By TyllahApril 12, 20220 comments

The Ultimate Guide to Twitter Marketing

Can we have an honest question about how confusing and difficult twitter marketing is? In the beginning, it almost feels the algorithm doesn’t want to promote and push your content along.

While that would be an amazing scapegoat for underperforming content and strategies, it is not the truth. Sometimes we tell ourselves this to overcome the feeling of failure when we can’t “tap into” social media.

Fortunately, regardless of previous or current experience with Twitter marketing, the truth is that you can get followers, engagement, and most importantly sales.

Even better news is, since you’ve taken the initiative to get started and try, all you need is a strategy. And boy am I excited to share my methods with you to help you get started. Let’s go over everything this guide will cover.

Twitter Marketing Guide Overview

Introduction to Twitter Marketing

Who’s using Twitter?
What to do with this data?
Building a customer profile

Twitter followers & engagement

How do you get Twitter Followers?
How do you get engagement on Twitter?
How to use comment sections to generate interest in your business?

Creating content for Twitter

What is a content calendar?
Content Pillars & Cluster Topics
Copywriting tweets
Keyword research

Email Marketing

How can twitter help you with email marketing?
How do you use twitter to grow your mailing list?

Introduction to Twitter Marketing

Marketing on twitter is a bit different than other social media platforms because Twitter is a communications platform. Meaning, having and starting interesting conversations is the most important part of your twitter marketing strategy.

When you try to skip over prioritizing communications, you will struggle to grow a following, generate leads and make sales. It’s not about having the most followers, being the most popular or even being the “prettiest”.

Instead, Twitter is about creating the best discussions, making meaningful connections, being the most helpful, and sharing the best content possible. If you learn how to do these 3 things, you’ll grow on twitter with ease.

But, before you invest in twitter, let’s review who’s using twitter. As with every platform, you should always research to make sure your customers are using the platform. If they aren’t, then this platform may not be helpful to you.

This also will only work if you have a customer profile, if you don’t have one then check out How To Increase Engagement on twitter.

Who’s using Twitter?

There are 27 million active users on twitter, with over 500 millions tweets sent per day. Of the 27 million active users, only 30% are female while 70% of users are male.

While 30% may sound small, in terms of 27 million users, this means that 8.1 million twitter users are women. The number one country for twitter users is the United States, followed by Japan and then India.

The average twitter user is 25 - 34 years old (40%) and of those in the United States, 46% confirmed that they use twitter nearly every day. ⅓ of twitter users are also college educated with at least a bachelor's degree, which is one of many reasons why it is prime for communications.

35% of American Twitter users earn $75,000 or more annually. With the platform doubling it’s users from 2017 - 2021, this figure is anticipated to increase, meaning that users with disposable income who are ready to shop will be available soon.

Twitter is great for professionals on the go because of how fast paced the platform is. Most users check the app multiple times a day, but they often stay on for less than 10 minutes each time.

Which is why it’s key to post consistently throughout the day and show up everyday, even if you’re only sharing 5 tweets a day and engaging with 5-10 accounts throughout the day.

For 70% of users, Twitter is also a news communications app. Most users trust twitter to deliver the most up to date news and resources for business, community and politics.

This is key to understand when marketing on twitter, because it shows that users don’t just want promotional content, but also informational and update based content that keeps them informed.

Needless to say, if your target audience is established millennials who are educated, making $75,000+, and reside in the U.S. - Twitter is the ideal marketing platform for you.

But what should you do with this information and how does this help you?

Let’s dive into this a bit more.

What should you do with this data?

After reviewing this data, you should be able to determine if this is the best platform for you based on your ideal customer. You determine who your ideal customer is by creating customer profiles.

I go over this in detail in How To Increase Engagement on twitter.

