X, formerly Twitter Advertising

What is Twitter Marketing?

Twitter marketing is how businesses use Twitter to create and disperse content to targeted audiences and build community interest for their brand—and hopefully generate sales. Twitter helps companies get in touch with a wide pool of potential customers from around the world. In fact, more than 300 million monthly active users are on Twitter.

Building a targeted and effective Twitter marketing strategy is a multistep process. The first step involves creating buyer personas for your ideal customers. After that, it’s a good idea to do Twitter research to get to know how your target audience acts on the platform and what they’re interested in.

When you have some idea of what your intended audience wants, it’s time to start making content for them. However, keep track of how users respond to your tweets. Monitoring your tweets’ performance can help you adjust and improve your strategy and find your brand voice.

Main Benefits of Twitter Marketing

Twitter marketing offers a range of benefits for businesses and brands looking to connect with their audience, build brand awareness, and drive engagement. Here are some of the main benefits of Twitter marketing:

Real-Time Engagement: Twitter is a platform where conversations happen in real-time. This enables businesses to engage with their audience instantly, responding to comments, questions, and trends as they emerge.
Brand Awareness: By consistently sharing valuable content and engaging with users, businesses can increase their brand visibility and awareness. This is particularly useful for reaching a larger audience and establishing a recognizable brand identity.
Audience Insights: Twitter provides valuable insights into your audience’s preferences, behaviors, and opinions. By monitoring trends and interactions, businesses can gain a deeper understanding of their target audience’s interests and tailor their content accordingly.
Customer Service: Twitter can serve as a platform for customer service interactions. Businesses can address customer inquiries, resolve issues, and provide assistance in a public and transparent manner, showcasing their commitment to customer satisfaction.
Promotions and Offers: Twitter is an effective channel for promoting special offers, discounts, and giveaways. Businesses can use hashtags, retweets, and other features to spread the word about their promotions and encourage user engagement.
Thought Leadership: Sharing informative and relevant content positions businesses as thought leaders in their industry. By providing insights, tips, and opinions on relevant topics, businesses can build credibility and establish themselves as experts in their field.
Networking and Partnerships: Twitter provides opportunities for businesses to connect with other industry players, potential partners, and influencers. Engaging in conversations and collaborations can lead to mutually beneficial relationships and expanded reach.
Content Amplification: Twitter’s retweet feature allows users to easily share your content with their followers, helping to amplify your reach. High-quality and shareable content can quickly spread and gain traction within the platform.
Hashtags for Visibility: Hashtags are a powerful tool on Twitter that can help your content reach a wider audience beyond your immediate followers. Using relevant and trending hashtags can increase the discoverability of your tweets.
Event Promotion: Twitter is often used to promote and cover events, conferences, product launches, and more. Live-tweeting during events can create buzz and engage both attendees and those unable to attend in person.
Direct Communication: Businesses can use Twitter’s direct messaging feature to have private conversations with customers, addressing specific inquiries or concerns in a more personal and direct manner.
Analytics and Measurement: Twitter provides analytics tools that allow businesses to track engagement metrics, follower growth, and tweet performance. This data helps in refining your strategies and optimizing your content for better results.

Twitter Content Types

Twitter offers various content types that businesses and individuals can use to engage their audience, build brand awareness, and communicate effectively. Here are some popular Twitter content types:

Text Tweets: The most basic form of content on Twitter is text-based tweets. These can include announcements, updates, insights, quotes, questions, and more. Keep your tweets concise and engaging to capture users’ attention.
Images and Graphics: Visual content can be highly impactful on Twitter. Share images, graphics, memes, infographics, and visual quotes to convey your message in an eye-catching and shareable way.
GIFs and Animated Content: GIFs are short animated images that can add humor, express emotions, or capture attention. Including GIFs in your tweets can make them more engaging and relatable.
Videos: Twitter supports short videos that can be used to share product demos, behind-the-scenes looks, customer testimonials, event highlights, and more. Native video uploads can autoplay in users’ feeds.
Polls and Surveys: Engage your audience by creating Twitter polls or surveys. This encourages interaction and provides insights into your followers’ preferences and opinions.
Threads: Threads are a series of connected tweets that tell a longer story, share in-depth information, or provide step-by-step instructions. Use threads to maintain continuity in your content and keep users engaged.
Quoted Retweets: Instead of simply retweeting, you can quote a tweet and add your own commentary or thoughts. This can help in expressing your perspective and initiating conversations.
Twitter Moments: Twitter Moments allow you to curate a collection of tweets around a specific topic or event. Moments can be used to highlight product launches, recap events, or showcase user-generated content.
Live Tweets: Live-tweeting an event, conference, or webinar can keep your followers engaged and informed. Share key takeaways, quotes, and highlights in real-time.
Hashtags: Use hashtags strategically to increase the visibility of your tweets. Create your own branded hashtags or use trending hashtags to join relevant conversations and trends.
User-Generated Content: Share content created by your customers or fans, such as user reviews, testimonials, or photos of them using your products. This builds community and trust.
Customer Stories: Highlight success stories or case studies of how your product or service has benefited customers. This showcases the value you provide.
Interactive Content: Create interactive content like quizzes, challenges, or puzzles that encourage user participation and engagement.
Promotions and Contests: Run giveaways, contests, or promotions exclusively for your Twitter audience to drive engagement and reward your followers.
Behind-the-Scenes Content: Offer a glimpse into your company’s culture, daily operations, and the people behind your brand. This adds a personal touch and humanizes your business.

