Twitter Spaces: A Marketer’s Guide to the
New Social Experience by Twitter

For those of you that do not know, Twitter is a social media blogging platform that allows you to send and receive short posts, known as ‘tweets’. You can also follow accounts that are run by other people and organisations, with similar academic and personal interests.

Twitter is a powerful networking tool and search engine, and the platform is great for finding updated information on any topic, including all things political, economical, social etc. It is a great platform for businesses to use to not only engage with other users but to stay up to date on external factors that may affect them.

Twitter makes it easy to distribute content and with over 145 million active users daily, many businesses can easily market themselves on Twitter to engage with their users and followers, increase their brand awareness, spark conversation, and more.

However, with such an excessive amount of users, and 500 million tweets being sent every day, you will need to think outside the box, and have a strategy in place if you want to remain competitive.

Your Twitter marketing strategy should always begin with a plan of action. Think about how you can use Twitter for your business and how you can implement your marketing efforts on the platform.

It may seem like the best way to be successful with your Twitter marketing is to just dive straight in. While you do want to familiarise yourself with the platform and the way it works, that you can put in place to help you stand out, and that you can use to your advantage.

This guide includes everything that you will need to ensure that you create the best strategy for your business, with complete understanding and confidence.

To build a strong Twitter marketing strategy, you first need to create the perfect profile for your brand.

It is quite easy to do, and it is essential if you want to appeal to your target audience.

Here is a small checklist that you should follow:

• Pick a username or an @handle. The best usernames include your brand’s name and if it is already taken then you can add an underscore (_).
• State your brand’s name
• Write a catchy Bio. Your bio is one of the first things that users will see when they go on your profile so use it to explain the purpose of your brand simply and clearly. One way to be found more easily by users is to include relevant hashtags so that your profile will come up when these hashtags are used in the search bar.
• Select a location. It is important to mention where you are based.
• Insert your website URL.
• Mention your brand’s launch date.

Once your Twitter account is set up, then one of the first things you must do is run a Twitter audit.

To break it down, a Twitter audit is a quick health check on your account. It involves looking over your Twitter profile to ensure that everything is working and running smoothly, and up to date.

More specifically, this can include analysing the following:

1. Hashtag performance
2. Individual tweet performance
3. Individual Twitter audience

This also includes ensuring that your account matches up with your other existing accounts on other social media platforms. for example, do your bio and profile picture match up to your brand and coordinate? Also, it is important to make sure that all your campaigns and advertising remain up to date.

By doing all of this, you can see which tweets are performing best which will give you an idea of what is most popular with your audience. You can then use this information for your future tweets to help them receive more engagement.

One easy way you can audit your Twitter profile is by overlooking your analytics. There is various analytical software available, such as Sprout Social, that can help you manage your profile.

To get anywhere, you need to know where you are going, right?

To be successful in any social media platform you need to begin with having clear and achievable goals.

As a guide, use the SMART technique:

1. Specific
2. Measurable
3. Attainable
4. Relevant
5. Time-bound

The SMART method will ensure that you set goals that will push you further, give you a sense of direction, and will help you get organised.

It is important that your accounts are monitored 24/7 and that your direct messages and mentions are being responded to. Otherwise, in the time your customer is waiting for a response, one of your competitors could steal them away!

As your business account grows, it may need multiple team members monitoring them. Individual team members can be assigned to provide a more delicate touch of customer service.

Bringing in more people will help you address this challenge, however, be careful of lack of communication and as a result, conflicting responses to customers.

Audiences are looking for brands that they can relate to and conform with. Brands that tweet and stay authentic to their voice will attract the most customers, as their audience will view them as trustworthy.

To connect with your audience, a personalised brand voice is key. Just make sure it is natural and unique to your brand, rather than just copying the latest trend otherwise you will not stand out.

Using images and videos are great, however, Twitter is more of a chatty platform, and connecting with followers requires an authentic and they should all adopt the same, consistent tone.

Once you tweet, it remains there, forever to be seen by each user that comes across it. However, think of the number of tweets that are posted per second. Very quickly, that tweet will be at the bottom of a user’s timeline and become virtually invisible.

This means you should post consistently and at the times that your tweet is likely to get the most views.

