Twitter seems so easy. Send out a quick message to your followers a few times a day and the job is done. Easy as that, right? Not quite. If you are using a personal account, sure that might work. But for a business account, I can tell you right now it will not.
Effective use of Twitter for business requires a lot more thought and planning than personal use. If you want to make this social media channel a part of your marketing plan, you need to develop a strategy that will guide every tweet you send out.
Here are some quick tips for planning your Twitter strategy.
1. Define your target audience.
Who are you sending tweets to and why? Your company’s product and services help to define your larger marketing audience. For example, if you are a residential plumbing company, your target audience most likely includes homeowners and rental property managers. The audience that you post tweets to may be your entire marketing audience or a specific subset. Knowing your audience allows you to target your message properly.
2. Determine goals and objectives.
What do you want to achieve using Twitter? You may want to increase traffic to your website, give better customer service, increase sales, enhance your brand, or improve conversion rates. Whatever you want to accomplish needs to be specific and has to have a definite time limit involved. For example, you may want to increase traffic to your website. A specific time oriented goal would be to “increase traffic to the business website by 10 percent in the next month.”
3. Design, develop and implement tactics to achieve goals.
How are you going to accomplish your goals? Once you know that you want to achieve, you need to design ways to make it happen. Let’s say you want to increase the number of followers you have. One tactic you might use is to send out an email message to your marketing leads asking them to become followers. You may want to also offer them a specific discount code if they become followers in the next 24 hours.
4. Monitor and measure results.
How can you tell if your strategy is working? The way you monitor and measure will depend on the goals you have and tactics you use. When making goals and developing tactics you need to also identify how you are going to measure and monitor your progress. There are many online tools available for you to use. But, before you implement your tactics make sure to take a measurement of where you currently stand. As you implement, you can start monitoring and measuring your progress.
5. Modify your strategy as needed.
Rinse and repeat. What worked and what did not? Once you finish working towards a particular goal, analyze how well your strategy worked. You may find that you accomplished your goal and went further than you thought. That is great and your strategy is working. However, you may find that one of your tactics did not work as well as you had hoped. Maybe you need to make a change or find a new tactic. Modify your strategy as needed.
There is no one-size-fits-all approach to creating a Twitter strategy. It is something each business must design and develop based on its own needs. It will involve a lot of trial and error but you will eventually figure out what works best for your business.
Are there any other tips you have for planning your Twitter strategy? Share them below!
