With around 330 million monthly active users, Twitter is one of the most powerful social media platforms when it comes to online marketing. Even for small businesses that rely on local customers, Twitter is a powerful tool for engaging in real time with consumers and building brand awareness.
If you're still unsure how to make Twitter work for your small business, this post will explore various ways to get the most out of Twitter for local marketing. Use these tips to reach more local customers and turn your Twitter account into a sales-boosting machine.
1. Follow Other Local Businesses and Individuals
By following other local businesses, responding to their tweets, and retweeting posts, you can steadily build your visibility on the platform. It's a simple to way to start building connections with complementary businesses in your area, which will benefit your business and theirs.
It doesn't take much time to like a tweet or share a post, and the long-term benefits are worth the effort. Before long, you should see more responses to your tweets and a growing list of followers. You'll also get a sense of what's happening locally, who the local influencers are, and what your competitors are doing.
2. Experiment with Twitter Ads
For smaller businesses, there are mainly three types of ads available: promoted tweets, promoted accounts, and promote mode. When using promoted tweets, you'll only be charged when a user takes a specific action chosen by you. For example, you can pay for each impression, engagement, video view, follow, or website click, and you choose what you're willing to spend in total.
For promoted accounts, you pay to make your account more visible to followers, with Twitter recommending your account to relevant users. In promote mode, you pay a flat rate per month and Twitter handles the rest. Twitter offers various targeting options so that each ad reaches your desired audience. This method is great for reaching local customers, as you can target your ads to users in specific areas.
3. Follow Local Organizations
As well as following other local businesses, there are various local organizations you could follow to broaden your reach. Search for local newspapers, radio stations, councils, mayors, business associations, universities, and charities. By following these types of organizations and joining in with conversations, you'll quickly spread awareness of your business to new potential customers.
4. Use Social Monitoring Tools
Finding conversations relevant to your industry and tracking mentions of your business is vital for learning about your target audience and finding new leads. Monitoring Twitter conversations also helps you figure out what content you should be creating.
The following tools are a great place to start: Hootsuite, TweetReach, Brandwatch, Nexalogy, RiteTag, SocialRank, and Tweriod. Using these tools, you can quickly find relevant hashtags, discover the best times to tweet, identify key influencers in your niche, and more.
5. Optimize Your Twitter Profile and Bio
To ensure your profile is more prominent in local search queries, include your location in your Twitter profile and bio. It's a simple way to gain more local followers.
Think of your Twitter profile as your digital business card. It's the first impression potential customers have of your business, so it should be appealing to your target audience. Make it clear who you are, what you sell, and where people should go for further information.
Include a website link in your bio, use the company logo in your profile picture, and add a hashtag or two that relate to your industry and location. You can search Twitter to find the most used hashtags in your region. Having hashtags in your bio makes it more likely you'll show up in relevant Twitter searches.
6. Offer Exclusive Deals and Discounts
By giving Twitter users exclusive deals, they're more likely to return to your Twitter feed, follow you, and recommend you to others. You can post a graphic of a coupon that users can show in-store. To make your promotions easier to see, pin your promotional tweets to the top of your timeline so everyone visiting your profile can see them. Also, remember to use offline promotional material to direct customers to your Twitter account and exclusive offers.
7. Taking It Further with Engagement
If you want your Twitter marketing strategy to succeed, it's important to keep in mind your long-term business goals. What do you want to gain from using Twitter? If you want to reach local customers and drive local sales, you have to optimize your Twitter profile and posts with local keywords, follow other relevant accounts, try Twitter Ads, and track the results.
Going forward, you need to encourage engagement:
• Have real-time conversations with your audience.
• Like and retweet other posts.
• Ask questions to encourage conversations.
• Use Twitter polls to boost engagement and for market research.
Starting out on Twitter can feel overwhelming, but the more you use Twitter for reaching out to local customers, the better you'll get at it. Follow these tips and you'll create a sense of community around your brand that builds your credibility, increases your Twitter following, and makes your business more visible in your local area.