How to Engage Your Ideal Audience From Twitter?
Engaging your audience is a must to kickstart your lead generation. And Twitter engagement is one of the best ways to generate leads and retain your existing customers.
This is the 21st century is the era of digitalization. With huge technological advances, our lives have been taken over by social media.
According to a study, there a 3.48 billion social media users globally as of now.
With more and more businesses moving online, we need better ways to engage and reach out to them.
With more than 300 million global users, Twitter is one of the best social media platforms for businesses to use, and reach out to customers.
It’s a great platform that allows easy two-way communication, and you can start a conversation with anyone you wish to target.
Moreover, Twitter can help businesses create brand awareness to develop a brand identity, with such a massive outreach.
Here are some of the ways to engage your customer on Twitter:
1. Share Completed Decks
A great initiative to ramp up Twitter engagement is by putting up and sharing on Twitter presentation decks created by you that have secured funding, closed deals, or changed the course of actions of your clients successfully.
Presenting the target audience with in-built, fully-customizable templates with a proven track record can make their task easy in the sense that they don’t have to start from square one.
Tweeting about it and sharing them provides value to our followers. It may well be re-tweeted several times, increasing its reach and enhancing visibility. It’s a great way to get your business noticed.
It engages the right customers in a positive way and they become mentally associated with you.
Here’s what Mitch Grasso, Founder/CEO of Beautiful.ai says about this strategy:
Share decks created by brands that have secured funding, closed deals, or changed the course of their business with Beautiful.ai. If we can provide our audience with a pre-built, fully customizable presentation template that has a proven track record it provides them with a starting point so they don’t have to start from scratch. Sharing these templates provides value to our followers, which ideally encourages them to re-share (retweet) with their own follower base. We collaborate with and tag these other brands in the hopes that they will re-share the content with their audience, increasing our reach.
Here’s one of their tweets where they have reshared content from some other brand to increase their outreach:
2. Propagate Brand Voice to Start Twitter Engagement
The first step here is to identify what we are trying to sell or promote. Once you have decided on that, searching for relevant content on twitter becomes easy. Here, it is a great practice to engage with, and re-tweet relevant content from similar brands, to set the tone for your product.
To build a brand voice, and conveying it to the outside world, you need to build sustainable, long-term relationships with experts, thought leaders and acclaimed speakers, so that they endorse you, and you can reach out to more and more customers.
With your tweets, and online activity, you need to propagate what exact value you are offering, and why should customers use it. This is, undoubtedly, a great way to augment your Twitter engagement process.
The propagation may be by way of sharing news articles, webinars, blog posts, podcast hosting, or thought-provoking tweets, but the aim is to create your brand awareness.
By reaching out through a varied methodology, you increase your chances of appealing to more customers.
3. Active Customer Communication
Did you know that more than 65% of social media users use it to find customer support? Clearly, there is a gap between demand and supply of customer service.
Here’s another interesting statistic:
With active customer service and engagement, you can make all the difference in the world in your business.
According to Groove, a single happy customer is likely to share your details with nine acquaintances. Which means you could be serving 10 people instead of 1, just by taking care of that one.
Immediately responding to customer queries and complaints result in increased trust in your brand. The customers begin to identify and align themselves with your business and brand.
To increase your Twitter engagement, it’s better to use any automated tool to ensure better communication and ROI.
Reuben Swartz, Founder of Mimiran, the CRM for people who hate “selling” and Chief Nerd on the Sales for Nerds Podcast, told us:
Use a tool like SocialBee or MeetEdgar to automate posting some great content on a regular schedule. Then engage with leaders in your space. Since I have some of those people on my Sales for Nerds podcast, I can @mention them to increase engagement with my audience, and theirs. Follow them and interact with their posts, too. Be generous.
Responding and re-tweeting tweets about your business have become an integral part of a brand. It ensures the customers feel more connected with your brand, and become loyal to your business.
Customer retention and Customer Lifetime Value (CLV) increases, and you gather new ones as well. It’s a win-win situation for you, at virtually no cost.
4. Share Tweets With Attractive Images
It’s a fast world, and no one really wants to go through the winding, lengthy texts. That’s why it’s been found that infographics are a much safer bet if you’re looking to get your message across.
Tweets with images are 30 times more likely to get read, that texts. And not only that. Tweets with images get shared 3 times as much as those without any images.
A recent study found that simple texts had a retention rate of 10% after 3 days, whereas those with images had retention of as much as 45%.
Barack Obama, former United States president tweeted this after his reelection.
Had he posted this message without the image, he surely wouldn’t have gained this much traction.
It was also found that publishers who use images could grow their business 12 times faster than those who did not.
All of these statistics point to the superiority of using images as a supplement to your tweets to engage your followers and generate re-tweets. All of these ultimately will serve to increase your visibility and enhance your chances of engagement with your target audience.
5. Use Videos
Turns out, infographics aren’t the only game-changer in the business. Tweets with videos have proved that they are just as useful, if not more. And there are statistics to prove it.
Here is a simple one. According to a study, having the word ‘video’ in a subject line increases its open rates by 19% and click-through rates by 65%.
80% of the world internet traffic comprises of videos at present. Clearly, videos are the gateway to getting your business growing and engaging with your customers in a fruitful manner.
And the future is all set to be ruled by videos. By 2021, 4 out of 5 internet usage actions will result in a video being played for the user. Videos are the place to be, and creating them is the ultimate way to offer value to your customers.
On Twitter, videos get 6 times as many re-tweets as images and also you can download videos from Twitter easily
By sharing videos on your twitter handle, you could engage customers in a variety of ways. It could be a guide to your followers, advising them about how to use your latest product. Or it could simply be a promotional advertisement.
