With more than 310 million active monthly users, Twitter is a “must-have” network in any marketer’s tool kit. How are marketers using this rapid-fire social network to their advantage?
Customer experience is the unifying thread tying all marketing activities together, so it’s important to understand the demographics of Twitter’s users.
According to Pew Research, 24 percent of internet users use Twitter, 37 percent of whom are between the ages of 18 and 29. And they’re slightly more likely to be male than female. Also, eight out of 10 Twitter users access the platform via mobile, so whatever content you share on the platform must be optimized.
On point and to the point
The upside to the 140-character limit is that it forces you to be punchy and to the point. The downside is that there’s little room to clarify and explain things in detail. Brevity has the potential to cause misunderstandings and uncharitable interpretations, but good tweeters can refine complicated thoughts into compact statements.
Hashtags can insert your brand into active conversations or help start your own. Tweets with hashtags get twice the engagement of those without and are 55 percent more likely to be retweeted. But less is more: Tweets with only one or two hashtags have 21 percent higher engagement than those with three or more.
Here are a few #HashtagHacks to help your tweets get more traction:
- #ShortAndSweet: Keeping it simple makes the hashtag more memorable and forces marketers to focus on the clearest, catchiest keyword.
- #LookBeforeYouTweet: The most popular trending hashtags in your geolocation can be found in the sidebar of your Twitter.com home feed or the mobile search tab. You could also set up a social listening project to monitor trending topics and hashtags among your target audience. This will ensure that your chosen hashtag is inserting your brand into relevant conversations, and that you’re making a valuable contribution. Plugging into hashtag conversations without any contextual insight could backfire. Remember when DiGiorno Pizza accidentally used the #WhyIStayed hashtag to promote pizza?
- #ContentForDays: If you need inspiration, try using a popular hashtag associated with a day of the week, such as #TBT (Throwback Thursday) or #FBF (Flashback Friday), with a photo from the early days of your brand or the prototype of one of your products.