Here’s a quick summary of questions to answer to create your customer profile:

What problems do they have?
What are they passionate about?
What do they do?
Who do they do it for? And why?
How much money do they have?
Where are they from?
What kind of car do they drive?
Do they have kids?
How old are they?
Are they married?
What is their ethnicity, race and nationality?
What languages do they speak?
What are their morals and ethics?
What do they believe in?
What do they value most from brands?
How can you positively reinforce your alignment with their values?
What brands do they already love?
From the brands they love, what platforms are they using? What kind of content do they share?
Using semrush, who are your keyword competitors?

After you answer these questions, you will have a simple customer profile to build onto. Try to be as specific as possible to narrow down who your customer is, this will make it significantly easier to target them with your content.

Twitter followers & Engagement

While I don’t believe having a ton of twitter followers is necessary to make money, having at least a few thousand can be helpful.

For reasons you may never consider including:

Larger followings add legitimacy to your brand for newcomers.
More followers makes it easier for others to trust you online.
You’ll have a larger pooled audience to sell to.
You’ll get opportunities much easier with larger followings
You can open yourself up to sponsored brand deals.

There’s a ton more reasons to, but these 5 reasons alone are more than enough reasons to want to grow online.

It’s not as easy as you may think either, especially when you consider the following data:

The average twitter account has 707 followers.
Over 390 million twitter accounts have no followers at all
40%+ of all twitter accounts are created and never tweeted from.
25 million of all active twitter counts are estimated to be bots

This means that if you have over 10,000 twitter followers, you’re in the top 0.1% of all twitter users. Of the 293 million active users, only 293,000 have 10,000 followers or more.

So, when someone minimizes your struggles with growing, you can know without certainty they haven’t done the research nor have they created a replicable strategy that can help you grow.

So, if only 0.1% of twitter users have more than 10,000 followers, how do you grow on twitter?

How do you get Twitter Followers?

I’ve discussed this with accounts of all sizes from 100 followers up to 400,000 followers and the process is different for everyone.

But there are many similarities in their journeys including:

Participating in relevant online conversations regularly.
Being proactive offline with asking others to follow them.
Sharing less filler content and more value added content that’s helpful.
Sharing at least 2-3 threads monthly.
Engaging with their followers how they’d like to be engaged by leaving meaningful comments that are helpful, funny and engaging.
Targeting quality accounts to engage with and partnering up to do virtual content together like lives, courses, digital bundles and more.

I share my twitter strategy for growth in followers and sales in my YouTube video “How to make $1,000 online consistently”. In summary, I review completing keyword research to create a list of 100 accounts to network and engage with.

By doing this, you can easily get your brand in front of 100,000+ active users for free and start generating 1 million monthly impressions with ease. While it will take time to grow, you can see consistent growth by using these strategies on Twitter.

Just with these simple strategies, my only community grows by 400+ new followers a month on my main twitter page. This is 100% replicable because I started with 0 followers just like you.

How do you get engagement on Twitter?

You get engagement on twitter by engaging with others, creating quality content and being likable by your target audience. I know that sounds simple, because it is.

If you engage consistently with others, they’ll engage with you regularly in return. Let go of the idea that you need to focus on engaging with as many large accounts as possible to grow, it’s not true.

If I were you, I’d target engaging with active accounts that had 1,000-9,000 twitter followers in the beginning. These accounts are more likely to share your content, click your profile, engage with you and potentially do business with you than large creators.

Large creators also get tons of comments and engagement from small accounts, so your comments are more easily lost in the crowd. Whereas smaller accounts have a more manageable opportunity to engage with and respond to others.

How to use comment sections to generate interest in your business?

You may think the best way to get people’s attention is to spam them in their inbox, but this is one of the most annoying things you can do as a small account.

Instead, you should try creating segmented creator lists on twitter and turning your notifications on to try and be first to comment on creators content consistently. This is how you’ll get noticed and more importantly, it’s how you’ll get remembered by name.

Don’t be so serious all the time either, go ahead and create a memes folder for all occasions. You should try to display your personality via memorable memes, but avoid using Black memes if you aren’t Black. This can be considered “digital blackface”, which will get you blocked by your favorite black creators - myself included.

