The Expert Advice, Made Easy Blog

Twitter is not just a great platform for brand building; thanks to its reach, it is also the ideal way to announce new products, promote your business and direct customers to product pages.

Let our expert advice made easy help guide your business into gaining a wider audience in the Twittersphere.

Using Twitter for Promotion

A single tweet can reach millions of people, making it as potent as TV advertising when it comes to promotion – and tweeting costs nothing. Therefore, if you have something to promote, whether a product or service, Twitter is the ideal tool. However, there are drawbacks to promoting on Twitter, and many people fail to use the platform correctly.

Including a promotional link in your tweet is a great way of attracting your customers to a particular product or offer.

Balance

People will soon tire of you if you just send out tweet after tweet promoting your products or services. Users expect a little promotion, but if that is all you are doing, you will simply cause them to unfollow you. You need to get the correct balance between putting out engaging and useful content, and promotional material. While there is no hard-and-fast rule, it is perhaps not a good idea to send out more than one promotional tweet for every three tweets that contain non-promotional content.

• Hot Tip: Try to include powerful and evocative words, just as headline writers do. The more you can grab a reader’s attention, the more likely it is that they will click on your link.

Tweeting Promotional Content

With just 140 characters, you cannot use a tweet as a sales pitch. The key to promotion on Twitter is to drive traffic to your website or sales page using a link. However, in order to get people to click your link, you will have to be creative.

• Benefits: Rather than try to sell a product in a tweet, outline a main benefit.

• Tease: Tempt users to click a link by making them want to know more about your product. 

• Reward: Offer discounts or freebies to make Twitter users feel privileged.

Think before you type: make your promotional tweet sound too good for people to resist.

Composing Promotional Tweets

A promotional tweet has to centre on your link. Even if you are using a link shortener, space is going to be at a premium, so you need to compose your message as concisely as possible. 

Social Media Tools

All sorts of tools and Twitter clients can help you with your promotional efforts. Many of these allow you to do things that you simply cannot do using Twitter’s main interface. 

Using Twitter Clients

Twitter clients have some useful tools for promotion: 

• Scheduling tweets: Send out your promotional tweets when your Twitter users are most active.

• Automating tweets: Automatically generate tweets whenever you have a new product or service to promote, or send automatic responses to tweets when you are not online.

• Multiple accounts: Manage several accounts at once.

• Group: Separate your customers from your other Twitter followers.

Useful Twitter Clients for Promotion

We have covered some of the best Twitter clients in Chapter Five (see pages 174–78), but some of the most useful for promotion include the following: 

• TweetDeck: Twitter’s own desktop client that has plenty of tools useful for promotion.

• HootSuite: One of the most popular Twitter clients available – and essential for any business managing multiple social media accounts.

• Zendesk: Lets you search for relevant content and import tweets into your business software.

Advertising on Twitter

If you really want to reach large numbers of people and tap into the huge audience potential of Twitter, you may consider Twitter advertising. Twitter offers businesses three types of advertisements, so it is important to choose the platform that you think will be most effective for your brand building. 

• Promoted accounts: Appear on people’s # Discover page as Twitter suggestions of accounts worth following.

• Promoted tweets: Appear on users’ timelines with their other tweets.

• Promoted trends: Appear on the list of trending topics.

Promoted Accounts

Promoted accounts are useful for building up a larger following. You can select the people you want to reach according to their interests, location or even gender. This ensures that you are only recommended to users who are likely to want to follow you.

Promoted Tweets

These appear in people’s Twitter feed. However, you can target users according to their interests, to specific keywords they have tweeted or to their location, thus ensuring that you are only advertising to people relevant to your brand. 

Promoted Trends

Useful for promoting projects or campaigns that you are running, promoted trends mean that your trend will appear at the top of certain users’ trending topics. Again, you can target the people who will see your advert and your promoted trend lasts for 24 hours.

How Twitter Advertising Works

Twitter’s advertising prices are based on pay-per-action (PPA). This means that you only pay when a person follows your account (promoted accounts), replies, retweets, favorites or clicks a link in your tweet (promoted tweets), or clicks your promoted trend link. This pricing system is based on bidding, which means that you set the maximum amount you are willing to spend per follow or click. 

There are several stages to advertising on Twitter:

1. Visit https://business.twitter.com/ad-products, and click the Let’s go! button, as shown to the left.

2. Select your business location from the drop-down menu and your estimated monthly digital advertising budget.

3. Fill in details of your business and advertisement.

4. Choose the type of Twitter advertisement you would like.

5. Choose how you would like to target your tweets, such as by keywords or interests and followers.

6. Set a daily budget for your campaign (Twitter will stop showing your ads once you hit that figure).

7. Place a click-through bid.

8. Select a date for your promotion to begin.

Links

• Get inspired by these 7 Twitter marketing campaigns to learn from

• Have a look at some more Twitter client tools here

• But always reamina aware! You don't want to end up like McDonalds after this Twitter nightmare

So you have a twitter account and you're happy so far. You follow interesting people and interact with them as much as possible. But why aren't your tweets getting as much attention as others? Let our expert advice made easy outline the ways in which you can utilise Twitter as both a fun social distraction and a powerful media tool. 

