focus another one on something that is getting a lot of conversation or that your Tweet directly correlates to.
This way you build your brand while simultaneously building on your reach. Be active – you may not need to have a dominate share of the 6,000 Tweets per second, but you need to break through somehow – about 5 or 6 Tweets per day is a great benchmark.
Pick it up on days where there is more to talk about and decelerate on days where conversation is dry.
Twitter in SERPs
For about a year now, Google has been showing Tweets in their search results! This is a marketers dream, crossing two of the most important functions to online marketing – social media marketing and search engine optimization!
Keeping your Tweets up to date and focusing on topics of popular events, gives you the opportunity to not only reach people that are already following you or a new audience based on your popular hashtags but also puts you in front of a search audience!
This is huge news for people on the forefront of current and popular events!
You don’t have to be a news anchor to be on the frontline of current events. In fact, staying up to date on breaking news on popular news sites, Google topics and other Tweets will give you all the information you need. Do you have an opinion? Get that in the conversation!
Twitter Tools
Twitter separates itself from the Social Media platform crowd because of the resourcefulness of the tools that can integrate with it. Most social media channels have tools and APIs that can connect but very few can strike a good balance.
The balance is usefulness for the user without being overbearing for those that are out there. One such Twitter tool is Staged – connecting you to a targeted group of Twitter users and re-purposing video content to promote your brand.
Wouldn’t it be nice to gain your competitor’s followers?
Staged allows you to address your competitors’ Twitter pages and gain targeted followers – and by targeted followers, I mean those that are already following your competitors!
The reason being, if they are interested in your competitors’ products or services, then chances are they could be interested in yours!
Wouldn’t it be nice to put your company in front of about 200 new people per day?
One Staged feature is a “Managed Followers” account, which actively puts your account in front of up to 200 new people per day.
Using Twitter best-practices, properly building out your profile and actively putting your brand in front of perspective customers is one of the best ways to build branding and to drive revenue.
Wouldn’t it be nice if you could post useful YouTube videos while giving credit to the creator and still putting them in front of your brand?
Sure you could spend a few hours each day taking 3 or 4 YouTube videos you like and using the embed codes to put those on landing pages you’ve built and then Tweet them there.
And, that would bring a lot of people to your brand! But, it because a question of time and value for money. You better bring in a lot of sales if you are going to spend 20+ hours a week on it.
Or, you can just use Staged auto-video poster which takes YouTube videos and puts them in “Stages” or just landing pages you’ve designed at the beginning.
All of this is done in an hour or so of setup and revisited on occasion. No need to spend 20 hours a week on it but you’ll still get the same results!
Twitter for Business
Twitter is still a great tool for businesses. The power it has to connect your company with prospects and to build your brand is really second to none. Whether you are looking to build your brand via hashtags, build social awareness in SERPs or leverage tools that help you out – Twitter is the way to go!
What suggestions do you have for accelerating online visibility with Twitter? Let me know your comments on any of the above! I always enjoy hearing from our community!
As a Visual Digital Marketing Specialist for New Horizons 123, Julie works to grow small businesses, increasing their online visibility by leveraging the latest in internet and video technologies. She specializes in creative camera-less animated video production, custom images, content writing, and SlideShare presentations. Julie also manages content, blog management, email marketing, marketing automation, and social media for her clients.
Twitter is my favorite social media platform for so many things. Sure, it’s a great place to share links to my stuff, but it’s also a great place to share stuff from others, have conversations, and find out what’s going on in the live moment. For all this stuff I’ve been reading about the demise of Twitter, it’s the first place those of us in the know go when there’s a crisis and we want to know what’s going on, or can connect with each other when there’s something significant going on like the Super Bowl.
Power? Absolutely!
Thanks Mitch. Very true. Being able to search for conversations of interest via hashtags is definitely not only powerful, but provides this information right at your fingertips in real time. Of course, this is an added benefit to how it can really help you grow your business 🙂