Twitter is an amazing marketing, sales, and customer support tool. Its increasingly important role in helping campaigns go viral and political messages get spread is obvious proof of its power of influence.
In 2016, an insurance company called Esurance ran a Twitter-focused campaign during the Super Bowl. The campaign earned them over 160K tweets and literally millions of impressions!
Clearly, exposure is key to success on Twitter’s platform. Here are five unbelievably simple but highly effective ways to increase your exposure on Twitter.
1. Get the basics out of the way
When sharing content on Twitter, it’s vital to understand the fundamentals of how the platform works. A few small changes can dramatically boost your visibility.
Here’s what NOT to do:
- Don’t overload your tweets with hashtags. You may think this helps and taps into trends, but it looks spammy, unprofessional and decreases the ultimate shareability of your tweets.
- Don’t begin tweets with @mentions. Doing this limits the visibility of tweets to you, the owner of the @mention handle, and any mutual followers you may have.
- Don’t toot your own horn too hard. This can be particularly damaging if you’re a small business and you don’t already have a passionate fan following. Instead, behave as a neutral and trustworthy information source to build respect for your business.
- Don’t over-write your tweets. The 140-character limit can be your friend by pushing you to craft neat, punchy and effective tweets. Don’t abuse it by trying to squeeze too much info into a single tweet, and avoid shortening words such as ‘you’ to ‘u’.
- Don’t tweet just for the sake of it. Tweet frequency isn’t valued so much as tweet quality and tweet engagement, in the eyes of both Twitter’s algorithm and your own followers.
In addition to following these DON’Ts, you can incorporate the following DO’s:
2. Get creative with visuals to beat the 140-character limit
Twitter lets you upload videos as large as 512MB (or 140 seconds). How great is that? With this feature and Periscope combined, there’s huge potential for audience engagement.
Video can be great for a bit of low-budget PR. For instance, look at what UFC did to connect with Twitter followers. It wasn’t a professionally shot fight sequence – they literally had popular fighter Menace Bermudez start a cooking show in his kitchen.
Another great idea is to use screenshots to add context to tweets, make them stand out or reiterate a point.
For instance, Moz founder Rand Fishkin uses screenshots in tweets often. This one helps emphasize his opinion on the topic being discussed.
Screenshots can also help you beat the 140-character limit and get away with sharing a text-heavy post.
You can also even use graphs in your tweets. Breaking research and case studies hold a lot of bearing in the professional world. If your company has original case studies that are suitable for public distribution, you can portray them powerfully using graphs.
3. Embed tweets in your blog posts and guest posts
Have you ever tried to get customers to write testimonials for your brand? If you have, you know it’s like pulling teeth.
Customers do, however, tweet positive experiences from time to time without being prompted.
These tweets are gold when utilized properly. You can feature these Twitter testimonials on your blog or website’s testimonials page, or use them in places where you need social proof – like a sales email or your checkout page.
You can also embed tweets as examples or illustrate your point in a blog post, just like I have in this one.
If you have conversational-style SlideShare or video content to share with fans, you can always first tweet it and then embed that tweet into a blog post. That way, your readers can always click on the embedded post and reply to the tweet.
Embedding tweets is really simple. When you see a tweet you want to embed, simply click on the drop-down menu and use the URL generated when you click on ‘embed tweet’.
If you’re using WordPress, you can just copy the URL of the tweet and paste it in your visual editor whereever you want the tweet embedded.
4. Use Twitter lists to create lasting relationships
If you want to receive consistent engagement on your tweets, then you need to build a small and active community of brand advocates. Generally, a big part of receiving love on Twitter is giving love in return.
You need to take interest in what your team, customers, and Twitter friends are up to for them to reciprocate in kind. It’s just like in real life.
So how can you keep in touch with everyone who matters on Twitter? Use Twitter lists!
Madalyn Sklar has her lists organized brilliantly:
Create separate lists for your office team, webinar attendees, people you are trying to get to notice you (prospect brand ambassadors or influencers), and people who share content that is useful to your audience.
Engage with them on a needs-must basis. For instance, you should regularly initiate meaningful conversations with people you want to be noticed by.
You could even create a list of your biggest fans and reward them from time to time with contests or giveaways.
Bloggers and industry experts are important because they can give you access to new, untapped markets. One tweet by an influencer could give your brand more exposure. For that to happen, they have to notice you and you have to build a good rapport with them.
You don’t have to manually create Twitter lists for bloggers and influencers, you can just subscribe to public lists created by reliable brands or people.
You can also keep your clients engaged by interacting with them via a separate, private Twitter list.
5. Use advanced search to find unique opportunities
It’s a smart move to use Twitter’s advanced search to monitor mentions and conduct research for content ideas. A valuable find in either of these categories is a potential opportunity for more exposure.
To access the search page, click here. Alternatively, you can use Twitter’s default search bar on the platform.
To view the most popular content created by a particular website, or in an industry, you can use Twitter’s search operators – “keyword + min_retweets:[number]” or “keyword min_faves:[number]”.
For example, if I want to find all Jeff Bullas’ blog posts that contain tweets that were retweeted over 30 times, I’ll type jeffbullas.com min_retweets:30.
To keep track of mentions, you could set up an automated system. Warble lets you monitor tweets with a daily updates email. You can also set up smart keyword combinations, like ‘your brand name’ + ‘wish’, or ‘your industry keyword’ + ‘need’.
These can help you find unique opportunities to increase brand exposure. For instance, dog food brand Purina wished a customer’s dog happy birthday. He was so pleased that he wrote a blog post that attracted a lot of attention.
Wrapping up
Twitter has incredible potential to create real-time and raw interactions that ultimately boost exposure for your business.
The key is to use original and attention-grabbing content and take an open-minded approach to finding opportunities for exposure.
Hopefully, this blog post can fuel your first few experiments for exposure, and make you realize it can be incredibly easy.
Guest Author: Disha Dinesh is a Content Writer at Godot Media, a leading content agency. Her interests include social media and content marketing. When she’s not writing, she’s on the prowl for social media trends and inspiration.