Twitter is a great marketing platform for businesses of any size. Small or medium-sized businesses can especially leverage the free platform not only to promote their products and services but also to get in touch with fans and customers and also collect client feedback. In the US alone, there are nearly 70 million users on Twitter. Moreover, one-fourth of the users decided to purchase discovering a business on Twitter. However, using Twitter to promote your business can also get quite tricky. However, once you get used to it, it can improve your conversions rates a lot.
Understanding the Hashtag
A hashtag is a tag that binds a bunch of similar posts. This allows one to view related posts that people are making more easily. It’s a handy tool to keep track of conversations related to a particular topic. Hashtags are followed by the hash (#) symbol, is generally a short phrase of around three words. Hashtags are not case sensitive. So, #ThankGodItsFriday and #thankgoditsfriday makes no difference. However, the capitalization improves the readability. When a hashtag gets a large number of tweets, it gets to be on the “trending” list. The trending list varies from region to region. On the desktop, you can see a list of the top ten such hashtags whereas, on the mobile app, you can see up to twenty.
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As a business owner, one can use the hashtag to track the conversations regarding their businesses. It also allows you to track the online reputation of the business, or increase the awareness regarding the small business.
Using the Hashtags for Your Small Business
When you are taking your business to Twitter, you also need to have a hashtag that uniquely identifies your business, your products, or your services. This may not have the name of your business in it, but it should be something that ties up all the post related to your business only. This also increases brand awareness.
So, if you are posting something on Twitter, say on the weekend, you can use hashtags such as #SalesSaturday along with your own. If some user wants to do some shopping and he or she searches with the hashtag #SalesSaturday, then they can find your tweet. They can go to your website from the tweet, or they can explore other tweets you have made using the unique hashtag. Meanwhile, if they retweeted a tweet, then more people will get to see the tweet.
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So, when you are making posts with hashtags, make use of relevant hashtags. This allows your tweet to stay more discoverable. There are a lot of premium tools that will enable you to analyze hashtags and provides you with the best ones too so that your tweet stays relevant.
Hashtags are an integral part of the Twitter community. Learning to use the right hashtags can take some time. When you use hashtags to tweet a post, you also need to see what other hashtags people are coupling up with the ones that you are using. So, if you are using the hashtag #MondayMotivation along with a few others, then you also need to check what hashtags others are using along with #MondayMotivation too.
Build Up Your Profile
When you are promoting your business on Twitter, it is essential that you complete your profile. First, you need to create the handle. This is the same as the username. The handle should generally be the name of the business. Then, there is the display picture. For a business, it should be the company logo. The display name should be the company name. This is something that can be changed later too, without much effect on the profile itself.
The bio is something that you need to invest a little time in. It should be a short and precise introduction to what your company is about. In the bio, you can also set the location of your company as well as a link to the website. The header is a wide picture, much like the Facebook cover photo, on the top of your profile. It is a great way to run promotional campaigns from time to time.
Finally, there is the pinned tweet. This tweet is the one that always stays on the top of your profile and something people will see first when they visit your profile. It’s a good idea to pin important announcements such as sales and product updates as a pinned tweet. Make sure that you use the relevant hashtags.
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Be Engaged with The Community
Hashtags allow your tweets to be found and even allows you to find others sharing similar content. When people discover your profile online, they may start following you. You should also follow them back. In the future, a follower will become a customer. Therefore, to get to know your customers, you should also follow them back.
Besides using hashtags, having an interesting profile is vital to gain and keep followers. Moreover, you also have to regular on Twitter. You cannot post once in a month and expect conversion rates to improve. In the case of Twitter, or any social media, there are certain times today where more people are online. You need to check the timings and post accordingly, depending on your customers and location. You also will have to post regularly, comment on the posts of your followers and retweet their tweets. To keep things more private, you can also send a direct message to followers and is a great way to get in touch with certain people and collect valuable feedback.
Wrap Up
Twitter is a great way to reach a massive number of people. However, you need to be active, engaged and use hashtags properly to reach the right audience. Using too many hashtags is also considered a bad practice. So, finding the right ones is a trial and error process. Using Twitter takes some time and patience. You will not start getting followers and retweets from day one. However, persistence pays off in the end.