While Facebook and Instagram may be claiming dominance over the consumer social media market at the moment, it doesn’t mean that the other platforms aren’t worth investing your time and resources into. Twitter can be a powerful brand marketing medium for marketers to consider – find out why below.
Ability to Directly Contact Profiles
Facebook doesn’t let businesses contact personal profiles. Your followers can private message your page’s profile, and you can tag them if you’re replying to something they’ve already said, but overall the options for individual contact and communication is very limited unless it is user initiated. Twitter (and Instagram for that matter) on the other hand, do let you make contact with people and initiate a conversation. This tactic needs to be approached in the right way though, as spam style unsolicited contact is frowned upon. If you’re not sure how to go about using the platform to make contact with people directly, consider engaging some training or support from a specialist agency like Market Smartly.
Short, Fast Messages
The marketing and advertising realms have become even busier in recent years and rapid consumption of information is something all marketers need to be considering when putting out messages. The very nature of Twitter limits you to 140 characters – though experts suggest 100 characters is the ideal tweet length – which forces you to think of ways to express yourself in a succinct way. Tweets are easy to read, like and share, which means it is a simple way for your customers to engage and interact with your brand in real time.
Listening to The Competition
More than any of the other platforms, Twitter makes it really quick and easy for marketers to do competitive analysis on both businesses and industries. This data can help you to not only plan your next tweet, but also gives you quantifiable information that will help when putting together overall marketing and advertising strategies. Searching what is trending, hash tags and what people are saying is quick and easy on Twitter.
Having Some Fun
While obviously there is a time and a place for joking and light hearted mockery, Twitter can be a great platform for your business to let down some of the corporate walls and inject some personality in the brand. A web search of “brand twitter responses” will bring up some great inspiration of how humour and perhaps even a little bit of sass can help get your brand noticed on the platform. Just be careful though, as timing does matter and some topics (e.g. major disasters) are never laughing matters.
Social media experts often advocate only running as many profiles as you can reasonably keep updated, and while that is sound advice, it is also important to establish where you’re going to get the most impact with your target demographic and if you are not using Twitter, you may be missing opportunities.
How has Twitter helped you grow your brand?
