How Can Small Businesses Use Twitter to Grow their Business?

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With more than 300 million users, Twitter is a powerful tool to improve brand awareness, engage customers, develop leads, and boost sales. On average, every Twitter user follows at least five brands, and 80% of users have tagged or mentioned a brand in their tweets. However, you should understand various marketing basics of using this social media platform to stand out from the tough competition.

As simple as it may seem, this means different things for various businesses on Twitter. Small businesses can use these marketing tips to build their presence on the platform.

1. Build Your Twitter Following

Growing a well-targeted and engaged Twitter following is the first step towards boosting your business on Twitter. Fortunately, there are several ways and Twitter tools you can use to increase Twitter followers. One sure way is to be active on the platform. This requires you to post content frequently and engage your audience regularly. However, being active takes a lot of time and effort. The following tips can help:

• Automate your tweets
• Create and stick to your Twitter posting schedule
• Find time to respond to other tweets

As you increase your followers, expect more user interaction and website clicks.

2. Use Hashtags

Hashtags are identifying phrases or words that group similar tweets together. They present a perfect opportunity for increasing your content visibility beyond your Twitter followers. Most brands latch on to trending topics to increase their brand awareness and sell products. However, you can still use popular hashtags familiar to most users, such as #ThrowbackThursday and #FollowFriday.

While hashtags are an easy way of increasing visibility, you should latch onto hashtags that are relevant to your brand/business and marketing content. For instance, if your tweets target startups, hashtags such as #entrepreneurship might be appropriate. Additionally, you should limit your hashtag use. Twitter users often consider posts with many hashtags as spam, which reduces interactions.

3. Research Your Competitors

A key benefit shared by all digital marketing channels is the ability to research and understand your competitors. Like other platforms, you can use Twitter to search your competitors, see their marketing tactics and content. Gathering competitor information can help you refine your marketing strategy. For instance, if they have performing marketing strategies, you can identify areas that need improvement on your strategy.

4. Advertise On Twitter

As a startup business, getting your brand in front of a new audience is overly important. Therefore, while using Twitter is free, you should consider paying to promote your brand profile on the platform. For this, use either of the following advertising options;

• Promoted tweets – These are best for increasing engagement and widening your reach to users who don’t follow you yet
•  Promoted accounts – These help grow your followers and make your brand more discoverable
• Promoted trends – They appear at the top of trending topics. Unlike promoted tweets and accounts that target specific users, promoted trends are visible to all Twitter users

Unlike other platforms, paid ads on Twitter are affordable, making them suitable for small businesses. Setting up and maintaining these ads is also very easy.

Endnote

Small and established businesses can use Twitter to grow their business in many ways. This is a go-to social platform for businesses looking to communicate and engage with their audience effectively.