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Marketers often struggle with how to use Twitter to attract a bigger audience and turn these into viable leads and customers

We live in the age of millennials, which means that virtually everyone is online on social media platforms every day of the week. 2017 statistics show that the number of Internet users has increased for 93.8 per cent since 2000. Nowadays, Twitter has become popular for marketers, too, which makes it crucial for businesses to use this tool to achieve higher brand recognition.

All digital marketers already know of Twitter’s ability to increase awareness and optimise engagement with audiences. However, what they often struggle with is how to use the platform to attract a bigger audience and turn them into regular customers — basically lead generation and conversion. To help you with this issue, we are presenting the nine most effective ways of using Twitter to optimise engagement.

1. Keep your content short

As you probably know already, the technical limit on Twitter is 140 characters. Still, using all characters is not the trend of today since short and punchy tweets have proven to be much more engaging than long pieces of content. If you fill up all 140 characters, it is very unlikely that people will read and share the tweets.

The recommended number now is 125. Take this seriously – every successful Twitter user now tweets with 125 or less to achieve best results. Once you start using this strategy, you will notice how important it is in terms of retweets, modified tweets and comments.

2. Use targeted twitter ads

Money moves the world, which means that if you have money, you should use them to enhance your social media strategy. Luckily, using targeted Twitter Ads is not expensive, so you will not have to invest a lot into this strategy.

Run Twitter Ads to make sure that the business information gets to the right people – your target audience. Twitter now offers a geo-targeting feature that you can use to reach prospects located within a certain area.

Setting the location is now easier than ever. Once you do this, you can improve the targeting by adding more filters such as audience interests, behaviour, gender and language. This will refine the search greatly and allow you to get the information to the right place.

You do not have to get it right the first time. Do not be afraid to test various approaches until you understand what audience is the best fit for your business and how to engage them in the best way.

Also read: If you’re looking for a tech company to stand up to Trump, it’s Twitter

3. Respond to all tweets

An effective customer service is one of the most important features of every business. As a good marketer, you surely know that a happy customer is more likely to purchase your products or services regularly and retweet the posts to share brand awareness. If you learn how to make a customer happy, they will become potential advocates for your business and brand.

Social media platforms are where people convene and communicate — users discuss their opinions and experiences about their purchases. This is why as a marketer, you must constantly monitor and respond to every Tweet about your business.

This may prove to be a bit difficult since not everyone will mention your business in their Tweet. This is why you need to follow your target audience and see if something comes up.

4. Use trending hashtags for your Tweets

When you cannot decide on a good hashtag, do not rush and post the first thing you think of. It is always best to check our helpful sites such as Hashtags.org  or Hashtagify.me before posting your tweet.

Hashtags are extremely important, since they help digital marketers in entering relevancy to their Tweets. Once you use a good hashtag, you are entering a conversation that is relevant to the trending topic.

The most popular hashtags at this moment are closely related to news, marketing campaigns and sporting events. Try to get in on these conversations to get a clearer idea of your perfect hashtag.

5. Optimise the Content for Mobile Devices

Mobile devices have a huge impact on the social media usage, as well as the business optimisation. More and more people nowadays use their mobile devices to access social media platforms like Twitter, which means that you must make sure that the content is optimised for the most popular devices.

People now use the newest Android devices, Apple, iPad, etc. When linking to your own or third party content, do not forget to check how it looks on your mobile device. If you notice that it looks bad, it is best not to link to it until you fix the problem.

6. Find the best time to Tweet

Making quality tweets and tweeting regularly is not everything when it comes to engagement. If you want to reach your audience and get more followers to read your tweet, you must find the best time to do this. Tweets are not online for long — they are pushed down as new tweets come, which means that you must pick the time when your followers are active.

Use websites such as Tweriod to find out when the majority of followers is active. You can also use this tool to schedule the tweets for each day of the week and get hourly graphs that allow for content optimisation.

Also read: If Twitter dies, so goes my friend

7. Place links at the beginning of a Tweet

Even though the majority of marketers think that links are best placed at the end of the Tweet, research shows that people are more likely to follow the link if it is located at the beginning. Therefore, try to avoid that natural habit to place the links at the end of your tweets.

8. Monitor your competition

You will never succeed on Twitter if you do not follow the competition. Monitoring what the competition does will inform you on the latest trends and help you determine the hot topics of the moment. Additionally, once you get a habit of constantly monitoring other businesses’ engagement, you will get a clearer picture on what the readers are looking for.

Following the leads is a good way to see if the competition is doing a better job in tweeting than you. If it does, you need to make some immediate changes.

9. Pictures are important

If you are a digital marketer, you have probably learned that pictures are important in every social media platform. Well, you may be surprised to hear, but Twitter is not an exception to this. Even though the primary function is tweeting content, Tweeter now allows displaying images. Do not miss out on this opportunity. For example, being able to visualise data for users can optimise engagement and reach.

Are you ready to increase brand awareness and sales by using Twitter? Follow these simple tips and optimise your business!

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