1 February 2021

Social Media Marketing on Twitter – 6 Top Tips for 2021!

This week Bury’s top digital marketing company – Seek Social – take a close look at Twitter, and detail the thoughts of our top-notch social media marketing team on the features to be using and the opportunities available when marketing on the platform in 2021. Before we begin however, a quick disclaimer.

As you might expect, throughout the various tips that our expert digital marketing company have for you today, ‘the basics’ of social media marketing do still apply – that 280-character limit doesn’t mean you can let your fundamentals slip – so as you’re applying these tips remember to stay on-brand, post at the right time, use call-to-action, and all the other things that we’ve talked about before in order to see the best results!

Tip 1: Create a well optimised & visually striking profile

Our Graphic design and social media marketing teams can tell you that some Twitter handles are better than others when it comes to successful social media marketing. We’re not necessarily talking about what follows the ‘@’ symbol here either (although shorter is generally better). Rather the areas where you have more creative control, like your display name and profile pic.

For the text, you want something short, accurate and memorable… Something that’s going to be easy to recall without too much thought, but that still identifies you well – so anything that ends in a series of random digits (like the suggestions Twitter gives you when the handle you want is already taken) are out right off the bat. On top of this, such usernames are usually easy to spot, and can make it look like you’re either parodying (or outright ripping off) the people that had your awesome idea before you did.

As for the images, you’re going to need a little bit of everything if you want to find social media marketing success. You see, since your profile pic will usually be seen at a pretty small size you’re going to want something fairly simple in terms of design. Something colourful is a great idea too since this will be eye-catching and draw people to your content when they see it in their feed.

You are going to want some high-quality, high-resolution images too though, for prominent places on your profile like the banner and your pinned tweet (especially if you plan on keeping the same pinned tweet for an extended period of time). These images can rake up a large amount of real estate on the page, especially when it first opens – so if you go with a low resolution image, it’s more likely to look blurry and pixelated, and that’s not a good look…

Our final piece of advice here would be to avoid the use of gimmicky fonts. Stick with the Twitter default so everything’s nice and legible, but if you can find something appropriate then you can also make use of another feature – the ability to use emojis in your screen name.

Tip 2: Tweet Loud, Tweet Often!

The potential need to keep several accounts updated with new social media marketing content means that our full service digital agency enlists the help of third-party tools to help us schedule tweets and make sure they go out when we want them to. In a previous digital marketing blog we said that posting at the right time was of vital importance too, and of course we stand by that. Our paid third-party tools are one of the things that help us do this, but if you’re looking to stick to Twitter’s in-house tools or you don’t want to spend the money on a third-party subscription, then don’t forget that you can schedule posts using Tweetdeck too.

Twitter is a fast-moving place – it’s where people go when they want to put their finger on the pulse and know what’s happening in the world RIGHT NOW. Because of this, individual tweets have a short effective lifespan, and this means that you need to be posting regularly to have an impact on your niche and get seen in your audience’s feeds. All of this means that you need a lot of content for Twitter, so, anytime you have an update to share regarding your business – be it an awesome new product, an important change to your opening hours, an achievement by one of your staff members – don’t wait, tweet about it!

Even if you do that though, you might find that you’re still coming up short, that you still don’t have enough things to say. If that’s the case, then don’t forget that not every social media marketing post you make needs to be selling a product or promoting your business. You can also use posts to reach out to your audience and gather feedback, by asking them questions (or even creating polls) relating to how they feel about something. Use #TBT to Turn Back Time and look back on your business’ past, or brave an #AskMeAnything to let your audience get to know you and your business better!

Finally, don’t forget that when it comes to posting, retweets count too – and what’s more,  we now have the ability to use visuals in retweets as well. How can you use this in your social media marketing though? Well, just like the staff at our full service digital agency will tell you… ‘A picture is worth a thousand words, and those thousand words are really useful when up against a 280-character limit’. Use visual elements like gifs, images, memes, or short video clips as reactions to the posts you retweet, and not only might you get more expression into your retweet than text would allow, you make it more eye-catching too!

Tip 3: Make Use of Analytics & Insights

Another great thing about using a third-party platform to schedule our tweets is that as a customer of that platform, we also get access to a wealth of analytics data too. It may seem like an afterthought at first, or something done out of curiosity – but Seek Social know that checking how your posts perform is a vital part of any successful social media marketing campaign – and that the analytics data these platforms provide is a very valuable resource.