Types of Twitter Ads and Specs

Twitter offers various types of advertising options to help businesses reach their target audience and achieve their marketing goals. Here are some types of Twitter ads along with their specifications:

Promoted Tweets:
- Description: Promoted Tweets are regular tweets that businesses pay to promote to a larger audience, appearing in users’ timelines.
- Specifications: Up to 280 characters of text, can include images, videos, GIFs, and up to four website preview cards.
Promoted Accounts:
- Description: Promoted Accounts are used to increase your follower count by promoting your Twitter account to users who may be interested in your content.
- Specifications: Your account’s profile picture, bio, and a “Follow” button are displayed to the target audience.
Promoted Trends:
- Description: Promoted Trends are hashtags promoted at the top of Twitter’s “Trending Topics” list. They help amplify your campaign’s visibility.
- Specifications: A custom hashtag and brief description.
In-Stream Video Ads:
- Description: These ads appear in the video content feeds of users, both on desktop and mobile devices.
- Specifications: Videos should be in MP4 format, with H.264 codec, up to 2 minutes and 20 seconds in length, file size up to 1GB, 720p resolution minimum.
Sponsored Moments:
- Description: Sponsored Moments allow brands to curate a collection of tweets around a specific topic, event, or story.
- Specifications: Includes a cover image, headline, and tweets organized within the Moment.
Website Clicks or Conversions:
- Description: These ads drive traffic to your website or encourage specific actions (e.g., sign-ups, purchases) on your website.
- Specifications: 1.91:1 aspect ratio images (800×418 pixels recommended), headline (70 characters), description (200 characters), and destination URL.
App Installs or Engagements:
- Description: These ads are designed to drive app installs, clicks, or re-engagements for your mobile app.
- Specifications: 1.91:1 aspect ratio images (800×418 pixels recommended), headline (70 characters), description (200 characters), and app name.
Direct Message Cards:
- Description: Direct Message Cards encourage users to start a private conversation with your business through a pre-filled Direct Message.
- Specifications: Image or video, headline (50 characters), description (50 characters), and up to four customizable call-to-action buttons.

How To Create A Twitter Marketing Strategy

For your business’s Twitter marketing strategy to be as effective as possible, it’s important to put some serious thought into it. Creating a successful Twitter campaign is a multistep process that requires research, planning, implementation, and evaluation of your company’s content.

The steps to creating a successful Twitter marketing strategy include:

1. Research Audience and Behavior on Twitter

After deciding who your target audience is, see how they operate on Twitter. Find out when they’re on Twitter and what accounts are popular among them.

Researching how your audience acts on Twitter can help you create a coherent outline for your marketing strategy. It lets you start making decisions, like when to post and which tweets you want to model yours after.

Twitter Analytics can help you see other pages your followers like. It can also show you things like what age groups your followers fit into and what they do for a living. Tools like Twitonomy can help you see the engagement statistics for your competitors.

2. Know What Kinds of Content Resonate With Prospects

Using your business Twitter account, type in a few keywords related to your industry. Take a look at what type of content brands like yours are posting and see which of their posts get the most engagement.

Get a feel for what generates engagement in your field. Are the popular tweets funny? Are they sincere? Are they informational? The types of tweets that get attention will vary depending on your industry.

For example, if you have an e-commerce clothing store, you might find that many popular tweets for the keyword “fashion” contain pictures of models or advertise sales and promotions.

Reviewing the content from profiles your audience already follows can help you understand the needs of your potential customers. That way, you can create your own content that satisfies those needs.

3. Schedule out Tweets in Relevant Themes

Holidays, sports events, and current events are all opportunities for you to reach out to your audience. You can even schedule tweets that include any special deals or promotions you’re doing for a holiday.

Let’s say you have a restaurant. On Veterans Day, you might tweet something like “Happy Veterans Day to all our troops! To show our appreciation, we’re giving every service member 50% off of their bill.”

Tweets with themes like the one above can endear your business to your audience and help build a positive reputation for your company. Themes can also increase the visibility of your tweets and increase brand awareness.