Nonetheless, if you avoid spamming comment sections & direct messages with promotional content, you can more easily drive traffic to your profile where your promotional content is. If you have an optimized bio and profile, it’ll be significantly easier to gain followers and convince them to begin a customer journey.

If you want to learn how to optimize your twitter profile, you’ll love this twitter thread.

Now that you know how to get followers, drive traffic to your profile and optimize your twitter profile, what type of content should you be creating?

Creating content for Twitter

Creating content isn’t hard, you’re overthinking the process and making it hard.

All you need to do is set goals, pick 5-8 topics you want to discuss regularly, create a content calendar and then batch create and automate the content.

Did I make that sound too simple? That’s possible, but it can be this simple for you because I made you a marketing tool kit. You should check it out if you tend to overthink so much that you just don’t do anything.

In the meantime though, let’s review some of the basics for creating content for Twitter.

What is a content calendar?

“A content calendar is a calendar for marketers to use when planning their upcoming content output. Whether your team is publishing content for a blog, social media, or even an editorial, the content calendar will help you track your team's content creation workflows and monitor publishing dates.” (Welcome software, 2021)

In short, this is the tool you use to have an overview of your past, current and upcoming content. Learning to implement a content calendar can be life changing for you by reducing stress & hardships with content brainstorming.

To make this efficient and easy, start by choosing a monthly topic, then select weekly sub-topics, and lastly, break down the subtopics into more minor daily smaller topics.

You can also create content calendars centering tasks and goals, rather than topics if you have set content pillars. (View the second image for an example)

Consider starting with a content chart and then creating a full calendar based on your content chart. Let me provide two examples for you.

Content chart example

(Source: The Content Marketing Guide, 2021)

Content calendar example

(Source: The Content Marketing Guide, 2021)

Content Pillars & Cluster Topics

Understanding your content pillars and clusters help you create consistent content that generates leads, sales and engagement. Pillars are the primary pieces of content you use to build authority and share your expertise in a uniform way.

This content can be shared in multiple mediums, for example, here’s one prominent breakdown of pillars:

“A content pillar is a substantive and informative piece of content on a specific topic or theme that can be broken into many derivative sections, pieces, and materials. Examples of content pillars include eBooks, reports, and guides.” (Upland, 2021)

In terms of marketing on twitter, your content pillars are the primary pieces of content you drive traffic to like your freebies, YouTube videos, blog, podcast etc. It doesn’t have to be extensive to be a content pillar, just perceived valuable enough for viewers to give up their emails for.

It’s also worth noting that content pillars are the primary topics your content plans to cover in detail. For example, if you’re a skin care brand some content pillars could be dry skin, eczema, skin routine development, and eliminating dark spots. You’ll then create valuable blogs, freebies, YouTube videos etc. that dive deep into these topics to showcase your expertise. This is how you’ll generate interest in what you’re selling overtime.

Content pillars are important to create and identify because tweets are bite sized and meant to be previews of the full value generated by clicking the link in your bio. If the link in your bio only leads to buy something but does nothing to nurture your audience, you’re less likely to convert that audience.

Once you establish content pillars, it’s time to create your content clusters. Content clusters are “An SEO strategy designed to optimize a website's structure and internal linking by organizing content around topics into pillar and cluster pages. It means using different levels of web pages to carefully organize your content according to how relevant it is to a given topic.” (Plezi, 2021)

In terms of marketing on twitter, this is relevant because it makes navigating your website easier for visitors. It also means you take additional time thinking about how to best organize content so that it makes the most sense.

When done correctly, this can passively segment your email subscribers, giving you the opportunity to personalize their content by needs & interest.

There are multiple examples of this within my own content. For example, this blog is a content pillar that’s referenced on my blog page, home page, freebies to download, podcast, YouTube and throughout my twitter content. This blog also references my books and guides, tying everything together that I’ve created making it relevant to what I’ve shared thus far.