Without this data, how would you learn which parts of your initial social media marketing campaign worked and which didn’t? How would you find out what the reasons for this success or failure were? How would you figure out how you do better next time? You simply wouldn’t be able to – and therefore you could be dooming yourself to repeat the same mistakes over and over again.

Don’t think that unless you stump up for a scheduling platform that you’re helpless in this regard either. Yes, it could be that if you do pay for a setup like ours you get access to more analytics data – but Twitter Analytics is free and provided by Twitter themselves, and it’s a great place to start learning about how your social media marketing content performs and what your audience wants to see from it.

Tip 4: Tools to Help You Find and Interact With Your Audience

Conversation Insights is a new feature that lets you see who is talking about you, and the engagement buzz around your social media marketing content. Unfortunately right now it’s part of Twitter Media Studio, and that’s an invite-only feature. However the team at Seek Social know that this could be immensely useful for business accounts of all sizes. As a result we’re holding out hope that Conversation Insights will be rolled out to everyone at some point in the future. Even if it is not though, do not despair. As this digital marketing company knows that there are other tools on the internet that can offer similar insight into how your social media content is received.

You can now follow topics too – and while this won’t help you actually produce social media marketing content, it looks to be a great way of keeping your finger on the pulse of your niche(s) on Twitter. If you can do that, then you can make sure that your content is always well put to match the current mood in your niche, and should come across well. You can also jump in with timely social media marketing posts should there be any big news or developments to do with that niche. This makes your social media marketing topical, and – as the team at our digital marketing company knows – that’s great for increasing exposure and engagement with your content.

One other thing that makes Twitter different from the other social media marketing platforms out there is the way it lets you find the audiences that matter to you. It isn’t reliant purely on keywords, and this means that it’s easier to get your social media marketing content in front of the people that are most likely to want to buy – including people who have recently engaged with one of your hashtags – rather than people who for whatever reason, just happen to have been using your keyword recently.

Once they engage with one of your social media marketing tweets you can also take this a step further too. Tweet engagement targeting works in a similar way to remarketing on Google ads, and means that when a user engages with a tweet from a given company, they’ll start seeing that company’s social media marketing content more often in their feed. And as we all know – the more a prospective customer sees your name without having to look for it, the more that start to trust that name and the company behind it.

Tip 5: Show Off What Makes You Different

That doesn’t mean that it’s enough to simply throw a lot of social media marketing content out there and hope for the best. All that does is make you blend in with everyone else in your niche and won’t help you succeed. Just like when they buy offline, online customers like to know what they’re getting from you that they can’t get elsewhere… They want to know what makes you stand out, and the great thing is, these things are even easier to show to an online audience than an offline one…

It could be that your product really is one-of-a-kind, or does something that nobody else can do. It could be a demonstration of your team starting early or staying late to help a client with an issue, it could even be that someone on your team makes the best cup of tea in the UK… Whatever it is, if you can shout about it and tie it into your business in some way, then do it – get a tweet out there, get on your social media soapbox and show people the awesome things that they won’t find anywhere else!

Tip 6: Add Customer Service

The final thing that you need to add to your social media marketing content for Twitter in 2021 is customer service. More and more in recent times we ‘ve seen people taking to social media to find solutions to their problems, report issues, or just vent their frustrations. You need to be able to respond when someone tags your company in an angry, frustrated or upset post, because as well as telling you about their issue they’re also telling their entire audience. This puts your customer service skills in the spotlight and could have a big effect on how successful your social media marketing posts are – at least in the immediate future.

We’re seeing this already with larger businesses such as energy companies, but the client’s expectation that they’ll be able to ‘jump the queue’ and get hold of you on social media is only going to trickle down to smaller businesses too. You don’t need someone monitoring your account at all times – at least, not yet – but we do feel that providing real, working customer service via Twitter and other social platforms might be beneficial. Why is this? Because just like everyone can see the customer’s original frustrated post, they can also see you making an effort to help them. This can be just as beneficial to your overall social media marketing effort as ignoring them could be harmful.

The Final Word on Twitter Social Media Marketing for 2021

So, there you have it folks, our top six tips to master social media marketing on Twitter in 2021. And of course, while we’ve focused this post on one particular platform, that doesn’t mean that many of these social media marketing tactics can’t also be used elsewhere to great effect. So wherever you’re focusing your social media marketing efforts this year, give them a go – and of course if you’d like some help or advice that’s more tailored to the individual needs of your business, then feel free to get in touch with the Seek Social team via Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, or using the details here!