To know this is one thing, but to be able to tell when is the best time to tweet is another. There are various analytical programs available that will help you view your audience’s activity which will give your insight into the time your followers are most active, and therefore, the most optimal times for you to tweet.

Once you have established your optimal tweet times, you want to make sure you do not miss it!  Scheduling your tweets in advance gives you more time to think about what you want to say, which will improve the quality of your tweets.

The most important thing is to remain consistent, even if you are only posting once a day, and make sure your tweets remain relevant. Here are some details about the best times for businesses to share on Twitter:

• Between 8-10 am and 6-9 pm because this correlates with commuter schedules on weekdays
• Around noon or between 5-6 pm on any day of the week

There are not any rules with how often you should tweet. It’s more about ensuring that you are content is relevant and has meaning.

To maintain this, it is a great idea to create a content calendar.

Although this means investing more time into your tweets upfront, it saves you putting in the effort and prevents any stress later. It is especially useful for special occasion days, for example, international woman’s day, if you already have an original and witty tweet at the ready.

A content calendar can also be useful for spotting any gaps in your content or conflicts.

You do not need to be a graphic designer to create high-quality visuals for Twitter. There are lots of tools that you can use to create visuals to share.

If you do not want to get involved with any advanced tools, then Canva could be a good option for you. Canva is designed to be a user-friendly web tool that provides lots of existing formats and templates that you can work with.

If you want to create more advanced visuals, a tool like Adobe Photoshop may be a better option.

Video is one of the best formats to trigger engagement.

However, some limitations need to be considered when you are creating your video content:

• You can only post videos up to 2 minutes and 20 seconds max.
• Maximum resolutions of 1920 x 1200 and 1200 x 1900 (no 4k)
• A maximum frame rate of 40 frames per second (fps)

Try not to post anything under 30 fps otherwise, the quality will be affected.

It is also important to consider that now all your views will be in the ideal conditions to be able to watch and enjoy your video content.

Quite often, your viewers will be at work, traveling, or in other loud conditions, and may not have earphones at hand. You can prepare for these scenarios by adding captions and subtitles.

There are two ways to do this:

1. Via Twitter Media Studio

This is the control center in your Twitter account. There, you will find information on your videos, photos, and scheduled tweets, as well as useful Twitter analytics of your account. You can add subtitles by going to your library, selecting your video, and then adding them in.

2.   Use a Submaker Software Like Kapwing

Kapwing is an online image, video, and GIF editing platform. It is free to use and slightly more simple. You can edit your files on Kapwing, download them back onto your computer, and then post the video as you normally would on Twitter.

For those who do not know, GIFs are short clips made up of a series of images. They are a wonderful way to catch the attention of your audience because they are animated and are not as heavy as a video.

But how do you make them?

One casual way to create GIFs is through Giphy Capture. Or, if you are familiar with Adobe Photoshop, you can also create GIFs using the Timeline tool.

The maximum size a GIF can be for upload on Twitter is 15MB. To keep your files MB as low as possible, keep them small and short.

An easier option would be selecting a GIF out of the ones that Twitter provides. When you are tweeting, simply click on ‘GIF,’ type in the keyword you are looking for and select your choice.

Originally, Twitter users could only write tweets with up to 140 characters, but this was changed in recent years to 280 characters.

This does not necessarily mean that you should write tweets that are twice as long to generate more engagement.

It seems that tweets with 71 – 100 characters have the best engagement rates on the platform. If you include a link, which you should if you want to create the website traffic, then the ideal number of characters is between 94 – 123.

Knowing this does not mean that you should never write tweets with over 100 characters. If you have a delightful story to share then go ahead, but try to keep things simple if you can.

In contrast to this, track social found that tweets with under 20 characters trigger little engagement. Therefore, it is important to strike the right balance.

When it comes to Twitter, hashtags attract almost double the engagement, especially if the hashtags are trending.

Using hashtags is the best way to get your tweet seen by new audiences, who are likely to be interested in what you have to say because they indicate that your content is relevant to a certain topic. Some brands use hashtags for their campaigns to encourage their audiences to share their tweets.