Let’s say your restaurant is running a Halloween promotion. Anyone that comes in wearing a costume gets a free appetizer. You design a Halloween-themed tweet with the trending hashtag #HappyHalloween to advertise your promotion. Now, your tweet will appear in the search results whenever someone types in “Happy Halloween.”

4. Target for Specific KPIs and Outcomes

You can’t track your success unless you measure it. Keep track of certain key performance indicators (KPIs) to see how well your posts are performing. You can use Twitter Analytics to see some of the results of your tweets. Choose which KPIs are most important to your business and try to focus on them. Perhaps the goal of your Twitter page is simply to promote brand awareness. However, you might want it to make sales directly. Here are a few KPIs you should keep track of:

Engagement: How many people are interacting with your tweet in general? ‍
Retweets: Are people sharing your tweet on their own Twitter pages?‍
Follows: Which of your tweets are bringing you the most followers?‍
Website traffic: You’ll want to include links to your business website in your tweet. Which links drive traffic to your website the best? ‍
Brand awareness: See how often your business is mentioned by Twitter users. ‍
Sales: How much of the traffic brought to your website is converted into sales for your company?

‍5. Review Your Goals and Evolve

You’ll likely be reevaluating your strategy and changing your content continuously as you see what works and what doesn’t. Create goals for what you’d like to achieve with Twitter and how the platform fits into your company’s marketing scheme. Make sure your goals are specific and measurable. The best way to do this is to connect them to your KPIs. Here are a few examples of some clear goals you might have for your Twitter page:

Add 5,000 new followers who are aged 35 to 49.
Increase the number of people who follow a Twitter link to a landing page by 10%.
Get 2,000 retweets.

Be sure to review your goals periodically to make sure they’re still challenging but also realistic. Setting clear objectives for your Twitter strategy can help keep you motivated and focused, and can give you something to work toward. Goals can also provide a measuring stick you can use to evaluate your results.

B2C vs. B2B: Twitter Marketing Strategy Differences

Twitter marketing strategies can vary significantly between business-to-consumer (B2C) and business-to-business (B2B) companies due to differences in target audiences, goals, and messaging. Here are the key distinctions in Twitter marketing strategies for B2C and B2B businesses:

B2C Twitter Marketing Strategy:

Emotion and Lifestyle Focus: B2C businesses often appeal to emotions and lifestyles. Their content may highlight how their products or services enhance customers’ lives or solve specific problems.
Visual Content: B2C brands use more visual content like images, videos, and GIFs to capture attention quickly and engage their audience emotionally.
Consumer-Centric Approach: B2C companies prioritize engagement with customers, responding to inquiries and feedback promptly to build relationships and loyalty.
Hashtags and Trends: B2C brands use trending hashtags and participate in relevant conversations to increase visibility and tap into popular discussions.
Influencer Marketing: Collaborating with influencers who align with their brand helps B2C businesses reach a wider audience and build credibility.
User-Generated Content: B2C brands encourage customers to share their experiences and content related to their products, amplifying their reach.
Sales Promotions and Discounts: B2C companies use Twitter to announce sales, promotions, and discounts, driving immediate purchases and engagement.

B2B Twitter Marketing Strategy:

Educational Content: B2B businesses focus on sharing valuable and educational content that addresses their audience’s pain points and provides solutions.
Thought Leadership: B2B brands aim to position themselves as industry thought leaders by sharing insights, research, and industry trends.
Professional Tone: B2B communications maintain a professional tone and emphasize the value and expertise they offer to other businesses.
Long-Form Content: B2B companies may use Twitter threads or link to blog posts, whitepapers, and case studies to share in-depth information.
Networking and Partnerships: B2B businesses use Twitter to connect with other professionals, potential clients, and partners in their industry.
Lead Generation: B2B brands focus on driving leads through Twitter by directing users to landing pages with valuable content gated behind forms.
Webinars and Events: B2B companies promote webinars, conferences, and industry events to showcase their expertise and connect with potential clients.
Relationship Building: B2B businesses prioritize building relationships with prospects over time, nurturing them through the buying cycle.
LinkedIn Integration: B2B brands often cross-promote content between Twitter and LinkedIn, which is a more business-focused platform.

