Love it or hate it. It is hard to deny the power of Twitter. Originally launched as a social media site built on the premise of users sharing short one-line insights and opinions, Twitter has morphed into the town square of the internet.
The short text-style tweets have given way to longer posts, video clips, and GIFs. The platform has become just as popular as a powerful business marketing tool as it is a social platform.
All this is to say that if you want to grow your business or brand fast, you are going to need to develop your Twitter presence. In the old days that might have been as simple as creating a Twitter business profile and tweeting out a few clever quips promoting your business. Those days are gone. Twitter is a highly competitive sea of businesses and personalities all vying to grab and hold the attention of a Twitter audience.
So, how can you stand out from the crowd? In this post, we will explore the top tips and tricks to help you grow your Twitter following fast.
Getting Started On Twitter
Growing your brand following on Twitter starts with a solid Twitter profile. Your personal Twitter account is great for sharing your opinions and staying up to date on your personal news feed but your business Twitter account should be laser-focused on promoting your brand. This means that every aspect of your Twitter profile from your profile background to your bio should be carefully crafted to increase brand recognition and communicate your message.
If you have a brand logo be sure to use it as your profile picture, and incorporate your brand colors and theme in your Twitter profile background. Your Twitter @ handle should clearly identify your brand and leave other Twitter users with no doubt about who is authoring your tweets and responding to their messages.
Finally, let’s talk about your Twitter bio. Don’t worry, this is the hardest part for everyone. As much as we love to talk about ourselves and our business, when it comes to putting it in writing it can feel a bit awkward.
Keep your Twitter brand bio short and simple. Highlight the core points of your business, sprinkle in keywords to help get your profile found by users searching for related topics, and be sure to provide a link to your business website or brand blog.
Top Tips To Grow Your Twitter Following
Twitter has morphed into one of the world’s largest and most active social media platforms. This is both a boon and a challenge for brands hoping to gain a substantial following on Twitter. Competition is fierce and attention spans are short so you will need to bring your A-game and take advantage of some of the tips and tricks below to grab your share of the Twitterverse.
Take Your Twitter Feed To Your Website
If you have an established brand website or a popular blog, consider embedding your Twitter feed into your website. The cross-posted content allows visitors who have found your website or blog through organic search methods to find out more about you and your business by browsing your Twitter feed. Viewers who visit your website are already interested in your brand message, making them likely to become Twitter followers with little or no encouragement. As an added bonus, these followers may have knowledge or experience with your brand that they will happily share with new followers who have yet to take the leap to visit your site or research your brand outside of the Twitter platform.
Feature Your Best Tweets In Your Brand Blog Posts
Don’t let that awesome tweet or clever comment go to waste. Showcase your best Tweets or most informative space call content in your brand blog posts. Work them in naturally, or better yet, create engaging blog content designed to highlight several top tweets. Encourage your readers to click through and become followers so they don’t miss your next titillating tweet.
Create A Regular Posting Schedule
Modern attention spans are notoriously short. Twitter’s short-form posting style, and massive user base means that more than 500 million tweets are sent out across the platform every single day.
If you are sending out a few tweets a month, or even a few tweets a week, your brand message is going to get lost in the flood of daily tweets. To build a following you will need to commit to a regular posting schedule that keeps your brand front and center in viewers minds.
Keep in mind that while quantity of tweets is certainly important you will need to make certain that you are not spamming or flooding the site with advertisement or promotion type tweets. Keep it clever and entertaining and change up your subject matter regularly to keep users engaged and interested in hearing more.
Which brings us to our next Twitter tip…
Stay Relevant
Social media moves fast. What is a hot topic today could be old news next week. Building and maintaining a Twitter following means staying on top of the trending topics at all times.
Fortunately, Twitter makes this pretty simple. Take a few moments each day to check Twitter’s trending topics and tailor your daily tweets to incorporate one or more of these topics into your brand messaging or content whenever possible.
Don’t Be A Bot
We know that you are a real human being with a real business, but if you want to get noticed on Twitter you are going to have to make certain that Twitter users know that you are not a bot. The advancements in AI and the widespread use of bots on Twitter makes proving you are a human more challenging than you might expect.
The best way to prove that you are an actual human being is to interact like one. This means no canned responses, and no one-way posts. You will need to have actual interactive conversations with other Twitter users across all areas of the platform. This means that in addition to posting content, you should also be providing personalized responses to comments, and reaching out via DMs when appropriate.
Host Fun Giveaway Contests On Twitter
We have saved the best tip for last. It is no secret that people love to win free stuff. You can leverage this competitive desire to catapult your brand to the top of the Twitter popularity charts.
It doesn’t matter if you have never run a contest before, you don’t even need to have ever entered a contest before to run an awesome Twitter giveaway contest. KickoffLabs makes it simple to generate hype and build a following using contests.
Simply visit the KickoffLabs website, choose from a variety of fun contest dashboard templates, or make it simple and select our Twitter Growth template!
This will act as the landing page and information hub for your contest. We’ll guide you through the set-up process and can even work with you to create marketing posts and emails to help announce your contest. During the initial onboarding flow, you’ll decide what type of contest you would like to run. Referral-based sweepstakes and rewards giveaways work best for generating a following. While traditional sweepstakes, raffles, and giveaways may focus on encouraging participants to make purchases to earn contest entries, a referral-based contest rewards participants with additional entries based on the number of referrals that click through and follow your content using a unique link.
From there you will need to choose a prize or a series of prizes that will excite viewers and get them excited to join and win. Don’t worry if you don’t have a product or service to give away just yet. You can give away free tickets to fun experiences, or the latest must have device in lieu of your own products or services.
This referral based system is excellent for exploding your Twitter follower count with little effort on your part. You simply design and launch the contest (with the help of KickoffLabs) and send out your launch hype announcements. As your first participants respond and enter they will be incentivized to spread the word about your contest to their network of friends and followers to earn additional entries for themselves.
To help explode your Twitter growth faster, our Twitter Growth campaign automatically includes Twitter specific actions that leads can take in exchange for a bonus point or two.
Want to generate even greater hype and brand loyalty? Consider setting aside several tiered prizes and rewarding your top referrers at the end of the contest. This small gesture demonstrates that you are aware of your followers and that you appreciate their efforts.
All it takes is one contest to increase your Twitter following exponentially. Here is the best part, the more followers you have the larger the audience you will have for each subsequent contest. Once you have set up your KickoffLabs account you can continue running as many giveaway contests as you like, on as many platforms as you like.
Are you ready to launch your brand into the Twitter stratosphere? Visit KickoffLabs and check out how easy it is to set up your own viral giveaway contest today!