If you are unfamiliar with hashtags here are some do and do not guidelines:

Do

• Make it easy to remember and spell, and do not leave room for typos!
• Be realistic:
  Keep it relevant to your brand and ensure that it fits naturally, people won’t use it if they can’t relate to it!
• Do your research:
  It is important to check and see which hashtags are most popular and capitalise on them.
• Create a reason for people to use your hashtag:
  Providing incentives such as a give-away and prizes, or even just recognition in the form of retweets.
• Partner with influencer:
  Influencers and other accounts with a large following can help you gain exposure by retweeting your content and using your hashtags

Don’t

• Over hashtag:
  Limit your hashtags to one or two per tweet.
• Expect your brand slogan to translate to a hashtag:
  A hashtag is supposed to serve your brand by being shareable and discoverable. If it does not naturally flow in a tweet then users will struggle to use it and quickly lose interest in it.
• Neglect to educate on what the hashtag is and how to use it:
  Ensure that the hashtags meaning is clear and why it should be tweeted.
• Use all CAPS LOCK:
  This will bring attention to your hashtag and make it more noticeable.

The same concepts above about hashtags also apply to tagging users. The more users that you can @tag, the less engagement you will generate. But, if you tag other accounts when the content you tweet involves them somehow, you will increase the chance that they engage with your content.

This may lead to them retweeting your tweet, and therefore their audience will become yours too.

There are diverse ways that you can @mention users in your tweets. You can either tag them within your 240 characters limit, or you can tag up to 10 accounts on photo posts.

This type of interaction can be made to be a fun and conversational side of your brand. Not only will it result in increasing engagement with your brand but it will also open a door to brand new audiences.

Twitter polls are a great and fun way to connect and interact with your audience. No matter your follower count, Twitter polls are an excellent way to draw attention to your page and get in the heads of your audience.

Polls are easy, all you need to do is produce a question with four answers for your audience to choose from. This will help you determine what you should be doing for your brand, and is a light-hearted way to gather feedback.

Twitter polls are integrated into the user’s feed and therefore they will not need to go to another page or fill in a form, and it is a quick proves that will only take a few seconds of their time.

To set up a poll, you must go to create a tweet, and then hit the ‘add poll’ option. Then you add your questions and select what you want the duration of the poll to be.

DMs are extremely useful for brands. They allow you to reach out to other brands and influences you would like to work with.

Many brands encourage their audience to use DMs if they have a complaint or wish to discuss something.

• DMs allow clients to talk to the brand without having to share information publicly
• The brand can engage in heated conversation away from the public eye as soon as possible, limiting the risks of potential backfires.

Twitter ads promote your content on behalf of your business. This is an effective way to reach your audience directly rather than waiting for your tweets to be discovered. By promoting your tweets, you are guaranteed more results at a quicker rate. In addition to this, they help people find your profile, without you having to hashtag.

In terms of cost, Twitter ads are relatively affordable. You pay a fee monthly for as long as you want the promoted tweet to remain posted. For as long as it is posted, users can interact with it in the same way they interact with your other content. The only difference is that promoted tweets are marked so that users can see it is a paid ad.

Step one: Choose your Twitter ad objective.

The first step to advertising on Twitter is to figure out what it is you want to achieve from your ad. This requires careful consideration as this will later determine the engagement types to choose from and what you will be paying for.

Some objectives you can choose from include; tweet engagements, promoted video views, maximum awareness, website clicks, and increased followers.

Step two: Set up your Twitter Ad Group and bidding.

After you have chosen your objective you will have to set up your campaign and pay for your interactions.

You can choose to either pay for each interaction for a particular ad group or go for the automatic bidding option.

Step three: Choose your target audience for your Twitter ad

Twitter will offer you a few options to help you choose the right audience for your ad which helps you maximise your budget.

This includes demographics, such as gender, location, languages, and technology.

Step four: Choose your Twitter ad creative and ad placement

This is the final step before you launch your campaign is choosing the creative that you want to use for your ad. You can find an existing tweet to promote or you can create a new one specifically for your ad.

Now all you must do is review all your chosen options to double-check and then click the ‘launch campaign’ button!

Once you have launched your marketing strategy, it is important to constantly evaluate the results of your efforts, and your progress in achieving the objectives that you set earlier.

There are lots of metrics available to help you assess performance such as engagement rate, content performance, impressions, brand follower growth and video completion rate, and much more.

It is important to choose which metrics are most important to you, otherwise, the amount of data available can be overwhelming. Focusing on the metrics that matter will provide insights that can then help you refine your strategy, and demonstrate the value of your efforts.