The Twitter Marketing Guide: The Past, Present, and Future of Marketing on Twitter
Known as the internet’s public town square, Twitter has revolutionized the way we communicate online. For almost 20 years, Twitter has become a place for people to share opinions, engage with others, and find hidden gems on the internet – but it has also become an invaluable marketing tool for brands and thought leaders in the space, allowing virtually anyone anywhere to create an audience and garner a following (with the right strategy).
While Twitter is undergoing a rebranding to a platform now known as X, it is important to recognize the value of Twitter as a powerful space for digital marketing and beyond. So what’s really the story with Twitter? We’ll discuss the pros and cons of Twitter’s platform, as well as changes over the years and what we can expect in the future. As a Twitter user since its inception, I’m an expert at understanding how the platform works, which marketing strategies work best, and how to build out an engaged user base. Let’s dive in.
The Good: Building an Audience with Twitter
In our new digital era, the dream of building a global following has never been as accessible as it is today. Platforms like Twitter give you access to a huge audience of people with a phone or computer. This makes Twitter a powerhouse for generating marketing miracles. We’ll discuss a few pros, including building brand presence, creating viral moments, and engaging with the digital community.
Building Brand Presence
With the right tools, building a strong online brand presence and community can be a great pro to using Twitter in your marketing repertoire. By maintaining a consistent profile, including in the tone and wording of your Tweets, you can leave a lasting impression on your followers and the general Twitter userbase.
Bonus tip from my playbook: Make sure your profile picture, cover photo, bio, and all media you upload reflect your brand guidelines. Avoid posting anything that does not align with your brand values, mission, or general tone. Also, Twitter threads are a great tool for visibility and should be added to your content calendar.
Creating Virality
Every digital marketer dreams of going viral on the web – and Twitter helps increase the chances of that happening. Features like retweets and trending hashtags can help your campaign go viral and boost your brand’s visibility.
Engaging with Your Community
Another great thing about Twitter is that it makes it easy to build and foster a thriving community of engaged users and consumers of your product or service. Engaging with others is the lifeblood of a successful brand presence on Twitter, and sharing a mix of content is crucial to build and retain your audience.
Actively participating in conversations, taking part in trends, and addressing consumer questions can quickly build trust, authenticity, and relatability for your brand. Plus, tools like Twitter Analytics make it easy to track your metrics and inform your marketing strategy.
Bonus tip from my playbook: utilize polls, Twitter Spaces, and UGC to curate a sense of belonging and camaraderie among your followers. With Twitter, you can build an engaged and loyal community to foster brand advocacy and long-term benefits.
Twitter has many positive features that can help you build a strong brand presence and community online – what about the cons?
The Cons
As great as Twitter is for marketing, there are also some challenges that come with using the platform as a brand or thought leader. Some of these include dealing with negative publicity publicly, addressing misinformation, and running into issues with character limitations and formatting.
Negative Publicity
A great thing about Twitter is that many of a brand’s successes and wins can be shared on a public stage – but this can also be harmful. Dealing with a negative review, comment, or story on Twitter can be challenging to navigate and will require expert reputation management.
It’s important to have a detailed strategy for how to address negative brand Tweets and backlash on Twitter, starting with copy templates you can have on hand to use if these situations arise.
Addressing Misinformation
As you’ve probably seen in the news, Twitter has been in the hot seat for misinformation and censorship. It’s important to recognize that while Twitter is a public forum, your brand should always be fact-checking or researching any reposted resources – especially when it comes to medical information.
Character Limitations and Formatting
Marketing on Twitter is also very specific to the platform. Less about images and videos, much of Twitter has historically revolved around short, to-the-point messages or threads that encompass ideas in 280 characters or less. While this has recently been expanded to 10,000 characters for Twitter Blue subscribers, much of the marketing magic still happens with short, eye-catching text, making it a great opportunity for your content strategy to shine and your brand to stand out.
In some ways, a character count helps you parse out what’s really important in your messaging and can be a helpful tool to build out a robust marketing campaign that gets directly to your brand’s mission.
Twitter has undergone many changes in its lifetime – especially over the last year. Next, we’ll go over what’s changed since Elon Musk acquired the platform, how you can still leverage Twitter for your marketing strategy, and what to expect in the future.
Twitter: Then and Now
What started as a public group chat has quickly turned into a booming business owned by one of the leading businessmen in the world: Elon Musk. In trying to pivot to make the business more profitable, Musk has created subscriber-only features with Twitter Blue, such as the ability to edit tweets, larger character counts, and the all-mighty official blue checkmark next to a user’s handle.
So what does this mean for marketing?
If your brand is using Twitter, Twitter Blue might be useful to enhance your brand’s presence and abilities on the platform, while also allowing you a more tailored experience. A blue checkmark can also help build trust and authenticity for your brand, and in some cases, protect against spam accounts.
With the rebranding to X, more features are in the pipeline, some of which are rumored to be a job listing component, an option for users to publish long-form content, and creator compensation.
Twitter Tips
With all its pros, cons, and uncertainties about the future, Twitter is still a useful marketing tool to leverage when building an engaged audience and solid brand presence. Here are three tips from me when utilizing Twitter for your marketing strategy.
Build out a Twitter content calendar. Most brands find posting to many social media platforms time-consuming and cumbersome, so end up posting only a couple of times a week. I’ll tell you this is not enough. Being consistent in your daily posting is key to building up an audience on Twitter and engaging with your followers. Drafting a content calendar for the following month will save you time and stress.
Level up your engagement game. Much of a brand’s success on Twitter comes from engaging with others on the platform. Host a Twitter Spaces event, respond to Tweets, and retweet content that resonates with you and your brand. Twitter is meant to be collaborative.
Use Twitter Analytics. It’s key to leverage Twitter’s analytics for data-driven decision-making when creating future campaigns or revising your strategy. If you’re not sure how to best use the Analytics tool, I can help.
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