Social Media Marketing on Twitter: 5 Do’s and 5 Don’ts

1. Be informal and have the occasional personal tweet that is fun and keeps your followers looking for more. Only post these occasionally, people don’t want to know what you ate for breakfast!

2. Tweet about other companies positively and create news in your industry. This will make you look relevant and help you to become a thought leader in your industry.

3. Always have a link with your tweet. Use a provided such as Tiny URL to help shorten your URL. Do use hash tags appropriately and try and get topics to trend by investing time in a viral tweet.

4. Schedule your weekly tweets with a minimum of four tweets a day. This ensures that you always appear at the top of your followers feeds. We recommend tweeting in the morning, at lunch, in the afternoon break and at about 5pm to catch the commute home. 

5. Be consistent and keep the format of your tweets the same wherever possible. Tweet regularly and add the occasional free giveaway, competition of random act of kindness to help keep your followers happy.

5 Don’ts

Don’t be opinionated and derogatory towards competitors or other people. This limits your audience and can damage your brand image. Reputation management can be demonstrated by how you best deal with complaints on the social space.

2. Avoid lengthy wordy tweets; try to keep it short, relevant and viral. That way, you’ll encourage people to re-tweet and share your comments with their followers, enlarging your network.

3. Don’t ignore your followers. Reply to messages that are genuine and always make your comments personal. This way you will create relationships and network with potential customers.

4. Don’t ‘wee’ on your customers. What we mean by this is…‘We do this’ and ‘we do that’. Keep posts short and relevant. Tweets about your business should take up no more than 10% of your distribution, instead focus on the market, your area of skill and expertise. 

5. Don’t follow people for the sake of following them. Do your homework and reach out to people in your industry and perhaps they might just follow back.

There are many more do’s and don’ts to help you become a master but these will certainly help you on your way. Perhaps the biggest thing to take away from social media is the need to focus on viral marketing. In other words, if you can talk about your product or service in a way that makes people want to Tweet or re post your message, then you automatically expand your audience. Keep it viral, keep it interesting but please do keep it safe. 

For more information on using social media marketing to get more Twitter followers, get in touch with Iconic Digital or come along to one of our Social Media Workshops.