Composing Your Tweet 

Once you have signed up to Twitter and created your profile, it is time to send your first tweet. This can be daunting. After all, what on earth do you say? And how do you actually compose and send it?

The Compose Box

When you send a tweet, you write it in the compose box, which can be accessed in two ways. You can either click the box on the left of your Twitter homepage, where it says ‘Compose new tweet’ or you can click the blue icon on the top right-hand side (the one that looks like a quill), which can be clicked no matter which page you are on. 

Character Counter

Since all tweets have to be fewer than 140 characters, the compose box contains a counter on the bottom right. This starts at 140 and if you exceed the limit, it turns red and will have a minus sign, showing how many characters you have exceeded the limit by. In some browsers, the excess characters will also be highlighted.

• Hot Tip: Before you start tweeting, you could retweet what other people have been saying so that you can get used to Twitter and also introduce yourself slowly to the Twittersphere.

What to Tweet About

Perhaps the most challenging aspect of Twitter for a new user is knowing what to say. The first few tweets are always the hardest, but once you start tweeting, it soon becomes second nature. The great thing about Twitter is you can say almost anything. Here are some ideas.

• Introduce yourself: For your first tweet, why not introduce yourself to the Twittersphere?

• News: Comment on something interesting that you have seen in the news.

• Entertainment: Tweet about a film you have seen, book you have read or album you have listened to.

• What you are doing: If you are doing something interesting, let the Twittersphere know.

• Send a link: Link to something interesting you have seen on the internet.

Cramming it All in

The second most challenging aspect of tweeting for beginners is getting down what you want to say in just 140 characters. In order to tweet successfully, you need to learn how to write concisely and edit your tweets until they are the right length.

Tweet Editing

Perhaps the simplest way to learn how to edit down a tweet is to write out exactly what you want to say, ignoring the 140-character rule, and then go back and cut down your text so that it fits.

• Abbreviations: Use common abbreviations where possible. 

• Symbols: Use common symbols, such as ‘&’ instead of ‘and’.

• Cut: Remove extraneous words, such as adverbs and modifiers. Instead of saying: ‘This website is very interesting’ just write ‘This website is interesting’.

• Reorganize: Rejig your sentences so that they use as few words as possible. 

• Spaces: Try removing spaces after commas and stops.

• Word length: See if you can use a shorter word instead of a longer one.

• Twitter Speak: Learn the common Twitter phrases and abbreviations to save space.

Sending Your First Tweet

That first tweet can be the most daunting, but once it is out of the way, you will be surprised at how quickly you get accustomed to talking to the Twittersphere. Additionally, sending a tweet is incredibly simple:

1. Click the compose box and type in what you want to say.

2. If necessary, edit down your tweet until the character counter turns black and is not showing minus numbers.

3. Press ‘Tweet’. Your tweet is now live.

Location-based Tweets

Twitter has a feature that allows you to add your location to your tweets. Although it can be a good idea to let people know where you are if you are travelling around or communicating to people in other countries, you may not want to broadcast your location if you are away from home and your house is empty. 

Turning Tweet Location On and Off

You can set your tweet location on and off in your settings (that's another post), but also in individual tweets:

1. Compose your tweet as normal.

2. Click the pin-shaped location icon next to the camera icon on the bottom of the compose box. A box will appear asking whether you want to include a location in your tweets. 

3. Press the blue ‘Turn location on’ or click the ‘Not now’ link.

4. Send tweet as normal.

Deleting a Tweet

When you send a tweet, it is visible for the whole world to see, but if for some reason you wish to remove it from the Twittersphere, you can. Remember, however, that you cannot delete tweets that other people have retweeted.

1. Click ‘Tweets’ on the top left of the compose box.

2. Find the tweet that you want to delete.

3. Hover your mouse pointer on the tweet and click the Delete link when it appears.

Protecting Your Tweets

When you send a tweet, it is not just your followers who get to see it; anybody can find it in a search, retweet it and spread it around the Twittersphere. This means that a tweet can reach thousands and even millions of individuals. However, some people just wish to use Twitter as a place to connect with their friends and do not want their messages visible to the entire world. Twitter enables you to protect tweets so that only your followers can see them.

Making Your Tweets Private

1. Go into your Security and Privacy settings (click the gear wheel icon, select Settings and click ‘Security and privacy’).

2. In the ‘Tweet privacy’ section, tick the box beside ‘Protect my Tweets’.

3. Click ‘Save changes’ at the bottom of the page. Twitter will usually ask for your password to confirm the changes.

• Hot Tip: If you protect your tweets, your followers cannot retweet them, and anybody who wants to follow you or see your messages will need your approval first.

This article is based on an extract from our bestselling book Everyday Twitter: Made Easy (ISBN: 9781783612345). Have a look at it on Amazon here.

Links

• Don't worry, it's not always easy getting started. For instance, check out these 10 twitter faux pas commited by celebrities. 

• If you're feeling geeky, you might be interested in the 22 best twitter apps here. 

• Not for you? Lightening the mood with these hilarious twitter fails.