Driving Social Engagement (Part 4) – Using Twitter Effectively in Your Social Media Marketing

Our final post in the Driving Social Engagement series will focus on Twitter, and how you can incorporate the appropriate social buttons or social links for your business. Twitter is a social network that allows you to scale followers, amplify conversations, and accelerate engagement with 140 simple characters. If your audience lives on Twitter, growing your follower-base will produce broader distribution of brand and communications, richer conversations, and incremental earned media. You can spark dialogue between users and your brand with trending topics, and raise awareness around campaigns.   

Is mobile an important part of your digital marketing strategy? Twitter users are more likely to engage with the service through a mobile device than are users of other social media platforms. Over 50% of account holders utilize the service through a mobile device. Twitter is positioned to capitalize on the macro trend of  a greater proportion on internet browsing activity shifting to smartphone and tablet devices.

Roughly 56% of those who follow a brand on Twitter indicate that they are “more likely” to make a purchase of that brand’s product compared to 47% for those who “like” a brand on Facebook. In addition, Twitter followers are much more likely to use the platform for updates on future products compared to Facebook “Likes” (84% to 60%).

Twitter is viewed as a medium in which consumers can directly communicate with the stewards of the brands they are most interested in. Is Twitter right  for you business and the audience you’d like to reach?

Tale of the Tape: Twitter

• Registered Users: 127 Million Active Users
• Tweets A Day: 200 Million
• Tweeters On Mobile: 54%
• Time On Site: 11:50 Minutes Per Visit
• Tweet At Least Once A Day: 36%
• Female: 59%
• Age: 58% Are 35+ Years of Age
• Interesting Fact: Websites that display Twitter sharing buttons are linked to on Twitter nearly seven times more often than sites that do not display tweet buttons, according to a study by BrightEdge of some 4 million randomly sampled Twitter messages in August 2011.

Social Media Buttons For Twitter

Official Twitter Follow Button Use this button to promote your business’ Twitter account. Once generated, visitors to your website can follow your account with just one click, enabling you to easily increase your business’ Twitter following.

Official Tweet Button  This button enables site visitors to easily share content (e.g. your blog posts, custom landing pages, and other website pages) with their networks on  Twitter, extending the reach of your content to connections in visitors’ Twitter networks.

‘Tweet This’ Link You can create a link that pre-populates a specific Twitter message for your visitors to share. Usually, these tweet links are used on landing pages to promote offers using specific messaging, and within content itself such as in blog posts, eBooks, or whitepapers. This link gives you more control over the message a visitor shares.

Twitter Website Widgets Twitter provides the opportunity to create dynamic widgets to showcase your Twitter activity on your website. Here are 4 you can place on your website.

• Profile Widget to show your most recent Twitter updates
• Search Widget to show search results in real time  (tip: use this to showcase tweets for a hashtag you’re promoting)
• Faves Widget to highlight tweets you’ve marked as favorites
  (tip: favorite only testimonials for your business and add this widget to your website’s case studies or testimonials page)
• List Widget to showcase tweets from users on particular Twitter lists
  (tip: create a Twitter list of your business’ employees and add this widget to your website’s careers page).

To find all of Twitter’s official social media buttons/widgets in one place, visit https://twitter.com/about/resources