Top Tips for Using Twitter Effectively

Creating a strong community on Twitter can be extremely beneficial for online businesses. You can keep in contact with your potential customers, promote your brand, reach a wider audience, collect leads and drive traffic to your site. However, using Twitter can be time-consuming, and there are no guaranteed rewards for your hard work.

In this article, we consider top tips for using Twitter effectively. We look at how to create a community on Twitter and how to link Twitter to your website. We then look at actionable tasks you can undertake, like implementing Twitter Cards to help your content stand out from the crowd and using Buffer to automatically share content. Lastly, we discuss how to advertise on Twitter and the importance of monitoring analytics, to help your website convert against its goals.

Integrate Your Website with Twitter

Encouraging your website’s viewers to join you on Twitter should be an important part of your marketing strategy. You need to create a community of followers on Twitter, that you can keep in contact with and regularly Tweet your content at. You also want your site’s content shared on Twitter, enabling your brand to constantly reach new potential customers. So, apart from the obvious (adding social sharing buttons to your website), how else can you integrate your WordPress site with Twitter?

Create Tweetable Quotes

Tweetable quotes are a great way for your website audience to easily and quickly share the important highlights from an article. Better Click to Tweet is a WordPress plugin that uses a simple shortcode to make selected text tweetable. Making excerpts from your articles stand out, and easily shareable, encourages readers to Tweet them to their own followers. This results in your content reaching a wider audience.

Display Pop Ups

Once visitors leave your site, if they haven’t signed up to your mailing list or joined you on social media then you may never see them again. It is critical that you do all you can to befriend viewers on social media, helping you to keep connected with them.

WishPond uses exit-intent technology, enabling you to display a popup just as a viewer is about to leave your site. Customize popups with Wishpond to display a follow button for Twitter, and other social media platforms, encouraging visitors to join your Twitter community.

Embed a Twitter Feed

Embedding a Twitter feed on your website is an effective way to show your audience that you are active on Twitter. If people see your Tweets as exciting and interesting then they will be keen to follow you and keep up to date with your news.

Easy Twitter Feed Widget enables you to display your Twitter feed in a sidebar on your site. This widget has some good customization options, allowing your to change the color, border, and background so the feed looks at home amongst your site’s pages. Most importantly, displaying your Twitter feed in style with this plugin should help increase your followers.

Create a Community on Twitter

If you want to create an engaged community on Twitter you need to be consistent. Regularly tweet out interesting articles from your website. Follow people, like Tweets and retweet relevant content. Interact with your audience by replying to messages and thanking people for sharing your content. This will help you develop a strong, constant Twitter presence.

When you share content on Twitter always add the @name of the person or business you are tweeting. This way they know you have done them a favor, and may well share some of your content down the line.

Tweet at people and send out messages to get in contact with those in your industry. If you have exciting new content, Tweet it out to big names in your field to encourage it to be shared. The more people recognize your name the more they will include you and your content in their tweets. This will help raise awareness of your brand and increase your shares and followers.

Stand out from the Crowd with Twitter Cards

Setting up Twitter Cards for your website will help your content stand out from the crowd on Twitter. Twitter Cards enable you to display images and videos and write more than 140 characters of text. They also let your viewers download an app, visit a landing page or sign up for a newsletter, all without leaving Twitter. This helps you to generate leads and drive conversions.

Twitter Cards are extremely easy to set up with the Yoast SEO plugin. Simply select ‘Social’ under the Yoast SEO settings, enter your Twitter username and save the changes. This will activate Twitter Cards for your website, and help your shared content make an impact with your audience.

Use Buffer to Share Content

Buffer is the perfect solution for content sharing on social media. Twitter is extremely fast moving and you can’t be on it 24/7. By using Buffer you can select the content you want to share, from your own website or others, and then Buffer Tweets it out at intervals throughout the day.

Crucially, this means your Twitter page can be active at key times when your audience is online but you are not. This is particularly beneficial if many of your viewers live on the other side of the world and so are tweeting when you may be sleeping!

Advertise on Twitter

Twitter Ads have been proven to be very effective for businesses. There are numerous ways to advertise on Twitter and you can choose your campaign based on your goals.

Twitter enables you to target your key audience, based on demographics like interests and location. You can select a budget for your ads, split test adverts and monitor how they are being received by viewers. Advertising on Twitter is a good way to promote brand awareness, collect emails, drive traffic to your website and help your business convert against its goals.

Monitor Twitter Analytics

Keeping an eye on your Twitter analytics is an important task if you want your business to be successful on Twitter. Find out when your audience is most active, what content they respond to and which Tweets are receiving the most shares.

Use Twitter analytics to look in depth at your audience’s actions and gain a greater understanding of what interests your viewers. You can then alter your Twitter content management strategy accordingly.

Final Thoughts

There is much you can do to use Twitter effectively. Think carefully about your goals and what you would like to achieve on Twitter. Then create a plan of action accordingly.

What top tips have you got for using Twitter effectively? Please share in the comments below…