Twitter Tactics for Business Outreach

Everyone is aware that tweets on Twitter have notoriously short lives, but on the other hand, they can be very influential in that brief lifespan. In order to get the most out of your Twitter activity, there are some tactics you can use which will extend the life of your tweets, and which will engage your audience for a much longer period of time.

Twitter threads

Threads are tweets which are conversational and can be used to maintain audio audience engagement, and from the perspective of the initiator, they can be used to connect related ideas in a running conversation. They're also good for building onto narratives and for establishing a continuing commentary about your brand. By adding tweets gradually when they're needed, you can capture a fresh audience each time, as well as retaining audience members who were previously interested.

To make your threads most effective, you have to balance the frequency of them, perhaps by tweeting or re-tweeting once each day. This will avoid offending your target audience, while still keeping the tweet alive. You should also engage with your audience as much as possible, because they will appreciate responses just like you do, and their ideas are worthy of your attention and your respect. You should also make sure that each successive tweet is somehow closely related to the previous one, and you should avoid mixing subjects which are completely unrelated.Make sure to keep your tweets short and to the point, and it's a good idea to mix things up a little bit by including a poll in one of your tweets, a link in another tweet, and some text in the next offering. In each case, you should subject your proposed tweet to the metric of whether there is something new that the user can gain from your latest tweet. By introducing some variety, you'll avoid having your tweet grow stale, and losing a good portion of your audience.

Things to avoid

One thing you have to be sure to avoid is introducing complexity into your threads, because even if your topic is interesting, you're bound to lose a certain percentage of your audience if it gets too complicated. Keep your content interesting and simple, and you're much more likely to keep your audience as well. You should also avoid bad timing in your tweets, which means you shouldn't be posting content about events which happened years ago, or which might be of interest to only a small portion of your audience. Tweeting about Richard Nixon and the Watergate scandal will probably not garner much interest from your audience, so keep your tweets relevant and current.

Twitter polls

One of the best ways to keep an audience engaged with your brand is to use Twitter polls. Twitter polls will allow you to administer online contests and to provide fascinating prizes to your target audience to increase interest in participating in the poll. To the person conducting the poll, a great deal of benefit accrues because of the feedback which is generated. Feedback provides one of the best opportunities for improving your product or brand name, and it can show you what issues need addressing, as well as what the public perception of your strengths are.Collecting feedback from customers is usually a somewhat difficult process, and that means you have to make it convenient and attractive for followers, or else they will be reluctant to participate. You can use a Twitter poll to pose questions to all your followers on any topic whatsoever, and this will secure a great number of opinions, and will also encourage the sharing of your tweets with friends and other acquaintances. There is probably no better way to discover the opinions and the interests of your target audience than by using Twitter polls.

Best use of hashtags

Probably one of the most used symbols on the Internet is the hashtag, which was something started by Twitter and which eventually spread to several other platforms. While this has made the hashtag somewhat clichéd and commonplace, it can still be used effectively to bring benefit to your brand. Hashtags are very easy to search and they're also simple to read, and best of all, they capture the attention of followers, encouraging them to respond.Any hashtags you use to benefit your brand should represent a cause, an activity, or an event, rather than being a simple representation of your brand, because it adds a multi-dimensional aspect to your tweets. You should avoid any hashtags which have the possibility of conveying confused or inappropriate meanings, and you should also keep them short, so they are easily interpreted. It's also best to limit the number of hashtags you use to just a couple, because any more than that will probably overdo it, and turn off your audience.

Video tweets

Some of the most effective tweets you can possibly generate are video tweets, even though they are beginning to be very common on Twitter. By adding the customer touch to your tweet, you can impress your audience considerably because existing customers are very often the best sources for candid and relevant opinions. At every opportunity, you should solicit live or pre-recorded video tweets from your customers, because their feedback has a tremendous potential for encouraging follows and re-tweets for your brand. In most cases, your customers will be glad to do this, because it will make them feel like a valued customer, and that their opinion really matters.

Adopting the right strategy

By analyzing your Twitter activity, you should be able to assess how your business strategies are performing, and how they compare to other players in the market. The right strategy in twitter is generally dependent on the stage of your business, as well as what your marketing goals are. For instance, your goal may be to encourage more re-tweets, it may be to increase audience engagement, or you may want to increase the number of followers you have on the platform. Adopting the right strategy also may include monitoring what your competitors are doing on the platform, and analyzing how effective their strategies have been.

Social responsiveness

One of the best things about Twitter is how easy it is to monitor what people are talking about, because this gives you a pretty good idea about their wants and needs, as well as all their pain points. This is a great way to find out how many people are talking about your brand, and what they're saying about it. This will also give you the opportunity to respond to all those users, increasing your engagement with the target audience. By increasing your conversation time with followers, you should automatically notice an uptick in engagement. You may also want to listen in on what users are saying about your competitors, both good and bad, so you can learn from all those points to improve the public perception of your own brand.