Twitter Marketing Best Practices

Twitter is a dynamic platform that requires strategic planning and consistent engagement to achieve successful marketing outcomes. Here are some best practices to help you make the most of your Twitter marketing efforts:

Define Clear Goals: Establish specific and measurable goals for your Twitter marketing, whether it’s increasing brand awareness, driving website traffic, boosting engagement, or generating leads.
Know Your Audience: Understand your target audience’s demographics, interests, pain points, and behaviors. Tailor your content to resonate with them effectively.
Consistent Branding: Maintain a consistent brand identity, including profile picture, cover photo, and bio, across your Twitter account. This helps with recognition and brand recall.
Engaging Content: Create content that adds value to your audience’s timeline. Share informative, entertaining, and visually appealing content to capture their attention.
Use Visuals: Incorporate images, videos, GIFs, and other visual elements to make your tweets stand out in users’ feeds.
Effective Use of Hashtags: Research and use relevant hashtags to increase the discoverability of your content. Strike a balance between using popular and niche hashtags.
Timely Engagement: Respond to comments, mentions, and messages promptly. Engage in conversations, answer questions, and acknowledge feedback to build relationships.
Consistent Posting Schedule: Maintain a consistent posting schedule to keep your audience engaged and aware of your presence. Use scheduling tools to plan your content in advance.
Monitor Trends: Stay up-to-date with trending topics and hashtags. Participate in conversations related to your industry, products, or services when appropriate.
Quality over Quantity: Focus on delivering high-quality content that resonates with your audience instead of bombarding them with excessive tweets.
Twitter Analytics: Use Twitter’s built-in analytics tools to measure your performance, track engagement metrics, and identify what’s working.
Use Twitter Lists: Organize your followers into lists based on categories like customers, industry influencers, partners, etc., to streamline your content consumption and engagement.
Use Polls and Surveys: Engage your audience with polls and surveys to gather insights, opinions, and preferences. This encourages participation and interaction.
Promotions and Giveaways: Run contests, giveaways, and promotions to incentivize engagement and expand your reach.
Adapt and Experiment: Be open to trying new content formats, posting times, and engagement strategies. Experimentation helps you discover what resonates best with your audience.
Use Twitter Chats: Participate in or host Twitter chats relevant to your industry or niche. This helps in networking and establishing thought leadership.
Optimize for Mobile: Many users access Twitter from mobile devices. Ensure your content is mobile-friendly, with clear visuals and concise text.
Be Authentic: Maintain an authentic and human voice in your interactions. Avoid overly promotional language and prioritize building genuine connections.
Regularly Update Profile: Keep your profile information, bio, and contact details up-to-date to provide accurate information to your followers.
Compliance and Respect: Adhere to Twitter’s guidelines and terms of use. Respect privacy and avoid spammy practices.

Examples of Great Twitter Marketing Strategies

Here are a few examples of companies that have executed great Twitter marketing strategies to engage their audience, build brand awareness, and achieve their marketing goals:

Wendy’s – Engaging and Humorous: Wendy’s is known for its witty and humorous Twitter presence. They engage with their audience by responding to tweets, often with clever and funny remarks. This strategy has helped them build a strong and engaged online community, driving both brand loyalty and viral attention.
Oreo – Real-Time Marketing: Oreo has been a pioneer in real-time marketing on Twitter. During events like the Super Bowl, they create timely and creative tweets that align with the event’s happenings. Their “You can still dunk in the dark” tweet during a Super Bowl blackout is a famous example of their quick-witted approach.
Airbnb – User-Generated Content: Airbnb encourages its users to share their travel experiences using a specific hashtag, such as #AirbnbExperiences. They then retweet and showcase user-generated content, allowing their community to be part of the conversation and share authentic stories.
Mailchimp – Educational Content: Mailchimp uses Twitter to share valuable content related to email marketing, small business tips, and industry insights. Their educational approach positions them as thought leaders in the marketing space and fosters engagement from their target audience.
Denny’s – Quirky and Unique Voice: Denny’s Twitter account has a distinct and quirky voice. They often post surreal and funny tweets that resonate with their target audience, leading to increased engagement and a distinctive brand identity.
Zendesk – Customer-Centric Approach: Zendesk uses Twitter to provide customer support and answer inquiries. They address customer issues promptly, offering solutions and maintaining a customer-centric approach that builds trust and loyalty.
Lowe’s – How-To Videos and DIY Projects: Lowe’s leverages Twitter to share how-to videos, DIY projects, and home improvement tips. This strategy not only showcases their products but also provides value to their audience, positioning them as a helpful resource.
HubSpot – Sharing Educational Content: HubSpot’s Twitter strategy involves sharing a mix of educational blog posts, industry news, and data-driven insights. They consistently provide value to their followers, positioning themselves as a go-to source for marketing and business information.
Merriam-Webster – Clever Language Use: Merriam-Webster’s Twitter account is known for its clever and timely wordplay. They often participate in conversations and trending topics using their expertise in language, attracting attention and demonstrating their authority.
MoonPie – Engaging with Niche Audience: MoonPie engages with its niche audience of marshmallow treat enthusiasts. They use a mix of humor, relatability, and cultural references to connect with their followers on a personal level.