5 Effortless Steps to Improving Your Twitter Strategy

Getting your social media strategy just write can seem like an endless and thankless task, especially for small businesses who have other priorities on their mind.

Despite the other issues juggling for your attention, you should still focus on creating a Twitter presence. This will help you in the long run even if there doesn’t seem to be an immediate pay-off.

Here are some step-by-step tips to help you get your Twitter strategy off to a great start.

1. Kickstart your profile

If you haven’t already, you’ll need to optimise your Twitter profile. This will give your profile authority and make it friendlier to search engines, so people are easily able to come across your profile.

To do this you should first upload a good quality profile picture, preferably of your company logo if you have one as this will help people recognise your brand. You should optimise your Twitter bio with keywords that explain concisely the mission of your business – you can include hashtags here too.

You should also make use of your cover photo and pinned tweet. There are fewer hard and fast rules surrounding these, and you may want to update them regularly with any relevant dates or activities or any causes you’re promoting.

2. Be active

After you’ve kitted out your profile with the essentials, you should make the most of your Twitter profile right away. While you don’t want to inundate your followers with tweets, you should keep your profile active with regular posts.

These don’t have to declare your latest sales all the time. You can share content you find online that’s relevant to your business and put your own opinion on it, or ask your followers for theirs.

You can also tweet out your own content that’s uploaded to your website blog. Rather than just sharing the link you should intro it in an interesting way that will make your followers want to read on. DO this on a regular basis to encourage engagement and increase the likelihood of your tweets being seen.

3. Follow relevant people

Of course, there’s no point in tweeting if you’ve got no one following you! To get yourself on the radar of people and businesses, begin by following people in your industry.

After you’ve made some initial follows you should begin to see an increase in other people following you. While this may not seem like a significant amount, it’s a start to growing your audience.

Some people make an effort to follow everyone who follows them, which may seem like a friendly thing to do. In reality your Twitter feed will become inundated with tweets that aren’t interesting or relevant.

Keep it in order by just following those who will add value to your timeline. This will help you avoid falling out of love with Twitter later down the line.

4. Use hashtags

Hashtags, used in the right way, can be the key to increasing your tweet reach, engaging users and increasing your followers – all in one go.

However, it’s easy to fall into bad hashtag habits. Rather than posting a hashtag as every other word, you should restrict just how many you use. You should also avoid using hashtags within a tweet. Instead aim to tag them onto the end, after you’ve got the point across. For example:

‘Struggling to get your Twitter strategy up to speed? Here we explain 5 simple steps to success #digitalstrategy #socialmedia’

Rather than:

‘Struggling to get your #Twitter #strategy up to speed? Here we explain 5 simple steps to #success’

This allows you to target more specifically and makes your tweet easier to read.

5. Never miss an opportunity

The last step in improving your Twitter strategy is to make the most of it. Twitter runs on reactions to the latest news as well as people’s thoughts and opinions, which is why you should have your finger on the pulse and keep up to date with the latest industry news.

This way you’ll easily be able to jump in on the conversation – having your Twitter notifications enabled on your phone can also help here.

You can use this in conjunction with your normal tweets and save yourself time by scheduling the ones you want to post anyway – this way you’re not compromising your content.

What tips and tricks do you use to help engage your Twitter followers? Share them in the comment section below!