If you’ve never heard this terminology before or used these methods, I highly recommend checking out The Free Inbound Marketing Course by Hubspot.

You can also checkout additional content pillars pages I’ve created:

Copywriting tweets

I’m not going to dive deep into this here because I made a YouTube video for you. In this video I show you how to write tweets, what to avoid and what to prioritize for long term success.

Enjoy this video here: Twitter Tutorial: How to write tweets that make money

Keyword research

Keyword research is important to your twitter marketing journey because it’s how your content is found. But also, it’s how you’ll find others to engage with overtime.

In case you missed it, I did have a guest SEO expert write an article for you to help beginners with keyword.

Enjoy the article, The SEO Advice Most Businesses *Actually* Need.

Within the article you’ll find YouTube tutorials, a podcast interview and additional resources to help you get started.

Additionally, I also interviewed the Head of Communications at Semrush, one of the leading SEO tech companies today. You can enjoy that interview here:

All Things SEO, Wix & E-commerce .

These two pieces of content can provide a foundational understanding of keyword research, search engine optimization and creating content your audience is actively searching for.

Now that you understand content planning and strategy development, you’re ready to get into email marketing.

Email Marketing with Twitter

Using social media to generate sales is great, but using social media to grow your email list is better. Think about it, you keep your email list forever, even when the social media platforms are dead and gone.

And although twitter is thriving, it will come to an end one day. So, that means you should prioritize twitter marketing now so you don’t have to worry about ever losing contact with your followers.

How can twitter help you with email marketing?

Twitter helps you drive traffic to and generate interest in your websites content, freebies to download, and company newsletter. By promoting things outside of products, you can increase overall website traffic, reduce your bounce rate and increase web page browsing times.

Collectively, this helps you rank higher in search engines. Which means you can boost your search traffic from Google by using this simple method.

With twitter being a communications app, people are constantly sharing problems they have, their interests, passions and beliefs. You can survey your audience regularly to stay up to date on what type of content you can create to generate interest in signing up on your mailing list.

Twitter is useful for this because it gives you direct access to everyone’s thoughts and desires if you’re great at keyword research. This is especially helpful when your account is small, because you don’t need followers to participate in audience research.

How do you use twitter to grow your mailing list?

Once you figure out what type of content to make and get your lead capture system created, you’re ready to get started. If you’re unsure of how to do this by using Shopify, I got your back.

Checkout this quick tutorial on how to create freebies to download + an automated social proof campaign: Shopify Hack: how to create freebies using Shopify

Next, you’re ready to start creating promotional tweets to encourage signups regularly.

Once you figure out what tweets perform the best, copy and paste them into zapier and set them to repost once a week forever. Now, this offer is being promoted 100% passively 4 times a month.

As a heads up, here’s the software you’ll need to make this happen:

Canva
Shopify
Powr
Zapier

Once this is done, go ahead and make a keyword spreadsheet of 50 words to search for weekly to respond to relevant tweets. Add value, drop gems and reference your freebies regularly. Doing this every single day is how you’ll generate interest in your email list via twitter.

For additional assistance, checkout these resources I made for you:

I also made something more detailed and intensive for email marketing beginners, The Email Marketing Tool Kit.

With this email marketing tool kit, you'll get Part 1 and Part 2 of the Email marketing guide. You’ll learn the basics of email marketing, email marketing law, formatting, subject line writing, how to generate sales and more.

While I could elaborate, I’m going to stop here to give you space to process and implement everything I’ve shared. In part 2 of this guide, we will discuss SMS marketing, things to avoid while marketing on twitter, understanding your analytics and more.

Did you enjoy this article?

If so, comment down below, let me know and share your favorite tip on twitter by tagging me.

I’d love to hear your thoughts here as well, we are business Besties after all.

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Sources

Tags: twitter strategy