Take a look at this tweet by Puma, for instance.
This advertisement featuring Italian football star Mario Balotelli, advertising the new football kit from Puma, resulted in massive sales for the company.
6. Memes and GIFs
A relatively new medium of customer engagement on twitter, but extremely useful nonetheless. These are a fun and attractive way to direct leads to your post, and then engage them in a concerted manner.
According to HeyOrca!, ‘GIFs are a great way to showcase your brand’s personality, stay trendy, and have fun’.
Twitter was one of the first social media platforms to identify the potential of GIFs and memes, and incorporated them, which has made it very easy for marketers to use them.
The advantage of memes and GIFs are:
- They convey events and promotions
- Reflect the company work environment and culture
- Connect on a better level due to its uniqueness and creativity
- Convey emotions much better
Adding a succinct title on the top can serve as a caption that can increase its acceptance and appeal even more.
7. Create Twitter Polls For Better Twitter Engagement
Creating and conducting polls on Twitter is an essential part of your Twitter engagement process.
Moreover, this method is now being increasingly used by businesses on twitter for better customer engagement.
It’s been made even better by the ease of its use.
In the fast-paced life of the 21st century, no one really wants to take a poll unless they are getting something in return for their time.
But in case of a twitter poll, you don’t have to leave the page and navigate to some other page to participate in the poll: all it takes is one click and you’re done!
Another key differentiator which attracts poll on twitter takers is the instant results that are displayed.
Here’s one perfect example:
Twitter polls have been used very efficiently for many companies to communicate their business propositions to followers they perceive to be potential customers. They can also trigger a purchase with the correct positioning at the opportune moment.
One of the many successful ones is Airbnb.
Take a look at one of the polls they conducted on twitter.
Once their followers voted, they started a second campaign, this time aimed specifically at the respondents who were staying in the California Bay Area that weekend.
This is a classic example of segmenting prospects according to geographic location, and then positioning your product at the correct target audience.
8. Use #Hashtags
More and more businesses are using the hashtag symbol before a relevant keyword or phrase in their tweets to help categorize them, and aid their visibility every time someone searches with respect to that keyword.
With enough shares, the business may be able to create a buzz around it and even create a different and whole new marketing campaign altogether.
These campaigns help to generate interest among the target group, and share and re-tweet them, adding to its visibility among the twitter users.
One of the greatest hashtag campaigns on twitter was carried out by Coca Cola with their famous #shareacoke campaign, to follow up on their refurbished personalized bottle campaign.
The personalized Coca-Cola bottles reminded the consumers of their friends and family, which made them more likely to buy the drink. It also made sharing pictures of the bottles on social media more tempting, since consumers were actually thinking about their loved ones, instead of promoting a product. The campaign was an international success and the sales of Coca-Cola increased for the first time in 10 years.
By partnering with twitter, Coca Cola managed to gather 150,000 mentions worldwide with their #shareacoke campaign, bolstering their campaign.
It’s an excellent example of using hashtags to engage your customers successfully, driving up revenue in the process.
9. Host Twitter Chats to Start Twitter Engagement
One of the best ways to engage prospective leads and start a two-way conversation is to start one. Hosting Twitter chats is a great way to promote your product and get conversation time with your prospects.
The more time you get with them, the more you can influence them into buying your product.
You might also ask them for suggestions and ask their inputs, and positively engage in criticism.
Most importantly, you can use the platform to:
- Answer product queries
- Understand the core audience
- Favorably position your product and offerings with respect to competition
It makes leads feel valued, and they become long-term endorsers and users of your brand.
Before starting a twitter chat, take care of a couple of things, such as:
- Decide on a hashtag specific to your brand
- Choose a particular date and time to hold them
- Fix a relevant topic for discussion
Using the power of Twitter chats can turn out to be a very profitable avenue for you to engage your ideal customer base if done properly.
10. Pin Tweets
Quite a revolutionary feature offered by twitter, this attribute is tailor-made to be used by businesses for customer engagement.
Suppose you want all of your customers to see a particular post that you think will appeal to a majority of them. What do you do then?
You use the option to ‘pin’ tweets to your profile. The tweets remain at the top of your page until you remove them.
And it’s very simple to use, too. Just select the tweet, click on the “…” option and click on ‘pin to your profile page’.
Something like this:
This makes sure that your customers, even in this fast life, don’t forget the point that you’re trying to make.
It can really make a difference in how you engage with customers and boost your brand awareness.
Bonus Tip: Monitor Your Traffic
We had a talk with a senior executive from Clevertap, one of the most prominent apps for customer retention on the internet.
The emphasis on tracking your traffic and engaging industry experts is clear.
Here’s the piece of advice from Siddharth Sharma:
“At CleverTap, we use Twitter as a traffic generating channel, and for engaging with industry experts, customers, prospects. It is our go-to platform for promoting topical content to hop on the trending hashtags bandwagon. We have seen tremendous success in promoting gated assets like CleverTap’s data insights reports, Benchmark Reports, Webinars, and Whitepapers on Twitter. We also live tweet from industry events that we attend to create buzz on social media. Apart from sharing in-house content, we tweet, retweet, and drive conversations with users by sharing third-party articles containing industry best practices”
Wrap-Up
So, these are some proven tactics on the Twitter engagement!
Twitter is a great platform to engage, recruit and generate new leads for your business.
With thousands of companies vying for the attention of a single customer, effectively engaging and delighting the customer at every step of the sales funnel has become a necessity nowadays, rather than a luxury.
A strong value proposition and a strong commitment to the customer is what will differentiate the winning businesses from the losers in the future, and twitter can provide the ideal platform to leave a mark.
What points do you plan to use for your own Twitter engagement strategy? Let us know in the comment section below!
